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from the picthfork-futures-accelerate-to-new-highs dept.
Nick Hanauer, a self-described "plutocrat" says history shows that the current economic and governmental situation can't last, and the USA should should get busy changing before the system breaks down.
From the memo to his "Fellow Zillionaires":
I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:09PM
You forgot to mention the horse and buggy whip makers....
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:43PM
You forgot to mention the horse and buggy whip makers....
The whip makers were lucky, for a while, that their woodworking and leather handling skills were still useful in other industries, like furniture. But how many furniture items do you have today that are NOT made at a huge factory by huge particle board presses? I do know of few sellers of handcrafted items, and I do buy from them from time to time - but they can provide employment only to one ex-whipmaker out of a thousand.
For hundreds of generations human societies developed without much need for advanced intelligence. Everyone was smart enough to be employed. The first deviation from this happened during early industrialization. It did result in destroying ancient trades (guilds) and creating the proletariat. We are now in another state of industrialization, where the very ability to perform useful work depends on worker's intellect and education. Employers have no use for monkeys who pull a lever whenever a light goes on; and they don't need hordes of those monkeys, one per machine. The new worker has to be smart, well educated, and very flexible, as it's unlikely that he will be working at the same factory from cradle to grave. The demand for such workers harvests only the best and brightest from the labor pool. Since the demand is limited in volume, employers have no need to dip deeper into that pool. The unclaimed labor remains unclaimed.