No way, it’s the Boy Sprouts or the Cattle Mutilators.
Monopoly, the game, is a bad analogy. We do not live in a world where everyone starts life with $1,500 and has the same salary. The point of Monopoly is that the bank always wins. Imagine playing a game of Monopoly where one player started the game owning everything built Baltic and Mediterranean, had unlimited access to low interest capital, made $200k for passing Go, and could arbitrarily change rent, and salaries for other players. Also this player pays much less when they land on the tax spaces, and never has to pay for street repair.
There are forms of power other than economic power. Political power is more influential than economic power. Arguably military power is more important than political power as military power is what is needed to rule or Overthrow a government. If the entire military decides to Overthrow the dictator, then the dictator goes down.
Putin is worth $200 billion because he used his political power to obtain economic power. But if the Russian military turn on him, he goes down.
It’s ironic that in America the power totem pole seems to be inversed. Instead of military > political > economic power we are the opposite. Economic > political > military.
Of course in most wealthy and developed nations the military is under civilian rule for a good reason, to prevent coups. But still, the US seems like an outlier where wealth is more influential than political power.
Either way, to your point the rules of the game can be changed. If you enact progressive taxation, estate taxes, wealth taxes, etc as well as laws to grow labor unions, make housing affordable, higher minimum wage, etc then wealth inequality goes down.
The rules of the ‘game’ can be changed so that more wealth and power accrues either at the top or the bottom. The issue is that in America both parties enforce rules that ensure wealth and power go upward (the gop wholeheartedly does it and the dems half heartily do it, but they both do).
There are forms of power other than economic power. Political power is more influential than economic power. Arguably military power is more important than political power as military power is what is needed to rule or Overthrow a government. If the entire military decides to Overthrow the dictator, then the dictator goes down.
Putin is worth $200 billion because he used his political power to obtain economic power. But if the Russian military turn on him, he goes down.
It’s ironic that in America the power totem pole seems to be inversed. Instead of military > political > economic power we are the opposite. Economic > political > military.
Of course in most wealthy and developed nations the military is under civilian rule for a good reason, to prevent coups. But still, the US seems like an outlier where wealth is more influential than political power.
Either way, to your point the rules of the game can be changed. If you enact progressive taxation, estate taxes, wealth taxes, etc as well as laws to grow labor unions, make housing affordable, higher minimum wage, combat racial inequality, auto enroll people into private retirement accounts, match retirement account investments with public funds, invest in education, etc then wealth inequality goes down.
The rules of the ‘game’ can be changed so that more wealth and power accrues either at the top or the bottom. The issue is that in America both parties enforce rules that ensure wealth and power go upward (the gop wholeheartedly does it and the dems half heartily do it, but they both do).
True, but to continue the analogy to the breaking point, while most of us are sparrows whose individual actions subtly shift the emergent effect, some are hawks whose individual actions can have dramatic effects.
Slightly different but not meaningfully so. The point remains: the outcome that you see is a product of the rules of the game, which in this case include having different starting points.
(You don’t, by any remote stretch of the imagination, think that I was defending the status quo, do you? Or are you one of those who absolutely need a Culprit in order to argue that how things are is not fair?)
This is true, and should be the starting point for any discussion about how power works, at least where pluralistic representative democracies are concerned.
This is also true, but it would be a mistake to focus only on individuals. Institutions, organisations, movements, and interest/identity groups are not merely aggregations of their individual members. They are also actors in their own right, with their own internal logic and power dynamic.
It’s entirely possible to predict the ways in which a system will respond to a given change. It happens all the time. Thus are elections won and fortunes made.
It can certainly seem as if all predictions are bullshit. Firstly, because nobody is ever completely right. And secondly because the times when people are wrong tend to be more salient. In general, we attract much less credit for being right than we attract scorn for being wrong.
But, for the most part, when power takes action the intended changes are achieved to a reasonable degree of reliability. Improve safety standards and fewer people die in accidents. Increase education budgets and you’ll get a more productive workforce. Cut taxes on a group and that group will have more power.
And the same is true for those broader social and cultural matters. Movements can change the things they want to change, albeit never to the degree they wish. The civil rights movement of the 1960s successfully changed the culture in ways it intended. As did the neo-liberal movement of the 1980s.
The trick for a politician is to find a wave that’s ready to break, and bring enough people with you to ride it through to real, substantive change.
No, the OP had it right. The Canadian McKenzies are the real power pulling all those levers at places like McKinsey & Company, Goldman Sachs and so forth. Everyone thinks the Canadians are nice, polite and harmless. But they’re secretly controlling the world.
Well they’re not exactly making it look like they’ve got an idea where it’s going, do they?
That just goes to show how devious they are.
The Illuminati.
I was recently repeatedly assured that girls run this mutha.
Now I understand global warming!
At best it’s educated guesswork, and if I had to venture a guess, I’d say that the ability to predict anything concrete is right up there with tea leaves, entrails and chicken bones.
I mean, we can deduce SOME of the rules that govern the emergent behavior that Sam Stone is talking about, but only in very specific circumstances.
Otherwise, the system is too large with too many actors to accurately predict much of anything. It’s like the weather- it’s the product of a bunch of local phenomena combined with larger-scale regional and global things. And it can be predicted to some degree of accuracy, within very vague parameters, and within very short time frames. And with some of the world’s most powerful supercomputing resources applied to it.
Emergent behavior is like that- we can confidently say that the swarm of bugs is going to avoid the flaming tree, but we can’t predict with any certainty what else they’ll do.
I’m not sure why it’s even an argument- it’s clearly an emergent behavior, and does what it’s going to do. If it was, economics would be less contentious and more akin to math or a hard science like chemistry. Same with politics.
Systems manage systems. It doesn’t matter as much as anyone thinks who is “in charge”. The system needs some people to be in charge and they are surprisingly interchangeable, almost as much as the rest of us. What does the system want? It just wants to keep existing. It re-calibrates whenever there’s a disturbance, to absorb that disturbance and turn it into more system. And more about cybernetics that I don’t understand, personally, but I’ve sure seen how it works. You can see it at the family level, at the local politics/economics level, and all the way on up.
The real reason climate change, which will kill us and all our systems, isn’t being addressed, for example, is that there is no function in the system to address anything long-term, except via disaster, when change is forced. The system doesn’t think or plan, it just continually reacts to maintain itself.
Unless it’s the Lizard People after all.
If they weren’t so short-sighted, they would realize that a strong middle class consumer base is needed for them to make money. There are not enough oligarchs and despots to buy each others’ product if the masses don’t have enough income.
history dot txt.
If only someone wrote a book on this subject…
Standard reading for most macro-econ 101 courses, Thomas Dye’s Who’s Running America is up to it’s 8th edition, last updated during the Obama years.
He breaks it down to the corporate elites, the media moguls, and politicians.
I, for one, welcome our Touque-wearing overlords from the Great White North. Someone get me some backbacon and beers!
Are we USAians too unworthy for our Canadian overlords to share some of that sweet health care?