The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy
Reading this article makes me think of the word choice that new button on Facebook that lets you report that a link is a &quot;false&quot; news story. Notice the subtle shift away from the populist phrase — the accusation is not that the news is &quot;false&quot;, but rather &quot;fake&quot;.<p>The facts in this piece are by and large true (although if you look closely you can see a few opinions and judgement calls that have calcified into facts). However, Stewart&#x27;s class confessional is the essence of &quot;fake news&quot;, in that it assumes a viewpoint, speaks authoritatively and factually from it, and ignores the gaping details that would contradict his story.<p>The assumed viewpoint gets slipped into the middle of a sentence like this: &quot;Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, <i>in relative terms</i>, had to come from the people below&quot;. Read: increases in absolute wealth do not matter; it&#x27;s all about the Joneses. Just as when postmodernists academics obsess over power hierarchies, you can see the hunger for power at the core of their doctrine, so it is here: when pop-socio-economists talk to no end about inequality, you can see that they are driven not by a desire to improve conditions, but by envy and by (as Stewart projects onto the Trump base) resentment.<p>Where is the discussion of poverty here? Stewart cares not a whit about poverty. Ctrl-F for it: the single instance of is in the phrase “relative poverty”.<p>Thus we get a sentence such as “We are the staff that runs the machine that funnels resources from the 90 percent to the 0.1 percent”, which is dynamite verbiage if you clicked on this article in order to wallow in your upper middle class guilt. But read closer: the wealth of the 90% has, in point of fact, not gone down, merely stagnated. They have not been funneled from, except in these relative, zero-sum terms.<p>As far as the “gaping details”, any discussion of inequality that is so myopically focused on one country in the global system is missing the big picture. Here’s what’s been going on with actual, absolute wealth since the 70’s: huge swaths of the developing world have been raised out of poverty. A few lucky, skilled, well-positioned, and&#x2F;or hardworking elites, both in the US and abroad, have gotten fabulously rich off the new global economy. And yes, incomes for the bottom 90% in the US and Western Europe, far from keeping pace with this global growth, have risen hardly at all.<p>(How does this story of massive poverty relief play out for the secondary concern of inequality? Exactly as advertised in every true-but-fake screed, wealth inequality has skyrocketed within the United States, and within China, and within [insert your country here, probably]. What is scrupulously avoided by Stewart and others is that, as the gap <i>between</i> countries narrows, the overall contour and slope of the global wealth distribution has remained roughly constant).<p>If you do care to grapple with the messy data, you could pick worse starting places than here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;income-inequality" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;income-inequality</a> (although you can see in the title that Roser and Ortiz-Ospina are already starting from two wrong premises: that “inequality”, not poverty, is the topic at hand, and that “income”, not wealth, is the natural locus of that inequality).<p>However, Stewart mentions none of this. If we assume good faith, we can chock the omission up to Stewart’s ignorance and his meager qualification to preach on this topic. If we assume bad faith, then his careful aggregation of confirmatory true facts and dismissal of the big picture data is straight up mendacious, or as the tweeter of the best words puts it, fake.<p>Note that this characterization is not personally specific to Stewart. It applies also to the fake rebuttal from Slate in the link above. Both magazines assume the premise that inequality is the problem, not poverty, and then they bicker about the cutoff point. Of course the 1% gatekeeps against the 99%! You could write just as incisive (and factually correct) an analysis of the 0.1% gatekeeping against the 99.9%, or of the 5% against the 95%, and on down the line. But to say that gatekeeping is the <i>whole</i> story is to succumb to the zero-sum fallacy. To say that violins exist merely to get my kid into Harvard ahead of yours is reductionistic, impoverished thinking that may help you sleep but will not, in the long run, win you any elections.<p>The wealth story is global. Progress is real. The pie has gotten bigger. Poverty, not inequality, is the issue to tackle. Teapot Dome and Enron are the exception, not the rule. Facts are messy. Class is a continuum. And to suggest otherwise is fake news.