Chapter 4: Disparity

In a Capitalist society, one’s degree of wealth or lack thereof is the most powerful determinant of one’s freedoms, options, quality of life, access to resources, and the treatment one receives in the society. It is not unusual for CEO’s to make in day or even in an hour what a median employee of the same company makes in a year. In a few cases the disparity is even more dramatic. In 2017 the wealth of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, grew by approximately $33 billion, about $1,050 every second, while the median Amazon employee was paid $28,446 for the year (Glum, Money, 2018), which is just barely a living wage. His wealth grew by that employee’s yearly pay about every 27 seconds. The current disparity rivals, and by some measures exceeds, that of Europe at the height of Feudalism in the Medieval period. In addition, the disparity is becoming ever more extreme over time, and the rate of acceleration is itself accelerating. Professions that a few decades ago allowed one a high quality of life and degree of freedom from the “wolves at the door,” now only bring one a just barely over surviving level of existence (Paquette, Washington Post, 2018). Each generation now has a smaller chance than the last of doing better than its parents: about 90% of Americans born in 1940 came to earn more than their parents, but only about half of those born in the 1980s (Chetty et al., 2017). Many now work longer and harder for fewer options, less freedom, and more stress.

Capitalist societies justify and explain this disparity by postulating that one’s wealth and power, or lack thereof, is a measure of one’s productivity, worthiness and contribution to the community. Yet in most cases the CEO may contribute nothing more than generating more wealth for already-beyond-wealthy investors while contributing nothing to the community or even the processes over which they preside. Most of the actual production would continue without the CEO and other officers and upper management, since coordination can be done by the people doing the work, as worker cooperatives show. It would cease altogether without the machine operators, cafeteria workers, forklift operators, engineers, truck drivers, and others who actually produce goods and services. The “meritocracy” myth is thematically identical to the Medieval myth that held that royalty was in power because God had made them inherently superior to peasants and serfs and that to go against their power was to go against God and earn one a place in hell.

Another common Capitalist myth is the “anybody can make it” myth. Similar to the “anybody can win big” myth in a casino setting, it is not a complete untruth. It is true that anybody could theoretically “make it” or win big in a casino. There are plenty of anecdotal rags-to-riches stories to dramatize the myth and make it feel believable. Yet as in a casino, the Capitalist paradigm is sharply pyramidal. The paradigm itself cannot function if more than a very tiny segment of the population actually “make it.” To believe otherwise is an illusion akin to believing in an engine that can function free of entropy. Yet the myth is very effective at keeping most people working hard to make it, believing that if they just work hard enough, or come up with the right business idea, or hang in long enough, they will ascend the pyramid to free themselves of functional wage slavery.

This is inherent in the very structure of the paradigm. It cannot be resolved by tweaking the current system from the top down, any more than a lead balloon can be made to rise by modifying it. Reforms handed down from above, however well-intended, are reliably eroded while the underlying structure remains. The change has to be built from the ground up, and only then completed through democratic law: once the alternative has proved that it works and has become firmly rooted and established, it can no longer be waved away, and governments will have to take it into account and answer to it. The change must come from the people themselves, by changing the way the daily functions and activities of decision-making and of production and distribution of goods and services are done in the factories, in the stores, in the streets, and in our lives.

Yet studies have found that most people vastly underestimate the extremity of the disparity (Norton and Ariely, 2011). The myths and propaganda serving the ruling neo-Feudal lords is working to keep almost all of the people compliant. The majority of people are blissfully unaware of how catastrophically far the stratification of their societies has progressed nor how rapidly it is accelerating. The direction of travel points toward a replication of Medieval Feudalism reinforced by sophisticated technology and propaganda mechanisms, a dystopian dictatorship that could well last a very long time if the paradigm driving it is not decommissioned very soon.