Stanford University Press Blog

A Wealth Gap Video Goes Viral, and Why It Matters

A guest post by Angelique Haugerud, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and Editor of American Ethnologist.

It took just a few days in March 2013 for the great American wealth gap video to attract 4.4 million YouTube viewers.  The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein termed the video, just over six minutes long, a “mind-blowing” visualization of a 2011 academic study by behavioral economist Dan Ariely and psychologist Michael I. Norton.

What caught many Americans by surprise is the chasm between the actual versus imagined wealth distribution in the United States. If we assume that most citizens realize how unequally wealth is spread, we would be wrong.  It is news to many that the top one percent hold nearly 40 percent of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 90 percent have less than one-quarter. In the video’s wealth inequality chart, the riches of the top one percent so far exceed the assets of the rest that their column zooms upward beyond view, like an impossibly tall skyscraper.  

Not only did Ariely and Norton’s nationally representative respondents underestimate current inequality (by a lot), but in addition they defined an ideal pattern of wealth distribution that is even more equal than that of their assumed status quo. Although the top 20 percent of the U.S. population hold more than 80 percent of the wealth, Ariely and Norton’s respondents estimated that the top quintile held less than 60 percent of the wealth, and stated that ideally they would hold about one-third. According to these and other measures, the gap between the wealth distribution that respondents prefer and what we have is stunning.

The video’s wake-up call is echoed—in a different linguistic register—by satirists and activists known as  the Billionaires, who are the focus of my new book,  No Billionaire Left Behind: Satirical Activism in America. The Billionaires are a media-friendly national network of activists who don ball gowns, tiaras, top hats, and tuxedoes, and adopt fictional names such as Phil T. Rich, Tex Shelter, Ivan Aston Martin, Alan Greenspend, and Iona Bigga Yacht. Their signs declare “Corporations Are People Too!”  “Leave No Billionaire Behind!” and “Taxes Are Not For Everyone!” In the spirit of satirical news programs such as The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, these faux billionaires express a sophisticated knowledge of economics and public affairs through ironic humor, parody, and satire.  The Billionaires evoke the elegance of The Great Gatsby’s Roaring Twenties or an even earlier era of robber barons and heiresses. It is up to spectators to historicize the present, to perceive the implied link between the early twenty-first century and those earlier wealth bubbles--such as the late-nineteenth-century era Mark Twain popularized as a Gilded Age of surface glitter and vast underlying corruption, when the very rich sparkled while many went hungry.

No Billionaire Left Behind explores the inner workings of the satirical Billionaires as they tackle two of the most contentious topics in American political culture: the great wealth divide and the role of big money in electoral politics.  In a time of precariousness and fear, the book recaptures political domains of conviviality and play. Why might the satirical Billionaires be considered a cultural touchstone, a sensitive gauge of the condition of American democracy? Through participant-observation, interviews, and archival research, I analyze cultural politics during a time of profound ambivalence toward politics itself, and show why irony opens spaces of hope. Humor’s gift, like that of the viral video, is to remind us that today’s world can be made differently.

 

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The Roots of International Women’s Day: a Guest Post by Myra Marx Ferree, author of Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective

March 8, International Women’s Day, provides a perfect occasion to reflect on the different histories of gender and class politics across the globe and, in particular, in the United States and Germany, two countries where feminists were fundamental to establishing this global holiday at the beginning of the twentieth century. There are many stories about the origins of this special day. Reliable histories suggest the day developed in reaction to a lack of specific consideration offered women workers in the May Day labor mobilizations of the 1880s and 1890s, as socialists organized to promote the eight-hour day.   
  
On February 23, 1909, feminists in the United States, led by the Women’s Trade Union League, proclaimed a National Women’s Day to emphasize the need for women’s suffrage to offer a political voice for women working in factories. Here, this was not a socialist issue alone, but was a common cause for a cross-class coalition of feminists that emerged from the New York shirtwaist strike in support of working women’s labor rights. (The movement was further energized following the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire on March 25, 1911, in which more than 150 women died.)

 In 1910, German socialist feminist Clara Zetkin cited the U.S. National Women’s Day as inspiration when she led the women of the Second International, a socialist alliance, to call for an International Women’s Day to highlight wage-earning women’s labor rights and desire for the right to vote. To this point, labor protection and woman’s suffrage had not proved as unifying an issue in Germany as it had in the United States. German middle-class feminists often supported a right to vote limited to property owners, both men and women, disenfranchising the entire working-class. So Zetkin and other “proletarian feminists” put their primary emphasis on socialist organizing work. 

 

 

 By 1911, International Women’s Day was fixed on March 8. As illustrated in a poster produced for the 1914 Berlin International Women’s Day rally, the day had become a celebration of working-class women’s political strength in Germany. On the poster, an angry proletarian woman waves the red flag of the socialist party in support of their demand for women’s suffrage. (Decades later, this strong heritage of socialist feminism continued to define the perspective of feminists in Germany, and International Women’s Day remained an occasion to mobilize women for women’s rights. In 1971, a socialist feminist group in Berlin took the 1914 poster and redrew it in more contemporary, less emphatically proletarian fashion to announce their own International Women’s Day rally.)

But even as International Women’s Day took on increasing significance around the world over the decades, in the United States, the day did not bring women out to rallies and protest events.  In 1978, the first school district launched a Women’s History Week celebration centering around International Women’s Day. In 1981, Congress recognized the spreading popularity of this event by formally declaring the first week of March Women’s History Week (and in 1987, Congress made it a full month).  While offering a tool for conveying a more gender balanced approach to history in the schools, the U.S. framing of these commemorations moved away from sharing in the international—and more socialist—single day of attention to women’s current political demands and made it a more general reflection on women’s contributions broadly.  

American feminists also took August 28, the anniversary of the passage of the women’s suffrage amendment, as an alternative occasion to celebrate feminist mobilization. From 1923 on, the August anniversary was linked with a continuing demand for passage of an Equal Rights Amendment to the
U.S. constitution, a demand still unrealized today. Like the National Women’s Day that predated it, August 28 feminist events provided a cross-class mobilizing venue that carried fewer suspiciously socialist connotations.  For American feminists, claiming their constitutional rights and fighting stereotyping and discrimination based on gender was seen as “like race” and a unifying cause.

Issues of injustice that particularly affect lower-wage-earning women are still on the agenda of U.S. feminist cross-class mobilizations—most notably, requiring employers to provide a minimum of paid sick leave, and seeking to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to cover the part-time, temporary jobs, and small employers where half the female workforce is found. But, for better or worse, the separate path taken over the past century by U.S. feminists has weakened the prominence of International Women’s Day as an opportunity for calling for renewed national attention to such inequalities, even while affirming that these are issues for all women regardless of their own social class advantages to rally behind.  U.S. feminists are able to forge an inclusive movement that is respectful not only of the issues but of the voices of women of color and non-citizen women.  But while women immigrants often bring a memory of International Women’s day as important in their own countries, they have not yet found a way to bring the U.S. movement to take this more global perspective on women’s issues.  

The comparative significance of International Women’s Day and its symbolic power could hardly be more different in Germany and the United States, but the points of overlap in its history signal the importance of both the German and U.S. varieties of feminism that developed over the twentieth
century. Both the socialist-infused version of Germany and the cross-class politics of the United States leave traces in contemporary mobilizations and feminist frames that are on display in how local women’s movements  today celebrate International Women’s Day—or not.

 Myra is the author of Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective

In Memoriam: An excerpt from Stephen Guest's Ronald Dworkin, 3rd Edition

To commemorate the life and works of Ronald Dworkin, deemed by many to be the most important and most controversial Anglo-American jurist of the past forty years, we post this excerpt from the newly published 3rd edition of Stephen Guest's "Ronald Dworkin."   This 3rd edition offers a considerable update of the original--a minor classic in the field, offering the most complete analysis and integration of Dworkin's work to date--and incorporates discussion of Dworkin's latest masterwork Justice for Hedgehogs.  Read on for more on same:

Personal Ethics and Dignity: The Importance of an Authentic Life 

One of the striking points about Justice for Hedgehogs is Dworkin’s use of a distinction between personal “ethics” (how we should live) and “morality” (how we should act towards others). He thinks
morality derived from our sense of ourselves and what we think is right for ourselves is the basis on which we work out what is right in our conduct towards others. He there­fore looks for an ethical, not moral, standard to guide our interpretation of moral concepts. An obvious obstacle to the idea is, however, that our personal responsibility to do what’s best for ourselves seems to clash with what we should do for others. Dworkin is remarkably original in his attitude to this: he thinks it is too “austere” a way of looking at it because it denies what he calls our “authenticity,” that is, our personal responsibility to make our lives our own, endorsed by us, and us alone. He says that if we are to live genuinely authentic lives, and thus live our lives responsibly, we need to conceive our personality and life in a way that can “break out of distinctly moral considerations.” The austere—Kantian—view that our personal life consists of continually doing what is morally right—that is, that our personal life is always a reflection back on how we treat others—is, he says, “sad.” It makes morality seem like an “arduous and unpleasant mountain we must constantly cross.”

Dworkin therefore proposes a different way of understanding the cat­egorical nature of morality. It doesn’t just promote our personal desire; that is too “implausible.” Rather, we need to find what personal goals would fit and justify our sense of having obligations. He says that both Hobbes and
Hume claimed ethical bases for moral principles. However, Hobbes’s moral principles, deriving from a “social contract” and based only on the need for individuals to “survive”—a matter of “self-defense”—is not, Dworkin says, a sufficient condition for living well. An ethical life can’t be based on what we
need in order to defend ourselves. Humean “sensibilities” are, he says, “more agreeable,” but sensitivity alone cannot answer problems about the way we should live; our ethical life couldn’t consist of our just following our feelings. Nor, he says, can Hume’s utilitarian principle help, because while it would mean treating everyone’s interests equally, this “can hardly serve as a strategy for living well oneself.”

Opposing the conventional view, Dworkin distinguishes between having a good life and living well. A good life is not just having what one wants, but living according to our critical interests. Nevertheless, he
says, it is “wildly implausible” to suppose that living a morally good life is the same as living well. In fact, a decent view of our moral responsibilities could easily lead to a life not lived well: 

It is hard to believe that someone who has suffered terrible misfortunes has had a better life than he would have had if he had acted immorally and then prospered in every way, creatively, emotionally and materially, in a long and peaceful life.  

We can understand the satisfaction of our drives, tastes and preferences but it is considerably more difficult to understand our desire to live a critically good life—a life of pleasure is not enough. We want, Dworkin says, to live responsibly. He suggests an analogy of art with life; we value our lives for their “adverbial value,” the value of the “performance” rather than the “im­pact” they have on others: 

On any plausible view of what is truly wonderful in almost any human life, impact hardly comes into the story at all.  

Further, striving for a good life is not the same as minimizing the risks of a bad one. Lives are better for “spontaneity, style, authenticity and daring” and the setting of difficult or impossible tasks. But these can go crashingly wrong: living well is not the same thing as maximizing the chances of the best
possible life. On the other hand, he says that we can have a bad life in spite of living well. It is not just that our life can be bad because we made bad choices but because of matters of luck and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. We may, for example, be prejudiced against, or be born disabled, or we may die at a tragically young age. We can also have a good life in spite of our living badly. Dworkin gives the example of the Medici prince who lives a life of achievement and refinement but does so through killing and betrayal. The distinction between “living well” and “living a good life” makes sense of the phenomenon of “moral luck.” We can feel regret for something that was not our fault, as would the bus driver who drives without fault but twenty schoolchildren die as a result of the bus crashing. It makes sense to say that the bus driver “lived well” but had a “less good life” because of the accident. The distinction also makes sense of whether what happens after your death affects the goodness of your life: it doesn’t affect how well you lived but it affects the goodness of your life.

It would be a mistake, says Dworkin, for us not to care about how we personally live. Judging people to be equal is much more of a principle of morality than it is of ethics; it tells us that no one’s life is “more important” than anyone else’s. The principle that we should show respect for ourselves is clearly
ethical because it describes the attitude we should have to our own lives. Is it, then, important to “live well”? It is different from enjoyment, although enjoyment is linked to what we believe is “living well”; “pleasure,” too, is not pure feeling independent of belief about what gives rise to it because it is “fused with ethical flavor”—even the enjoyment of doing what we know we shouldn’t.

Authenticity, he thinks, is “the other side of self-respect,” for it requires accepting responsibility for our actions both towards others and ourselves. I can’t treat an act as mine unless I accept responsibility for
it (I can’t hive off my responsibility for something I’ve done by saying my parents are to blame, for example). I should also be prepared to acknowledge limits both to what I ask of others and to what I ask of myself. I can’t demand that others fund ridiculously expensive projects I have in mind (such as major
help in building a vast monument to my personal god); nor should I suppose that because I made some relatively minor mistake in my life I should suffer a life of hair shirts and dire poverty. Authenticity demands, Dworkin says, that we strive for independence but this idea is not the same as the commonly
understood value of “autonomy”; that idea does not adequately bring out the way we have to balance the ethical and moral determinants and do so while being bound to some extent by an “ethical culture.” His example is that it is not possible to live a life of medieval chivalry in Brooklyn in the present age. The idea of independence must capture the internal ground between those inescapable influences on us and our being dominated: “We cannot escape influence but we must resist domination.” So autonomy is not a “range of choices” as, for example, Joseph Raz has argued. Rather, Dworkin says: 

Authenticity is damaged when a person is made to accept someone else’s judgment in place of his own about the values or goals his life should display.

The Happy (Intellectual) Housewife

This month marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique, and the  chattering classes haven't stopped, well, chattering about it.  We asked Rachel Mesch, author of our forthcoming Having it All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women's Magazines Invented the Modern Woman, to comment on the striking similarities--and differences--between how women were both portrayed and instructed in women's magazine's from the Belle Epoque through the 1960s.  Plus ca change, we might say...

"While the problem may have had no name, its cause was easy to identify. In her classic volume The Feminine Mystique, which celebrates its 50^th anniversary this year, Betty Friedan pointed an accusing finger directly at American women’s magazines.  

“By the end of 1949,” lamented Friedan, “only one out of three heroines […] was a career woman—and she was shown in the act of renouncing her career and discovering that what she really wanted to be was a housewife.” What particularly disturbed Friedan, and what might seem surprising to contemporary readers, was that in previous generations, some of these very same magazines had urged women otherwise—cheering them on towards equal rights, suffrage and the career of their choice. A post-war emphasis on marriage and family building altered the equation. Friedan documents with dismay how legions of happy housewives seemed to get increasingly younger and childlike in the pages of McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal and Redbook, just as the bright ambitious futures that once lay before these college graduates receded from memory. 

Friedan’s classic work reminds us that magazines have long controlled the precise dose of femininity served to women, inviting readers to see themselves in specific, culturally determined ways that can radically shift from one generation to the next—and from one continent to another. American readers, noted Friedan, scoffed at Simone de Beauvoir when The Second Sex was translated in the US. But French women’s magazines have their own fascinating story to tell about the feminine mystique and its journalistic deployment. The first French women’s glossies, Femina and La Vie Heureuse (literally, The Happy Life), which were launched in the early 1900s, also celebrated the happy housewife. But these blissful domestic figures were depicted just as often sitting at their desks-- where they wrote novels and poetry—as arranging flowers and tending to their children. Happiness, for these early working mothers, was measured through the precise balance of books and babies, intellectual and domestic productivity.  

Several generations before their 1950s American equivalents, then, French women’s magazines  pressured readers into a new bourgeois ideal.  But it was one that encouraged women to use their minds, even as they kept up their impeccable households and appearances. Don’t leave it up to male authors to tell stories about women, urged best-selling author Delarue-Mardrus in a 1909 column for Femina. “Reflect, ladies,” she exhorted, “and write for us what you discover!” 

Out of this combination emerged the paradoxical image of an “intellectual housewife,” as writer Camille Marbo termed it in 1907, one taught to recognize her own strengths inside and outside the home. There is nothing wrong with housework, noted Marbo in a long-forgotten but deeply significant early moment in “having it all” myth-making from the pages of La Vie Heureuse. It’s just that housework is not for every woman. And the worst thing in the world for a woman is to be forced to stay home when her talents lie elsewhere. 

It would be another four decades before Friedan discovered this all over again."

For more on Having it All, including images from the book, see her recent piece in Slate's "DoubleX."

 

 

Related articles

The Feminine Mystique, 50 Years Later

At 50, Does 'Feminine Mystique' Still Roar?

Egypt's State of Emergency, and What it May Mean for the Future of Morsi's Government

The continuing unrest in Egypt has undermined hopes for a dramatic shift away from the authoritian regime that was in place before the spring 2011 revolution.  Latest developments raise further questions about Morsi's ability to lead the nation away from the oppressive regimes of the past.  A recent piece in the New York Times describing the State of Emergency declared in three Egyptian cities on Sunday, January 27, observed: "By imposing a one-month state of emergency in Suez, Ismailia and here in Port Said, where the police have lost all control, Mr. Morsi’s declaration chose to use one of the most despised weapons of former President Hosni Mubarak’s autocracy." The piece went on to comment that "a state of emergency suspends the ordinary judicial process and most civil rights. It gives the president and the police extraordinary powers."  And today's New York Times reports that " the nation’s top general warned Tuesday that the state itself was in danger of collapse if the feuding civilian leaders could not agree on a solution to restore order."

Comments on the parallels between both governments are not new, and certainly not to Josh Stacher:  "Morsi's declaration of a state of emergency in Egypt's three most central canal cities is partially a reaction to the inherited legacy of the Egyptian state after Hosni Mubarak's overthrow and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces-led transition. Morsi is unable to prevent the periodic but routine violence from happening because he refuses to address the protesters' most basic demand: To reform the Interior Ministry and its coercive instruments.

In many respects, he fails to reform the Ministry because he cannot, which leaves him trapped at the crossroads of blame for this violence. Thus, Morsi confronts not only a restive population that has shown no signs of returning to their homes, but also a unbroken state whose ranks are cohesive in their
obstruction of his attempts to lead. Given that the 18 days of revolt in 2011 dislodged Mubarak but did not break the state, it is producing an overall deterioration of state authority and weakening of the state elites' ability to project power or heed the calls of its citizens."

For a more complete analysis on the legacy of authoritarian governments in Egypt, and a striking comparison of those governments in Egypt and Syria, turn to Stacher's latest book,  Regime Power in Egypt and Syria.

 

Where the GOP is Wrong on "Amnesty" and Border Security: a Guest Post by SUP Author Jody Agius Vallejo

President Obama just detailed his Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) plan one one day after a bipartisan proposal was revealed by a “Gang of Eight” senators (Marco Rubio, R-FL; Jeff Flake, R-AZ; John McCain, R-AZ; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Dick Durbin, D-IL; Bob Menendez, D-N.J.; Chuck
Schumer, D-NY; Michael Bennet, D-CO). Both plans are similar and focus on four key elements of reform: border enforcement, a national employment verification system and penalties for employers who hire unauthorized workers, an earned pathway to citizenship for the eleven million unauthorized migrants presently in the country (the majority of whom are Latino), and an overhaul of the ways in which visas are allocated. The sticking point for CIR will be how rapidly, and to what extent, nauthorized migrants are granted American citizenship.

Although republicans are eager to appeal to Latinos who overwhelmingly voted for Obama in the last election, many republicans are reluctant to agree to a rapid citizenship pathway, what they derisively call an amnesty, because they mistakenly think it rewards unauthorized migrants and encourages more
unauthorized migration. This is why the Gang of 8’s plan has placed contingencies on their proposed citizenship pathway that include proving that the border is secure and that visitors can no longer overstay visas. These contingencies do not bode well for America’s future, which is inexorably tied
to how rapidly Latinos achieve social mobility and enter the American middle class. What are the measures by which you prove that the U.S.-Mexico border is secure? Recent research demonstrates that levels of unauthorized migration are at their lowest levels in nearly a quarter of a century. In fact, unauthorized migration is presently at net zero.

In just a few months Latinos will surpass whites to comprise a majority of California’s population, and their national population is expected to double in just a few decades, from 17% in 2012 to 30% in 2040. Citizenship is a critical mechanism that will allow today’s immigrants, and tomorrow’s native-born citizens, to fully integrate into American society. My research on the Mexican American middle class shows that families with parents who gain legal status and citizenship early on in their children’s life forge a more rapid trajectory into the middle class. These parents exit exploitative low-wage jobs and earn higher incomes, the benefits of which stream down to children. Parents have more money to
invest in their children and save for college and they move to better neighborhoods. If republicans want to charm the Latino population, and do what is best for America’s future, they must support a rapid citizenship pathway that does not include contingencies that are impossible to meet.

For more on the Mexican Middle Class, see Jody's new book, Barrios to Burbs" The Making of the Mexican American Middle Class, and a Q&A she did recently with KPPC's "Multi-American."