I am finding the growing discontent represented by the “Occupy Wall Street” movement interesting in a couple of ways. First, unlike the “Tea Partiers,” who were reasonably well-focused in their demands for lower taxes and smaller government, the “Occupy Wall Street” group—groups at this point, as they are currently (as of 13 Oct 2011) in 103 cities in 37 States and a number of other locations around the world—do not have well-organized, uniform talking points. Our friends the media pundits don’t know how to respond to them because, other than their sheer numbers, it’s hard for them to find a quickly defined story.
The one common theme is the complaint that 1 percent of the population controls the vast majority of the wealth in the U.S. (the same is evidently true in other major economies) and that they are the other 99 percent. It is easy to find statistics (complete with graphics) showing that the distribution of wealth has shifted over time. The “rich” have definitely gotten richer, while the rest of us have gotten poorer. What is not so easy to find is a definitive reason for the shift. The lack of a single, clear reason for the increasing gap between “the rich” and “everyone else,” is undoubtedly one of the principal causes of the lack of coordinated talking points from the Occupy Wall Street groups. The growing gap between “the rich” and “everyone else” not only results in a general malaise among the Occupy crowd, but also in wide-spread defensiveness among “the rich.”
Here is a fairly typical “rich person’s” comment by Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain: “Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself. It’s not a person’s fault because they succeeded. It is a person’s fault if they failed. And so this is why I don’t understand these demonstrations and what is it that they’re looking for” (The Grio, “Herman Cain on poor and jobless: ‘Blame yourself!'”). In a similar comment, Michael Bloomberg (the millionaire mayor of New York) said that he doesn’t think too much of “Occupiers”: “If the jobs they’re trying to get rid of in the city—the people that work in finance, which is a big part of our economy—go away, we’re not going to have any money to pay our municipal employees or clean the parks or anything else” (see CNN News).
While I do not pretend to understand the complexities of macroeconomics, I am pretty sure that both Cain and Bloomberg miss the mark. While some of the “Occupiers” have expressed anger at “the rich,” most of their anger seems based on what I would call a “tilted playing field” rather than on the resentment of wealth per se. The rules, especially those defined in the U.S. tax code, have increasingly been stacked in favor of those who were already wealthy. This was, of course, a natural consequence of having “the rich” be the ones responsible for writing the rulebook. Back in the mid-1970s, when I started teaching in a College of Business, the focus was decidedly centered more on making money than on making things. Those declaring business majors were primarily interested in “money management.” When I was responsible for advising, one young business hopeful asked me what to major in if he wanted to specialize in “insider trading.” I suggested finance. At the time, I thought that his business professors would doubtless encourage him to set a better business goal. The principal problem, however, was that the focus had shifted from making money by making things to making money by financial wizardry. Insider trading was illegal, but credit-default swaps were on the horizon.
In Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, auto manufacturing guru Bob Lutz ascribes the decline in the quality of U.S. automobiles to the managerial shift from people who actually cared about the cars they were making to those whose only reason to be in the business was making money. The media coverage of the recent death of Steve Jobs reminded me of the history of Apple Computers, when Jobs was fired (he was evidently a “challenging” boss) and replaced by John Sculley. I don’t know the whole story, but it seems as though a “computer guy” was replaced by a professional manager, a “bean counter,” and Apple’s quality declined until the board begged Jobs to return (he had been off with Lucas Films creating Pixar, the video animation company) and sent Sculley packing.
In a recent article in The New York Times (“Something’s Happening Here”), Thomas L. Friedman presents two global analyses to help explain what seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. “The Great Disruption,” proposed by Paul Gilding in a book with that title, says that world economic systems are broken and that the Wall Street Occupiers and other discontents are increasingly realizing that they have been lied to and that a wide variety of world systems are breaking down. The second analysis is proposed by John Hagel III, and John Seely Brown, in The Power of Pull, call what’s happening “The Big Shift,” which (if I understand Friedman’s summary correctly) is being caused by a shift away from corporate and governmental systems, to smaller systems developed by individuals. Friedman says that Gilding’s theory is fear-based, while the Hagel-Brown theory is optimistic.
I agree with those who point to discontent as a global phenomenon. I have wondered whether there might be a third option that would account for the current social unrest. I am reminded of the experiments with rats conducted in (if I recall correctly) the 1970s, in which overcrowded conditions increased aggression and resulted in a number of undesirable behaviors, including cannibalism. I wonder if we have reached some kind of human population limit and that disruptions will become the “new normal” as the population continues to increase. However things “break” in the months and years to come, we will all need to pay attention and do our best to make the best choices we can. One thing we know for sure: the future has never turned out exactly as people anticipated. That probably means that neither the most optimistic vision nor the most pessimistic is likely to be correct.
Mahatma Gandhi reportedly said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Now, if only we could agree on a shared vision….
