nautilus | Media may already be helping us understand the economic scale changes
happening in this country. The surprising success of Bernie Sanders has
been propelled by online discussions of income inequality. Michael
Konczal, a fellow with the Roosevelt Institute, points out that between
1980 and 2006, gross domestic product increased fivefold, while
financial sector profits increased sixteenfold. Between 1984 and 2014,
the increases have been fourfold and tenfold, respectively. At this
rate, we could well be in for a black hole-sized phase change.
Even
billionaires know something qualitatively new is going on
here—something so different that the old rules don’t apply. “I’m
scared,” wrote Peter Georgescu, chairman of advertising giant Young and
Rubicam, in The New York Times recently, speaking of the income
gap. “We risk losing the capitalist engine that brought us great
economic success.” His billionaire friends are scared too, he said. They
know what we’re seeing is not just more of the same.
Could a
tipping point exist where a concentrated quantity of power and money
really change society? Even individual behavior? The evidence is
mounting. One sociological study showed that drivers of more expensive
cars are less likely to stop for pedestrians than drivers of less
expensive cars. Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman points to
studies suggesting that “living in a culture that surrounds us with
reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that
we do not know about and of which we may not be proud.”
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