The Profiteers by Christopher Marquis

Author:Christopher Marquis [MARQUIS, CHRISTOPHER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2024-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

Systemic Poverty and Second-Order Effects

As laudable as Faber’s and others’ efforts are, systemic problems require systemic solutions. For this problem, the solution seems simple: more progressive taxes and, specifically, a wealth tax like liberal US politicians Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed. In 2022, President Joe Biden unveiled a proposal in which a 20 percent tax would be levied on households worth in excess of $100 million, including all assets and even unrealized capital gains. This tax would help reduce the country’s deficit by $360 billion.50

Though they poll well, wealth taxes are notoriously difficult to enact, not just because of the resistance of the wealthy (which is considerable), but because they are so inconsistent with what corporate gaslighters have persuaded us to believe. Companies and executives urge us to consider the effects of their philanthropies instead of levying taxes. Part of the issue is the perception in the world today, particularly in developed economies, that wealth is an indicator of success and poverty is a sign of laziness.51

Marjorie Kelly of the Democracy Collaborative, a nonprofit working to catalyze the creation of a democratic economy, contradicts this accepted narrative in her recent book, Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises. She discusses how a root cause of our systemic problems, from inequality to climate change, is that wealth itself is valorized and so people often don’t ask how it was accumulated. She likens this to a cognitive bias—which she calls capital bias—because it’s a way of thinking that tells us who matters and what matters, and who doesn’t matter and what doesn’t matter. In highlighting the potential for systemic change, she draws a powerful analogy to gender bias or racial bias, which are now socially unacceptable but once were accepted. She argues that we need to understand that the level of inequality today, and the capital bias that underpins it, is also unacceptable and that we need to better see its destructive and unethical nature to be able to overcome this bias.

Beyond recognizing that we are biased to valorize wealth, perhaps even more importantly, we need to shift our cognitive frames to better understand that poverty is not simply a result of the actions of poor individuals but that societal structures and institutions hold the poor back in many ways. Unless one has experienced poverty, it is hard to recognize its impact. Most decision-makers at large companies can’t relate to the plights and economic realities of their wage workers.

People can become trapped in a cycle of poverty. Poor individuals have limited access to credit and so are forced to seek loans from predatory lenders, who not only charge high interest rates but include hidden fees and unclear terms in their structures. High rates of poverty mean lower economic participation. Companies then shift the externalities of low wages onto the whole society: reduced consumer demand, slower economic growth, increased reliance on public assistance programs, and increased health-care costs due to inadequate access to preventive care.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.