Capitalism is harmful to the poor—and to the rich

During last night’s discussion of capitalism verusus Catholicism, I made the point that everyone—rich and poor—is negatively affected by capitalist inequality.

My argument was that poor people are put at a distinct disadvantage within an “economy of exclusion,” because they are denied the basic material conditions necessary to sustain not only their individual lives, but also their participation in the wider society. But, I went on, rich people are also hurt by inequality, in the sense that are forced to act in selfish and unethical ways in order to maintain their positions of privilege.

I then referred to the psychological literature on the behavioral effects of inequality, about which I’ve written before (here and here). The latest contribution to this literature was just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: “Social Class, Power, and Selfishness: When and Why Upper and Lower Class Individuals Behave Unethically,” by David Dubois, Derek D. Rucker, and Adam D. Galinsky. The authors set out to disentangle the differences between unethical and self-serving behavior in relation to social class. Here’s what they found:

Both higher and lower social class individuals can engage in unethical behavior, but the target of that behavior might often differ: The unethical behavior of upper class individuals is more likely to be self-beneficial, whereas the unethical behavior of lower class individuals is more likely to be other-beneficial. This parsimonious account complements and qualifies recent work on social class and unethical behavior (Piff et al., 2012) by advancing the argument that the link between upper social class and unethical behavior occurs primarily for self-beneficial reasons.

As I’ve argued before, the point is not that rich people per se display behavioral pathologies—or, for that matter, that poor people are noble. It is fascinating that there are systematic differences in the target of their unethical behavior. But I’m more interested in the idea that both groups, within a highly unequal society, are forced to behave in ways many of us would consider unethical, whether self-serving or altruistic.

What I had in mind when I made my remarks was, of course, Marx’s statement “that the capitalist is just as enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as is his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in a quite different manner.”

But after the fact, as I was driving home from the discussion, I had another thought: what if that is the true content of the preferential option for the poor? We often think of the preferential option as a kind of basic moral test, in the sense of judging the adequacy of current economic arrangements in terms of how the most vulnerable members of society are faring. But what if there is a somewhat different interpretation—that changing society to eliminate poverty will benefit not only the formerly poor but also everyone else? In other words, creating institutions that eliminate the kinds of grotesque inequalities that characterize contemporary capitalism will benefit even those who are not poor, since they will no longer be forced to lose or undermine or otherwise forsake their humanity by engaging in unethical self-serving behaviors. Thus, eliminating capitalist inequality can be seeing as restoring humanity to everyone, both poor and rich.

In that sense, the poor and vulnerable represent a universal class—not because of some kind of inherent nobility, but because eliminating the conditions of poverty and vulnerability will benefit not only themselves, but all others in a capitalist society.

That—and not pity or charity or individual instances of social mobility—may be the truly radical content of the preferential option for the poor.

Stop blaming poor people!

One of the persistent narratives about the 2008 financial crash is that low-income people (with help from the government) took out mortgages to buy homes they couldn’t afford. And when they inevitably defaulted on their mortgage payments (and government-sponsored lending agencies were declared bankrupt), the entire financial system came tumbling down. In other words, poor people  caused the crash.

Uh, no!

New research by Manuel Adelino, Antoinette Schoar, and Felipe Severino serves to bury that myth. According to the authors,

The large majority of mortgage dollars originated between 2002 and 2006 are obtained by middle income and high income borrowers (not the poor). While there was a rapid expansion in overall mortgage origination during this time period, the fraction of new mortgage dollars going to each income group was stable. In other words, the poor did not represent a higher fraction of the mortgage loans originated over the period. In addition, borrowers in the middle and top of the distribution are the ones that contributed most significantly to the increase in mortgages in default after 2007.

In other words, the mortgage crisis that provoked the crash was not caused by poor people “living beyond their means.”

So, let’s stop blaming poor people for a crisis that originated elsewhere—among lenders and borrowers at the other end of the distribution of income whose “irrational exuberance” led them to get caught up in a spiral of increasing levels of mortgage debt premised on an unsustainable increase in housing prices that served as the basis of an intricate web of financial derivatives.

A bubble, which had nothing to do with poor people, that inevitably burst.

Only in America

Another distressing, but not particularly surprising, result from the study by the Pew Research Center I wrote about yesterday: most of America’s financially secure citizens (54 percent at the very top, and 57 percent just below) believe the “poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.” They also think we can’t afford to do more for those in need.

America’s least financially secure, meanwhile, vehemently disagree; nearly 70 percent say the poor have hard lives because the benefits “don’t go far enough.” And, according to those at the bottom, we should do more for the needy, “even if it means more debt.”

A clearer divergence in political views between the most and least financially secure Americans won’t be found in the entire survey.

Quantitatively ease this!

The other day, in preparing my thoughts for a BBC interview on the end of quantitative easing in the United States, I wish I’d had Steve Waldman’s pithy summary in front of me:

you can see why a QE-only approach to demand stimulus embeds a troubling political economy. The only way to improve the circumstances of the un- or precariously employed is to first make the rich richer. The poor become human shields for the rich: if we let the price of stocks or houses drop, you are all out of a job. A high relative price of housing versus other goods, a high number of the S&P 500 stock index, carry no immutable connection to the welfare or employment of the poor. We have constructed that connection by constraining our choices. Deconstructing that connection would be profoundly threatening, to elites across political lines

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

A modest proposal

source

Maybe now that the proportion of unemployed workers on jobless benefits has fallen to an all-time low (thereby undermining John Boehner’s belief they don’t really want to work and prefer to just sit around, relying on government handouts) but the number of poor people remains at an all-time high, perhaps it’s time to take another look at Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” to advance the public good, relieve the poor, and give some pleasure to the rich:

The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders; from which number I subtract thirty thousand couple, who are able to maintain their own children, (although I apprehend there cannot be so many, under the present distresses of the kingdom) but this being granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy thousand breeders. I again subtract fifty thousand, for those women who miscarry, or whose children die by accident or disease within the year. There only remain an hundred and twenty thousand children of poor parents annually born. The question therefore is, How this number shall be reared, and provided for? which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can neither employ them in handicraft or agriculture; we neither build houses, (I mean in the country) nor cultivate land: they can very seldom pick up a livelihood by stealing till they arrive at six years old; except where they are of towardly parts, although I confess they learn the rudiments much earlier; during which time they can however be properly looked upon only as probationers: As I have been informed by a principal gentleman in the county of Cavan, who protested to me, that he never knew above one or two instances under the age of six, even in a part of the kingdom so renowned for the quickest proficiency in that art.

I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl before twelve years old, is no saleable commodity, and even when they come to this age, they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half a crown at most, on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriments and rags having been at least four times that value.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragout.

Of course, Swift’s proposal would work even better in our own times, since according to conservative thinkers the lives of the poor are even better—which means their children should be even more delectable. In addition, even though the one percent have given up their role as “job creators,” their escalating incomes should be sufficient to purchase infant flesh. And, as Swift explains, because “they have already devoured most of the parents, [they] seem to have the best title to the children.”

Update

These days, of course, as a friend of mine informed me, many of the the rich prefer to eat only free range and organic and to deal directly with the breeder rather than through an unscrupulous supplier.

Penny wise dollar not-so-foolish

 

What does it mean that Dollar Tree is buying rival discount store Family Dollar in a cash-and-stock deal valued at about $8.5 billion?

It means, at a first cut, that Family Dollar stockholders will receive $59.60 in cash and the equivalent of $14.90 in shares of Dollar Tree for each share they own—a transaction valued at $74.50 per share, which is an approximately 23 percent premium to Family Dollar’s Friday closing price of $60.66—and that Dollar Tree will now have more than 13,000 stores in the U.S. and Canada—nearly three times as many as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (although Wal-Mart’s square footage is still greater).

More generally, it means there’s a lot of profit to be made in selling discount commodities to the low-income and falling-income American families whose numbers have grown over the course of the past three decades, and especially in the midst of the Second Great Depression.

As Sriya Shrestha explains in her recently published study of dollar stores,

US consumers experience a kind of “thirdworldization,” that marks them not as exceptional but rather increasingly on par with rest of world as they become yet another population of consumers marked by their lack of income. Hence, multinational corporations’ and discount retailers’ techniques aimed at incorporating what are known in marketing literature as the “bottom of the pyramid” (poorest populations in poorest countries) overlap with methods used at US dollar stores. For example, brand- name goods at the dollar store are often sold in packages substantially smaller than the standard sizes found at Target or CVS. This technique also surfaces in places like India where companies like Unilever and Proctor & Gamble sell single-serving sachets of laundry detergent, fairness cream, and shampoo for around 2 rupees. These methods rely upon a particular model of frugality aimed at those with extremely limited incomes that actually costs the consumer more in the long-run. This contrasts with other recently popularized methods of shopping, like purchasing in bulk from warehouse retailers and couponing that actually save money. These latter shopping styles require more money upfront, time, storage space, and membership fees ensuring its association with normative American middle-class, feminine “home-making” and smart budgeting rather than poverty.

Thus, the sense of loss of an American consumer identity and American dream emerges through the sense of a compromised American exceptionalism as people in the US find themselves unemployed, underemployed, facing compromised conditions of labor and consumption. Chinese Tide detergent and Indian Colgate toothpaste make their way to US dollar stores because major US and European multinationals are now targeting growth markets among the middle classes and poor in the former peripheries of the global economy as the centers have slowly begun to crumble.

Clearly, poor and working-class families are being forced to have the freedom to pinch their pennies, which turns out to be a profitable opportunity for the likes of dollar stores that feed at the bottom of American capitalism.