Thursday, March 26, 2020

The Human Outbreak, and the Pandemic We Should Have Expected


As we sit sheltering in our homes and worrying about ourselves and friends and relatives, it is a good time to recall a warning that David Quammen issued to us in 2012 with his book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.  He pointed out that the rate at which zoonosis, the transfer of pathogens from non-human animals to humans, seemed to be increasing, with new strains of viruses appearing every several years.  He provided this list.

“If you assembled a short list of the highlights and high anxieties of that saga within recent decades, it could include....Machupo [1959]....Marburg (1967), Lassa (1969), Ebola (1976)....HIV-1 (inferred in 1981, first isolated in 1983), HIV-2 (1986), Sin Nombre (1993), Hendra (1994), avian flu (1997), Nipah (1998), West Nile (1999), SARS (2003), and the much feared but anticlimactic swine flu of 2009.”

Timing forced him to miss MERS (2012) which was identified in the year of his publication.  And now we have another deadly coronavirus, COVID-19 (2019).

Quammen’s thesis was that this parade of threats is something we are responsible for and something we should expect to continue, and that someday our luck will run out and a truly deadly pandemic is inevitable.  We are responsible because as we increase in number on the planet, we make epidemics more likely, and we move ourselves into new regions with unfamiliar ecologies where new pathogens are likely to exist.  We also come in closer contact with animals who might be harboring unfamiliar pathogens.  In fact, our mass breeding and raising of animals for food sources greatly increases the likelihood that those animals will develop new diseases and spread them to us. 

“Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another.  And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing.  They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet.  The first is ecological, the second is medical.  As the two intersect, their joint consequences appear as a pattern of weird and terrible new diseases, emerging from unexpected sources and raising deep concern, deep foreboding, among the scientists who study them.”

Quammen refers to us as “the human outbreak.”

“Outbreak in the broader sense applies to any vast, sudden population increase by a single species.”

“....we are hungry.  We are prodigious, we are unprecedented.  We are phenomenal.  No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like this degree.  In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant.  We are an outbreak.”

“And here’s the thing about outbreaks: they end.  In some cases they end after many years, in other cases they end rather soon.  In some cases they end gradually, in other cases they end with a crash.”

“We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond....We live at high densities in many cities.  We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and ecological communities of such places.  We cut our way through the Congo.  We cut our way through the Amazon.  We cut our way through Borneo.  We cut our way through Madagascar.  We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia.  We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out.  We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there.”

“We multiply our livestock as we’ve multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow these domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck.”

Quammen indicated that SARS had the potential to do serious damage to the global population, but we got lucky and were able to contain it because it showed symptoms before it could be spread widely.  His suggestion was that the greatest danger to us on the horizon was from H5N1, the bird flu.  This version of influenza is extremely lethal, but thus far is only transmitted to humans from animals—ducks in this case.  Quammen quotes one scientist, Robert Webster.

“’As long as H5N1 is out there in the world,’ Webster said, ‘there is the possibility of disaster.  That’s really the bottom line with H5N1.  So long as it’s out there in the human population, there is the theoretical possibility that it can acquire the ability to transmit human-to-human.’  He paused.  ‘And then God help us’.”

The lesson to be learned is that while the current coronavirus is not an existential threat, it is going to knock humanity on its butt for a significant amount of time.  And once it has been dealt with, we must expect that another will emerge in a year perhaps, or ten or more years, and they will continue to come.  And each time the next one could be much worse than what we are experiencing now.


The interested reader might find the following article informative:




Saturday, March 21, 2020

Keynes, the Good Life, and the Growth of Bullshit Jobs


David Graeber is a New-York-born anthropologist with an abiding interest in economic history.  He is currently at the London School of Economics as a professor of anthropology.  There is an advantage in viewing economics from the perspective of anthropology because that discipline actually requires one to look at economic actors as real human beings, not as the entities constructed by economists to fit economic theories.  He has provided a history of interesting and iconoclastic writings.  In 2013, he was asked to produce an article for Strike! magazine with provocative content.  What he delivered was titled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.  Briefly, a bullshit job is one that entails meaningless or unnecessary activity. This piece was enthusiastically received by the public.  A poll in the UK indicated that 37% of respondents considered their jobs to be in the bullshit category.  The interest in the topic warranted an expanded version as the book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.

Graeber begins his deliberations by recalling the long-ago prediction by Keynes that technology would allow us to produce everything we need while enjoying a much shorter work week—the good life.

“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week.”

There is no reason to believe that technology has failed us.  Data clearly indicate that the number of workers required to provide food, clothing, and shelter has dropped considerably as a fraction of the work force.  What has grown in employment is what is loosely referred to as the “service sector.”  Since these services don’t actually produce a physical product, one must be suspicious of their value to society.

“But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much as the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services and telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.  And these numbers do not even reflect all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical or security support for those industries, or for tat matter, the whole host of ancillary industries (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.”

“These are what I propose to call bullshit jobs.”

The net result, in Graeber’s view, is that we who are not directly involved in producing a product are in fact working about fifteen hours a week but spending the remainder of the forty or more hours in bullshit activities.

“While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on the class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing, and maintaining things.  Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves—not unlike Soviet workers, actually—working forty- or even fifty-hour weeks on paper but effectively working fifteen hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles, or downloading TV box sets.”

Not surprisingly, Graeber does have an explanation for that strange alchemy.

“The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.  (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.)  And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their working hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.”

The sense that one is working in a bullshit job fosters resentment against anyone who might have a job of value.

“Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way…to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those that actually do get to do meaningful work.  For instance: in our society, there seems to be a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.”

“Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be.  This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism.  You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralyzing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyze London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people.  It’s even clearer in the United States, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against schoolteachers and autoworkers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry executives who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits.  It’s as if they are being told ‘But you get to teach children!  Or make cars!  You get to have real jobs!  And on top of that, you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?’”

Graeber uses his book to fill in details associated with these conjectures.  The result is a fun ride for the reader.  Much of the detailed descriptions of the bullshit jobs that abound come from readers of his original essay who agreed that their jobs were worthless or unnecessary.

To understand the growth of bullshit jobs, one must first understand what the increase in service sector jobs actually means.  Graeber tells us that the traditional service sector jobs such as waiters and salesclerks have been constant at about 20% of the workforce over the last century.  The sector growth came from new types of jobs, ones that had less-clear indicators of what the work entailed.

“The vast majority of those others included in the service sector were really administrators, consultants, clerical and accounting staff, IT professionals, and the like…This of course is precisely the zone in which bullshit jobs proliferate.”

One might assume that bullshit jobs are not possible in a modern economy where corporations are tuned to run at high efficiency.  But that assumption is exactly what allows such things to occur without being noticed.  Plus, the tendency to create unnecessary jobs in some industries is not an accident, it is a feature.  If a corporation’s role is to extract as much in funds as possible from a customer for providing a service, that fee must be justified by identifying numerous employees performing numerous tasks.  Inefficiency and profit can be correlated.  But what about competitors?  Why compete when it lowers the profit margin.

Graeber draws an interesting comparison between feudal lords and modern corporate leadership.

“…feudalism is essentially a redistributive system.  Peasants and craftsmen produce things, to a large extent autonomously; lords siphon off a share of what they produce, usually by dint of some complex set of legal rights and traditions…and then go about portioning out shares of the loot to their own staff, flunkies, warriors, retainers…”

“…doctrinaire libertarians, or, for that matter, orthodox Marxists, will always insist that our economy can’t really be riddled with bullshit jobs; that all this must be some sort of illusion.  But by a feudal logic, where economic and political considerations overlap, the same behavior makes perfect sense…the whole point is to grab a pot of loot, either by stealing it from one’s enemies or extracting it from commoners by means of fees, tolls, rents, and levies, and then redistributing it.  In the process one creates an entourage of followers that is both the visible measure of one’s pomp and magnificence, and at the same time, a means of distributing political favor: for instance, by buying off potential malcontents, rewarding faithful allies…or creating an elaborate hierarchy of honors and titles for lower-ranking nobles to squabble over.”

“If all of this very much resembles the inner workings of a large corporation, I would suggest that this is no coincidence: such corporations are less and less about making, building, fixing, or maintaining things and more and more about political processes of appropriating, distributing, and allocating money and resources.”

Graeber provides numerous examples of the existence of bullshit jobs and the tendencies to create them.  Many came from individuals who responded to his original article with their own tales of woe.  However, we begin with one from his own academic world.

In the period between 1975 and 2005 it was determined that positions for administrators and managers at public colleges increased by 66%.  This increase was not associated with any increase in students or faculty and did not seem to be associated with any advances in education, the main function of a college.  One should be suspicious of this job growth.  Now consider that over the same period, the growth in the same class of jobs at private colleges was an even heftier 135%.  What is the main difference between the two cases?  Public colleges have greater budget constraints, while private schools have greater opportunities to increase the “pot of loot” available to an “entourage of followers.”  Graeber includes this quote from an anonymous British academic.

“Every dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean, and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs.”

In the UK a scandal broke in 2006 when it was realized that banks had been extracting loot from their customers by inducing them to buy essentially worthless insurance policies—payment protection plans (PPI).  The financial firms were required to refund most of the money to their customers.  This necessitated the accumulation of a huge pot of money and the identification of a huge financial entity to handle the distribution of the funds.  Participants in this process were quite willing to share their experiences with Graeber.  The process seemed to be intentionally inefficient in order to collect an ever-greater fraction of the pot in fees for the service provided.

“This is actually a fairly common story in the testimonies I received: I heard about similar things going on in law firms involved in asbestos compensation payments as well.  Whenever a very large sum of money, in the hundreds of millions, is set aside to compensate an entire class of people, a bureaucracy must be set up to locate claimants, process claims, and portion out the money.  This bureaucracy may often involve hundreds or even thousands of people.  Since the money that pays their salaries is ultimately coming from the same pot, they have no particular incentive to distribute the spoils efficiently.  That would be killing the goose that laid the golden egg!...this often led to ‘crazy, surreal stuff’ like intentionally placing offices in different cities and forcing people to commute between them, or printing and destroying the same documents a half dozen times—all the while threatening legal action against anyone who revealed such practices to outsiders.”

Graeber pinpoints the financial sector as ground zero for bullshit jobs.

“In a way, one could argue that the whole financial sector is a scam of sorts, since it represents itself as largely about directing investments toward profitable opportunities in commerce and industry, when, in fact, it does very little of that.  The overwhelming bulk of its profits comes from colluding with the government to create, and then to trade and manipulate, various forms of debt.  All I am really arguing in this book is that just as much of what the financial sector does is basically smoke and mirrors, so are much of the information-sector jobs that accompanied its rise as well.”

Graeber relates the experiences and observations of one worker who he refers to as Irene.

“Irene, for example, worked for several major investment banks in ‘onboarding’—that is monitoring whether the bank’s clients (in this case, various hedge funds and private equity funds) were in compliance with government regulations.  In theory, every transaction the bank engaged in had to be assessed.  The process was self-evidently corrupt, since the real work was outsourced to shady outfits in Bermuda, Mauritius, or the Cayman Islands (where bribes are cheap), and they invariably found everything to be in order.  Nonetheless, since a 100% approval rate would hardly do, an elaborate edifice had to be erected to make it look as if sometimes, they did indeed find problems sometimes.  So Irene would report that the outsider reviewers had okayed the transaction, and a Quality Control board would review Irene’s paperwork and duly locate typos and other minor errors.  Then the total numbers of ‘fails’ in each department would be turned over to be tabulated by a metrics division, this allowing everyone involved to spend hours every week in meetings arguing over whether any particular ‘fail’ was real.”

“There was an even higher caste of bullshit, propped atop the metrics bullshit, which were the data scientists.  Their job was to collect the fail metrics and apply complex software to make pretty pictures out of the data.  The bosses would then take these pretty pictures to their bosses…”

The collected examples Graeber received allowed him to formulate a kind of “law of bullshit job creation.”

“As a general principle, I would propose the following: in any political-economic system based on appropriation and distribution of goods, rather than actually making, moving, or maintaining them, and therefore, where a substantial portion of the population is engaged in funneling resources up and down the system, that portion of the population will tend to organize itself into an elaborately ranked hierarchy of multiple tiers (at least three, and sometimes ten, twelve, or even more).  As a corollary, I would add that within those hierarchies, the line between retainers and subordinates will often become blurred, since obeisance to superiors is often a key part of the job description.  Most of the important players are both lords and vassals at the same time.”

Two things to take away from Graeber’s arguments are that corporations, and capitalism itself, have been infected by financialization, and that infection has shaded economic decisions with the politics of human interactions.

“During most of the twentieth century, large industrial corporations were very much independent of, and to some degree even hostile to, the interests of what was called ‘high finance.’  Executives in firms dedicated to producing breakfast cereals, or agricultural machinery, saw themselves as having far more in common with production-line workers in their own firms than they did with speculators and investors, and the internal organizations of firms reflected this.  It was only in the 1970s that the financial sector and the executive classes, that is, the upper echelons of the various corporate bureaucracies—effectively fused.  CEOs began paying themselves with stock options, moving back and forth between utterly unrelated companies, priding themselves on the number of employees they could lay off.  This set off a vicious cycle whereby workers who no longer felt any loyalty to corporations that felt none toward them, had to be increasingly monitored, managed, and surveilled.”

What has resulted is a modified—contaminated if you prefer—form of capitalism that does not conform with traditional economic expectations and may be leading the world in a direction that it would rather not follow.

“If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn’t capitalism—or at least, isn’t any sort of capitalism that would be recognizable from the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or, for that matter, Ludwig von Mises or Milton Friedman.  It is increasingly a system of rent extraction where the internal logic—the system’s ‘laws of motion’ as Marxists like to say—are profoundly different from capitalism, since economic and political imperatives have come largely to merge.  In many ways, it resembles classical medieval feudalism, displaying the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers.  In other ways—notably in its managerialist ethos—it is profoundly different.  And the whole apparatus, rather than replacing old-fashioned industrial capitalism, is instead superimposed on top of it, blending together in a thousand points in a thousand different ways.  Hardly surprising, then, that the situation seems so confusing that even those directly in the middle don’t really know quite what to make of it.”


Sunday, March 15, 2020

Moral Outrage and Politics


In struggling to understand the nation’s politics, one is struck by the effectiveness of the Republican Party in getting people to vote for their candidates even if the policies of those candidates seem to have no relationship to the economic needs of the voters.  The Democrats represent the counter example of a Party that focuses on policies directed at relieving voters of their problems but seems to have the most difficulty in consistently turning out voters.  Tony Judt lamented this decline in progressive voters’ focus in his book Ill Fares the Land and produced this explanation.

“We no longer have political movements.  While thousands of us may come together for a rally or a march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest.  Any effort to convert such interests into collective goals is usually undermined by the fragmented individualism of our concerns.  Laudable goals—fighting climate change, opposing war, advocating public healthcare or penalizing bankers—are united by nothing more than the expression of emotion.  In our political, as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole.”

There seems to be truth in this analysis, but it does not help explain why Republicans are more effective in turning out their voters.  The arrival of Donald Trump on the scene has proved unsettling in many ways, but his effect on voters may help explain what really makes them behave as they do.

Trump’s election generated a number of massive protests and marches objecting to him and his policies.  Dana R. Fisher has followed these activities through the 2018 midterm elections and reports her observations in the book American Resistance: From the Women's March to the Blue Wave.  The Resistance is the assembly of outraged citizens who were driven to participate in activities that would both protest and counter Trump’s activities and policies.  It is somewhat similar to the Tea Party activities in response to Obama and his policies.  There is some evidence that those efforts were subsidized and coordinated by big-money Republican interests.  The current Resistance appears to be a real grass-roots movement, generated partly by the inability of the Democratic Party apparatus to participate effectively at local levels.

“The Resistance is a product of the president’s behavior combined with the response by Americans to an out-of-touch Democratic Party and the reach of conservative dark money in politics.”

What Trump has accomplished is the combination of all the diverse progressive factions mentioned by Judt into a movement to drive him out of office in the next election.

“Because it is a countermovement with a common enemy, it is possible to bring diverse streams of progressive activism together even though they have historically competed for resources, energy, and attention.  As I document in this book, the Resistance represents a merging of movements working together to form the river of resistance we see today.  It includes Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the women’s, antigun violence, and the climate movements, among others.”

Fisher identifies “moral outrage” as the necessary driver to generate Resistance activities (and those of the Tea Party as well).

“To understand the growth of the Resistance, it is important to look at the ways that disconnected individuals mobilize.  In other words, what gets the disconnected nonjoiners off their sofas and into the streets and town hall meetings?  The answer is moral shocks: ‘when an event or situation raises such a sense of outrage in people that they become inclined toward political action, even in the absence of a network of contacts’.”

This concept of moral outrage seems even more fundamental than Fisher’s perspective makes it.  Viewed through the prism of moral outrage, the consistent and dependable behavior of Republican voters becomes understandable.  The Republican voters consist of a contingent of the wealthy who are permanently outraged at the notion that their wealth might be diminished by taxation or regulation, a contingent of white voters who were outraged at the notion of a black president and who are permanently outraged (whether they admit it or not) at the notion of equality between races, and a contingent of the religious who are outraged by the disrespect they and their beliefs receive from liberals.  While the Democrats argue policies, the Republicans fan the flames of moral outrage.

The Democrats seem united, for the moment, in their outrage at Trump, yet policy differences could still cause some to break ranks.  Younger voters who see themselves as being generally excluded from the “good life” their elders have enjoyed view the leftish policies promoted by Bernie Sanders as the only path forward.  It is not yet clear that they would universally vote for a less ambitious candidate.

The lesson that moral outrage should teach democrats is that and the Republican candidate for president is far worse than any candidate the democrats might nominate.  The Republican agenda is not only illiberal, it is also undemocratic; and it is inconsistent with the way of life favored by progressives. 

It is sad to say, but the Republican Party views the Democratic Party as an existential threat.  Winning is everything.  The democrats must also view republicans as an existential threat—even after Trump is gone.  Losing is not an option.

It seems the only solution to this standoff is for one party to lose so definitively that it must reconstitute itself with a new agenda.  That is not likely in the foreseeable future.


Sunday, March 1, 2020

Young Voters: Generation Divide or Class Divide?


There was a time when young people tended to vote similarly to their parents, as if political viewpoints could be inherited.  That is no longer the case.  Those who analyze voting patterns tend to bin people into age groups suggesting diversions from past behavior are a generational thing.  Successive generations will reach political adulthood experiencing different economic and social conditions which political scientists tell us will affect their political leanings for the remainder of their lives.  To observe that different age groups are voting differently is interesting, but not explanatory.  Why that is so is what we need to know.  William Davies provided a fascinating article for the London Review of Books titled Bloody Furious that provides some necessary insight.  Davies was reviewing a book by Keir Milburn titled Generation Left (Radical Futures).  The conclusion to be drawn from these sources is that the generational differences are best understood as a traditional class divide with the have-nots opposing the haves.  The analyses focus on the British issue of Brexit and the recent election results, but the age-group voting trends in the US seem remarkably similar.  It would be wise to consider the British issues and outcomes as we head into our nominating and election period.

Davies provides background on the British voting data.

“In the 2016 referendum, 64 per cent of people over the age of 65 voted Leave, compared to 29 per cent of those under the age of 25. In the 2017 general election, 69 per cent of those over the age of 70 voted for the Conservative Party, compared to 21 per cent under the age of 25. The probability that an individual voted Conservative in that election increased by 9 per cent for each additional ten years. Boris Johnson was appointed Tory leader (and hence prime minister) in summer 2019 by Conservative Party members whose average age was 57. His subsequent election victory wasn’t due to any improvement in his party’s standing among the young, but because there was a drift of Labour voters (including young ones) towards smaller parties. Other than that, the electoral demographics were identical to those of 2017.”

“If you’re over the age of 50, the odds are that you’re happy with how it’s all worked out. If you’re under the age of 50, the odds are that you’re not, and if you’re under the age of 30, you may well be bloody furious.”

The relevant generational divide in the US resides in the Democratic Party where “moderate” candidates are contending against more “radical” candidates.  Joe Biden represents the moderate wing, while Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are considered to be in the radical category.  Eric Levits provided some relevant data in an article titled This One Chart Explains Why the Kids Back Bernie. 

“Blue America’s gaping chasm of a generation gap has been a — if not the — defining feature of the Democratic primary race thus far. An Economist/YouGov poll released this week found that 60 percent of Democrats younger than 30 support either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren; among those 65 and older, the progressive candidates’ combined total was 27 percent. Before the Vermont senator’s strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, surveys showed an even wider age divide: In late January, Quinnipiac had Joe Biden leading the field nationally — even as he trailed Bernie Sanders among voters 35 and younger by a margin of 53 to 3 percent. Exit polls from New Hampshire affirmed this generational split, with Sanders winning 47 percent of voters 18 to 29, but just 15 percent of those over 65.”

Levits’ focus is on the decline in return on investment for most from higher education.  The British viewpoint recognizes that and a few other generational issues and arrives at a more convincing explanation, one that seems just as true for the US.

What of material interests? The suspicion that baby boomers – generally defined as those born between 1945 and 1964 – have benefited disproportionately from postwar economic policymaking, both in its redistributive Keynesian phase and its subsequent neoliberal phase, has been growing for many years. Ironically it was a Conservative politician, David Willetts, who – in his 2010 book The Pinch – first assembled the evidence that a generational land grab had occurred in the UK, at the expense of the boomers’ children and grandchildren. The boomers enjoyed a childhood and early adulthood of generous public spending, along with free university tuition, abundant cheap property, then – for those who acquired assets during the 1970s and 1980s – growing house prices, share prices and pension pots.”

“The fact that older people vote in far higher numbers than the young has caused politicians to queue up to defend the interests of older generations: protecting the state pension from cuts, boosting the NHS, cutting capital gains tax and coming up with goodies such as free television licences for the over-75s. Of course statistical trends don’t reflect universal experience, and pensioner poverty is a serious problem, but there are advantages that the majority of older people enjoy: 73 per cent of those aged between 65 and 74 own their own home, for instance, compared to less than 5 per cent of under-35s. Novel monetary policies such as quantitative easing, which has contributed to a further rise in asset prices since 2009, have disproportionately benefited baby-boomers.”

The inability to enter the housing market is indicated as a particularly “radicalizing” factor for the young.

“The intergenerational conflict over housing is becoming more entrenched as cities around the world become less affordable. In Hong Kong, more than half of people in their late twenties and early thirties are living with their parents – an under-recognised factor in the political discontents of that generation. In the UK, Corbynism took deepest root in the cities and university towns in which housing was most expensive. The Resolution Foundation calculates that the average millennial will spend £44,000 more on rent in their twenties than a baby boomer did. But even among older voters, the appeal of the Conservative Party doesn’t extend beyond the ranks of owner-occupiers: someone who rents in their sixties is no more likely to vote Conservative than someone who rents in their thirties.”

A political generation is better defined by the circumstances a cohort has experienced than by chronology.  And the current young shared quite an experience in the recent Great Recession.  The lesson they seem to have learned is that no one is looking out for them, so they better take matters into their own hands.

“This is​ the premise of Keir Milburn’s Generation Left. In his account, the most significant political event of recent times was the financial crisis of 2008. It was 2008 that ‘crystallised and accelerated the ongoing generational divide in life chances’, breaking a central ideological pillar of postwar capitalism – namely, that a typical individual should enjoy greater prosperity than their parents.”

“The fallout from 2008 included a series of political decisions that had scant impact on asset owners and retirees, but fell heavily on the young. House prices and managerial salaries quickly recovered their upward momentum, while most wages slumped for the longest period since the industrial revolution.”

“Crucially, for the UK, the coalition government announced in late 2010 that university tuition fees would increase to as much as £9000 a year. This prompted two months of protests and university occupations, including the storming of the Conservative Party’s campaign headquarters at Millbank Tower. The Millbank occupation provided the ‘moment of excess’ that Milburn sees as decisive in the formation of new political movements and subjectivities, forcing ‘observers to make a decision on whether to align themselves with the old or the new space of possibility’.”

The protests in the UK were an example of activism that was matched in other places, including the US.

“In 2011 alone, protests included the Arab Spring, riots in several British cities, the emergence of the ‘Indignados’ in Spanish squares and the Occupy movement in Zuccotti Park.”

Milburn believes what the young desire is a reimagining of the social contract that would qualify as a “revolution.”

“…given sufficient political power, Generation Left could ‘reinvent adulthood’, channelling the passions of 2011 into a new policy platform that would confer economic security as a matter of citizenship rather than a consequence of asset ownership.”

The voting patterns are consistent with the youth voting as a class, or, if one prefers, a special interest group.  And what they want is what the so-called radicals like Sanders and Warren are offering.  The media and the Democratic elites don’t seem to understand this.  Why would any of those who feel dispossessed be satisfied with being told the status quo isn’t so bad, things will get better someday.  That is the message “moderates” like Biden are sending.

Bernie Sanders associates the word revolution with his set of policies, but they are merely copies of policies that already exist in highly successful countries such as those of Scandinavia.  There is nothing radical about them.  The powers that be in the Democratic Party have the right to be unhappy with Bernie as their nominee, but they would be wise to come to terms with his policies and their popularity with an important constituency.  They should start by finally understanding why Sanders is so popular with the young.  They should recognize that a society that produces a situation in which younger people feel that it will be impossible for them to do as well economically as their parents is a society in peril.  Ideally, one should have relatively equal levels of economic security across generations.  If economic security falls for the current generation, what is the trend for the next?  Continuing along this path will lead to true revolution—with bodies lying in the streets.


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