Rather, what Rousseaupresented was more of a parable, by way of an attempt to explore afundamental paradox of human politics: how is it that our innate drivefor freedom somehow leads us, time and again, on a ‘spontaneousmarch to inequality’?8

It’s almost asif we feel some need to come up with mathematical formulaejustifying the expression, already popular in the days of Rousseau,that in such societies ‘everyone was equal, because they were allequally poor.’

people end up being told their needs are not important, and theirlives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, isjust the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitableresult of living in any large, complex, urban, technologicallysophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just amatter of degree.

After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way itmight have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration ofcapital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, aword like ‘inequality’ sounds like it’s practically designed toencourage half-measures and compromise. It’s possible to imagineoverthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’snot clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kindof inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would peoplehave to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminatedinequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problemsappropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume fromthe outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on thetable.

This post is mainly about the book’s attempt to dismantle the myth of “agriculture as the source of social inequality.” The next post will be about Graeber’s and Wengrow’s startling claim that European Enlightenment can be seen, to a large extent, as the result of a conversation with Indigenous, non-western intellectuals and societies – indeed, as inspired by them.

1 ευρώ θα παίρνετε από αμοιβή, 2 ευρώ θα σας τρώει ο πληθωρισμός. Θα γίνει της Βαϊμάρης…

Increasing inequality

let's stop let's just stop doing it and let's let's find other ways of measuring quality of life other than being flooded 00:21:22 by this great tide of plastic and metal and electronics 99 of which we simply do not need to live a good life

this is a fundamental issue of justice and equity so the top one percent uh in 00:09:22 terms of wealth around the world use 15 produce 15 of the greenhouse gas emissions which is twice as much as the bottom 50 percent whose total 00:09:34 emissions are just seven percent of the total so we're looking at uh a very small number of people grabbing the lion's share of natural wealth they claim to be wealth creators they're actually taking 00:09:47 wealth from the rest of us they're saying we're going to have all this atmospheric space for ourselves and incidentally all these other resources all the mahogany and the gold and the 00:09:58 diamonds and the bluefin tuna sushi and whatever else that they're consuming on a massive scale and this is driven by to a very large extent by their remarkable disproportionate use of aviation 00:10:12 there's one set of figures suggesting that the richest one percent are responsible for 50 of the world's aviation emissions but also by their yachts for example the average 00:10:24 um commonal garden super yacht um kept on standby for a billionaire to step onto whenever he wants um produces 7 000 tons of carbon dioxide per year 00:10:38 if we're to meet even the conventional accounting for staying within 1.5 degrees of global heating our maximum emissions per person are around 2.3 00:10:49 tons so one super yacht is what over 3 000 people's worth of emissions this is just grossly outrageously unfair and we should rebel 00:11:01 against the habit of the very rich of taking our natural wealth from us

Recent research suggests that globally, the wealthiest 10% have been responsible for as much as half of the cumulative emissions since 1990 and the richest 1% for more than twice the emissions of the poorest 50% (2).

A final cluster gathers lenses that explore phenomena that are arguably more elastic and with the potential to both indirectly maintain and explicitly reject and reshape existing norms. Many of the topics addressed here can be appropriately characterized as bottom-up, with strong and highly diverse cultural foundations. Although they are influenced by global and regional social norms, the expert framing of institutions, and the constraints of physical infrastructure (from housing to transport networks), they are also domains of experimentation, new norms, and cultural change. Building on this potential for either resisting or catalyzing change, the caricature chosen here is one of avian metaphor and myth: the Ostrich and Phoenix cluster. Ostrich-like behavior—keeping heads comfortably hidden in the sand—is evident in different ways across the lenses of inequity (Section 5.1), high-carbon lifestyles (Section 5.2), and social imaginaries (Section 5.3), which make up this cluster. Yet, these lenses also point to the power of ideas, to how people can thrive beyond dominant norms, and to the possibility of rapid cultural change in societies—all forms of transformation reminiscent of the mythological phoenix born from the ashes of its predecessor. It is conceivable that this cluster could begin to redefine the boundaries of analysis that inform the Enabler cluster, which in turn has the potential to erode the legitimacy of the Davos cluster. The very early signs of such disruption are evident in some of the following sections and are subsequently elaborated upon in the latter part of the discussion.

Perspectives that emphasize lifestyles and consumption help to foreground the fundamental inequalities and injustices in the drivers of climate change (see Section 5.1). There are large variations in emissions between different lifestyles even within similar social groups and geographic regions (not least those with high income versus those without) (2, 129)—and yet, there has so far been a pervasive failure to direct mitigation efforts toward high emitters and emission-intensive practices (156, 158, 162). Confronting such variation and inequality requires demand management practices that target high-carbon lifestyles without disproportionately impacting more vulnerable communities. Such tailored approaches could lead to more effective mitigation policies by focusing on high-emission practices (e.g., frequent flying by wealthier groups). Furthermore, participatory and practice-oriented policy processes, where these involve citizens questioning how to bring about more system-wide change, can engender critique of the very power dynamics and patterns of influence that facilitate unsustainable lifestyles.

This report is an essential companion for policymakers working at the intersection of society and climate change.”

Dr. Lewis Akenji, the lead author of the report says: “Talking about lifestyle changes is a hot-potato issue to policymakers who are afraid to threaten the lifestyles of voters. This report brings a science based approach and shows that without addressing lifestyles we will not be able to address climate change.”

New report out today reveals the #inequality that is pushing the 1.5C goal of the #ParisAgreement out of reach without urgent action. Together with colleagues at the Stockholm Environment Institute, we estimate the carbon footprints of the richest 1% in 2030 are set to be 30 times higher than the global per capita level compatible with the 1.5C goal. The footprints of the richest 10% in 2030 are set to be nearly 10 times that level, while those of the poorest half of the global population will remain far below it. In absolute terms, the emissions of the richest 10% alone are set to nearly amount to the global total in 2030 compatible with the 1.5C goal, while those of the remaining 90% are set to only just exceed it. The richest 1% are set for an increasing share of global total emissions, reaching 16% by 2030. Evidently it is not the consumption of most of the people on the planet that is driving the global #emissionsgap - but rather that of the richest minority.

2021 has heralded the dawn of a new form of hyper-carbon-intensive luxury travel, space tourism, in which hundreds of tonnes of carbon can be burned in just a ten-minute flight for around four passengers.28

Gösling and Humpe found that no more than 1% of the world population likely accounts for half of aviation emissions.30

Earlier studies also established the major contribution to carbon footprints of the rich and famous from flights, especially via private jets. Gösling’s study constructed aviation emissions estimates based on tracking the international travel of celebrities via their social media postings. Footprints – from aviation alone – were found to be in excess of a thousand tonnes per year.27

The fact that these countries are still not on track to reach the 1.5⁰C per capita level by 2030, and have still not delivered the minimal commitment to mobilize $100bn per year in international climate finance by 2020, is a double indictment of their moral and legal failure in view of the equity principle at the heart of the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement.

The extreme difference between the expected carbon footprints of a small minority of the world’s population in 2030 and the global average level needed to keep the Paris Agreement’s 1.5⁰C goal alive is not tenable. Maintaining such high carbon footprints among the world’s richest people either requires far deeper emissions cuts by the rest of the world’s population, or it entails global heating in excess of 1.5⁰C above pre-industrial levels. There is no other alternative.

Chancel’s recent paper adds new insights by allocating national consumption emissions associated with capital investments to individuals within each country based on their share of asset ownership, derived from the latest wealth inequality datasets. He finds that emissions from investments make up an increasing share – up to 70% in 2019 – of the footprints of the world’s 1% highest emitters.32

Between 2015 and 2030, the richest 1% are set to reduce their per capita consumption emissions by just 5%, compared with the 97% cuts needed to align with the global per capita level compatible with the 1.5⁰C goal

4 In absolute terms, we find that despite the small total emissions cuts globally from 2015 to 2030, the total emissions associated with the richest 1% are set to continue to increase (see Figure 2). Notably, we also estimate that the total emissions associated with 90% of the global population combined will only just exceed the total global 1.5⁰C-compatible emissions level in 2030, while the total emissions associated with the consumption of just the richest 10% of the world population alone will nearly amount to that level. Figure 2: Total consumption emissions 1990–2030 of global income groups and the 2030 1.5⁰C-compatible total global emissions level Source: IEEP and SEI analysis This growth in the absolute emissions linked to the richest 1% also translates into a continued growth in their share of total global emissions, which we estimate will continue to grow from 13% in 1990 to 15% in 2015 and is set to reach over 16% by 2030 (see Figure 3).17 This continued increase is a reflection of the fact that in countries that are home to most of the world’s richest 1%, the carbon intensity of the economy is not set to improve sufficiently to offset the expected increase in income and consumption of those countries’ richest citizens.

Wilk and Barros drew on 82 databases of public records to document billionaires’ houses, vehicles, aircraft and yachts. Applying carbon coefficients, they found billionaire carbon footprints easily run to thousands of tonnes per year, with superyachts the biggest contributor, each adding around 7,000 tonnes per year, for example.26

Figure 6: Changing geographic source of emissions of world’s richest 1% 2015–2030

Many players already struggle with bandwidth and network congestion for online games that require only positional and input data. The Metaverse will only intensify these needs. The good news is that broadband penetration and bandwidth is consistently improving worldwide. Compute, which will be discussed more in Section #3, is also improving and can help substitute for constrained data transmission by predicting what should occur until the point in which the ‘real’ data can be substituted in.

Recent research suggests that globally, the wealthiest 10% have been responsible foras much as half of the cumulative emissions since 1990 and the richest 1% for more than twicethe emissions of the poorest 50% (2).

"The story of the American college is largely the story of the rise of the slave economy in the Atlantic world," says Craig Steven Wilder, a historian at MIT and author of "Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities."

Steven Brust's (quoted in my novel Walkaway): "Ask what's more important, human rights or property rights. If they say 'property rights ARE human rights' they're on the right." https://craphound.com/category/walkaway/

Technology changes the nature of both of these collapses. Take guard labor: mass surveillance and technological controls make it cheaper than at any time in history to isolate and neutralize political threats to elite rule. How much cheaper? Well, in 1989, the Stasi employed one in sixty East Germans to spy on the whole nation. Today, the NSA spies on the whole world, at a spy:subject ratio that's more like 1:10,000 – two orders of magnitude more efficient than the spies of a generation ago. That's a huge productivity gain, and it's all thanks to digital technology.

Impose sufficient austerity and brutality on a society and the cost of defending it exceeds the wealth its productive sector manages to produce, and boom – French Revolution, the World Wars, etc.

He reiterates his thesis that inequality self-corrects, thanks to the instability it engenders. Left on their own, market economies collapse, torn apart by the bill for guards to defend lenders' fortunes, the bill for interest payments that enrich lenders.

This fundamental truth (expressed in economic notation as r > g, or "return on capital is greater than economic growth") means that "meritocracy" is a lie: the richest people in a market economy aren't the people who do the best work, it's the people who started off rich.

Piketty concludes that no matter how fast an economy is growing – no matter how productive its makers are – that wealth grows faster, making the takers who financed growth even richer than the people whose work is propelling the economy.

45.8 percent of global household wealth is in the hands of just 1.1 percent of the world's population. Those 56 million individuals control a mind-boggling $191.6 trillion, as can be seen on the following pyramid.Below that, 583 million people own $163.9 trillion, 39.1 percent of global wealth, despite accounting for just 11.1 percent of the adult population. The base of the pyramid is the most poignant and it shows how 2.9 billion people (55 percent of the world's population) share a combined wealth of $5.5 trillion which is just 1.3 percent of total wealth.

while the super-rich may move through through world cities, their cosmopolitan practices and lifestyles rarely break out of the exclusive transnational spaces which stand at the intersecting points of particular corporate, capital, technological, information and cultural lines of flow.

Developing this argument, Bauman (2000) talks of the super-rich as the 'new cosmopolitans', suggesting that the fundamental consumption cleavage in contemporary society is between these 'fast subjects' who dwell in transnational space and those 'slow subjects' whose lives remain localised and parochial. The fast world is one consisting of airports, top level business districts, top of the line hotels and restaurants, chic boutiques, art galleries and exclusive gyms - in brief, a sort of glamour zone that is fundamentally disconnected from the life worlds of the vast majority of the world's population. Bauman thus equates power with mobility, echoing Massey's notion of unequal 'power-geometries'

Elon Musk has built not one but two world-changing companies (Tesla and SpaceX.) He clearly deserves to be wealthy. As does Jeff Bezos, who quickly regained his title as the world’s wealthiest person. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and many other billionaires changed our world and have been paid handsomely for it.

Until we recognize the systemic role that supermoney plays in our economy, we will never make much of a dent in inequality. Simply raising taxes is a bit like sending out firefighters with hoses spraying water while another team is spraying gasoline.

The tax system could and should become more dynamic rather than more predictable.

When the markets are buoyant, Fed officials claim that central bankers should never second-guess markets by declaring that there are financial bubbles that might need to be deflated. Markets on their own, they assure, will correct whatever excesses may develop.But when bubbles burst or markets spiral downward, the Fed suddenly comes around to the idea that markets aren’t so rational and self-correcting and that it is the Fed’s job to second-guess them by lending copiously when nobody else will.In essence, the Fed has adopted a strategy that works like a one-way ratchet, providing a floor for stock and bond prices but never a ceiling.

In our case, a system intended to expand equality has become an enforcer of inequality. Americans are now meritocrats by birth. We know this, but because it violates our fundamental beliefs, we go to a lot of trouble not to know it.

The impact of this exclusion itself is impossible to measure, but increasing meritocratic inequality has coincided with the opioid epidemic, a sharp increase in “deaths of despair,” and an unprecedented fall in life expectancy concentrated in poor and middle-class communities.

Meritocratic inequality works like this: First, elite workers acquire super-skilled jobs, displacing middle-class labor from the center of economic production. Then, those elite workers use their massive incomes to monopolize elite education for their children, ensuring that their offspring are more qualified to dominate high-skilled industries than their middle-class counterparts. The cycle continues, generating what Markovits calls “snowball inequality”: a compounding feedback loop that amplifies economic inequality, dramatically suppresses social mobility, and creates a “time divide” between an elite class whose members work longer and longer (due to a higher demand for their talents) and an increasingly idle middle class (whose work has been made redundant).

This leads us to Markovits’s second critique of the aspirational view: The cycle that produces meritocratic inequality severely harms not only the middle class but the very elite who seem to benefit most from it.

Some argue that the American elite is functionally an old-fashioned aristocracy that owes its income to nepotism and opportunism. Others argue that the elite is functionally an oligarchy that owes its rising income to a shift away from labor and toward capital. According to this view, elites don’t even need nepotism — they are using preexisting wealth and inheritance to rebuild an old-fashioned feudal class.

Aspirational critics tend to believe that rising inequality since the 1970s is the product of insufficient meritocracy.

At its core, The Meritocracy Trap is a comprehensive — and rather scathing — critique of the aspirational view. Markovits argues that meritocracy itself is the problem: It produces radical inequality, stifles social mobility, and makes everyone — including the apparent winners — miserable. These are not symptoms of systemic malfunction; they are the products of a system that is working exactly as it is supposed to.

Mike: I started hanging out with the wrong kind of kids. These other kids that wouldn't go to school and I noticed what type of kids I was hanging out with. I noticed the difference, because there's productive people that make you want to do better, and there's this people that just see you and they want to see you do as bad as them.Mike: So they kind of drag you down under. I felt like I just wanted to fit in kind of because all my life I felt like I wasn't equal—I don't know how to explain it. It's just I just wanted to fit in kind of, not feel like I wasn't as good as them, because I felt like I was always inferior, because I didn't have the things that they had.

It is perhaps predictable that, instead of presenting a bulwark against stratification, technology outcomes have tracked society's growing inequality. A yawning chasm of disparities is playing out in our phones at the same time it has come to shape our economic and political lives.

Preliminary results from the first year are tantalizing for anyone interested in solutions to address rising inequality in the United States, especially as they manifest along racial and gender lines. Within the first year, the study’s participants obtained jobs at twice the rate of the control group. At the beginning of the study, 28 percent of the participants had full-time employment, and after the first year, that number rose to 40 percent.

“In the last decade, especially with the pioneering work of Thomas Piketty and his co-authors, there has been a growing consensus that tax cuts for the rich lead to higher income inequality,” Hope and Limberg said.

Even worse, Shadow Stat's numbers show so much inflation the past 25 years that, as Jim Pethokoukis points out, it implies the economy hasn't grown at all during that time.

So which seems likelier: that we're no better off than we were a quarter century ago, or that Shadow Stats is total bunk?

Johnson: Earlier I interviewed you about patrilocal residence patterns and how that alters women’s sexual choices. In contrast, matrilocal societies are more likely to be egalitarian. What are the factors that lead to the differences between these two systems?Hrdy: I think in societies where women have more say, and that does tend to be in societies that are matrilocal and with matrilineal descent or where, as it is among many small scale hunter-gatherers, you have porous social boundaries and flexible residence patterns. If I had to say what kind of residence patterns our ancestors had it would have been very flexible, what Frank Marlowe calls multilocal.

The effort of confronting that machine, day in and day out, compounded over a lifetime, leads to stress so corrosive that it physically changes bodies

American exceptionalism was founded on cooperation — between the rich and the poor, between the governors and the governed. From the birth of the nation, the unity across economic classes and different regions was a marvel for European observers, such as St. John de Crèvecoeur and Alexis de Tocqueville. This cooperative spirit unraveled in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to the first “Age of Discord” in American history. It was reforged during the New Deal as an unwritten but very real social contract between government, business and workers, leading to another age of prosperity and cooperation in postwar America. But since the 1970s, that contract has unraveled, in favor of a contract between government and business that has underfunded public services but generously rewarded capital gains and corporate profits.

Third, i n contrast to the equivocal ideo-logical-polarization trends among the pub-lic, politici ans and other political elites have unambiguously polarized recently on ideo-logical grounds, with Republican politicians moving further to the right than Democratic politicians have moved to the left (SM). This ide ological divergence is driven in part by ex-treme economic inequality in America today, especially in conjunction with candidates be-coming increasingly reliant on ideologically extreme donors. As polit icians chase cam-paign dollars, these extreme voices garner disproportionate influence (SM).

wealth persist across racial groups.

cradle-to-career youth programming

crowd out, smaller individual contributions."

An equality-based justification for campaign finance regulation must recognize that the modern regulatory framework can only superficially reduce the impact of economic inequality.

On the other hand, donating and spending on a large scale are taxed at an everincreasing rate, which is beneficial as well. Because of this property, the rich would face arising marginal cost as they tried to exert more financial influence.

However, only the square root of the amount that they donate or spend, multiplied byan amount set to make the system as a whole budget-neutral, would actually be deployed.The rest of the money would enter the public Treasury. Assume, for example, that amultiplier of 10 would make the system budget-neutral. Then if a person donated $1 toBernie Sanders, his campaign would receive $10 (($1^.5)910). Similarly, if a personwanted to independently spend $10,000 to back Donald Trump (or if Trump wanted tospend $10,000 on his own candidacy), $1000 could be used on commercials, mailers, andthe like (($10,000^.5)910), and the other $9000 would go to the government.

Examining inequality across provinces and time has many advantages.2 Canadian provinces possess considerable comparable autonomy in administering social policy and research shows that inequality shifts are predominantly owing to provincial rather than federal transfers

hat effect, if any, does the extent of economic inequality in a country have upon the political engagement of its citizens?

These changes are not, on the whole, the fault of globalisation, that scapegoat of the populist insurgency, but of technology-driven changes combined with policies that have reinforced the underlying forces of divergence.