delong252_ Spencer PlattGetty Images_USinequality

Economics

هل تنجو أميركا من عصرها الـمُـذَهَّـب الثاني؟

Jun 5, 2023 J. Bradford DeLong

بيركلي ــ يتحلى بعضنا بقدر من التفاؤل أكبر من الآخرين بشأن المستقبل. نحن المتفائلون ندرك أنه لا يزال من الممكن الهروب من الفِـخاخ التي نصبها عصر أميركا الـمُـذَهَّـب الثاني.

أثناء أي عصر مُـذَهَّـب (عصر يتسم بالازدهار والنمو الصناعي والتكنولوجي القوي لكنه لا يخلو من الجشع والفساد وتعاظم ثروات المصرفيين والساسة على حساب الطبقة العاملة)، تُـوجَّـه القدرات الإنتاجية بعيدا عن تزويد أغلب الناس بالضروريات ووسائل الراحة، ونحو الإنفاق الباهظ على السعي وراء المكانة وغير ذلك من الأنشطة التافهة. تلعب الثروة الموروثة عادة دورا رئيسيا في الأمر، وتُـوَظَّـف غالبا لمنع وتأخير أي تحول قد يقلب الوضع الراهن.

لنتأمل هنا مسألة الانحباس الحراري الكوكبي، والذي يهدد بإبطال قسم كبير من المكاسب التكنولوجية التي كنا لنحققها على مدار الجيلين المقبلين. نحن في هذه الورطة على وجه التحديد لأن أصحاب مصالح الفحم والنفط يتمتعون بالقدر الكافي من القوة الاجتماعية والسياسية لتأخير الانتقال إلى الطاقة الخالية من الانبعاثات الغازية. الأنكى من ذلك أن شرائح من ذوي النفوذ الاجتماعي والسياسي ينظرون إلى الديمقراطية على أنها مشكلة.

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J. Bradford DeLong

Writing for PS since 2002
252 Commentaries

J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2022). He was Deputy Assistant US Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, where he was heavily involved in budget and trade negotiations. His role in designing the bailout of Mexico during the 1994 peso crisis placed him at the forefront of Latin America’s transformation into a region of open economies, and cemented his stature as a leading voice in economic-policy debates.

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Alan Rhodes Jun 11, 2023

"(E)ven the most individualistic society needs some degree of social solidarity" to qualify as so much as a bit moral. The growing implication is that services providing individuals guidance toward future goals like retirement should include political action as part of their advice. This change alone could drastically affect both breadth and depth of citizen participation in government, and help shift us away from the unproductive financial economy.

I have never read or heard any financial planner, brokerage, or bank suggest that individuals vote to ensure their Social Security or Medicare is not diminished, or, better, that they grow. Pretending to offer the best advice, they ignore these matters, or worse, imply that there can be no hope. Their communications are self serving, but also betray an unwillingness or inability to acknowledge the sort of compromises between individualism and social solidarity that even conservatives like TR, Carnegie and Hoover made.

The rise of our current gilded age has been brought about by a corresponding shift toward a financial services economy, exacerbating inequality, and, just as importantly, distracting people from their social responsibilities as precarity overwhelms their abilities to accurately discern all of their options.
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Per Kurowski Jun 11, 2023

If banks are allowed to hold less equity against loans to those considered more creditworthy, than against loans to those considered less creditworthy, does this increase the inequality in the access to the opportunity of bank credit?
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Charles Taylor Jun 8, 2023

A long process indeed. Thus the pessimism. If you are living during the long transition, it's hard to have reason for hope that the road will be built. This will come at a cost to a couple or more generations. The members of these lost generations will need help during their lives. Help that the last 40 years has proven is not a priority. Just drive through rural America today. What was the urban renewal of the past decades is now needed in rural America.
What's more, we have a leadership crisis. There are no Roosevelts today.
The times are much different also, think social media, automation, more integrated globalized labor, nuclear weapons, and on and on. The poor today are also different than the poor of the Gilden Age. They "know" how their opportunities don't measure up to those of their parents and grand parents generations.
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