Welcome to the new year. This is the time of year when journalists and pundits dust off their ‘best-of’ lists and track who was up and who was down in the year just past. This year, I wanted to do something different — to look beyond the events to the broader social forces producing really important changes in our country and the world.So I’ve come up with a list of five social forces — five trends which, backed by polling, show how our world is changing, and why.
All of these forces are rooted in longer-term trends and have implications for the foreseeable future. I also believe they’re not getting the attention they deserve in the public arena. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but I think it gives us a good 360 view of the challenges we’ll face in the coming years. Forewarned is forearmed.
Discussions of class structure and class tensions are hardly in the mainstream of year-end reviews. We see, however, how concerns about the health of the middle class have now become a mainstay of politics in Canada and the United States; as politicians once embraced the sanctity of the family, they now rush to the rhetorical defence of the middle class.
Look beyond the bromides and you can see some truly profound shifts going on. These movements are by no means healthy and, taken together, may spell nothing less than the collapse of the notion of inevitable progress which has underpinned the miracle of liberal capitalism since it emerged in the 18th century.
Despite glib pronouncements about the ‘end of history’, the death of state socialism and the final triumph of the West — pervasive themes in the late nineties — there are now grave doubts about the present and future of the advanced western economies. The American and Canadian dreams of a better future earned through hard work and ingenuity are fading and being replaced with a grimmer suspicion: that not only are we not doing better than our parents but the next generation will confront a much darker future. Whatever meagre profits do emanate from stagnant western economies are increasingly appropriated by a tiny cadre of über rich who don’t really participate in the mainstream of society.
The fraying of the progress ethic should be of grave concern to all of us. Max Weber argued that it was the Protestant ethic which produced the spirit of capitalism. This ethic transformed into a secular dream of progress that fuelled the unimaginable ascendance of the West. If our citizens truly believe that progress is now over — that the West’s day in the sun has passed and the best we can do now is hunker down in the vain hope that this somehow will fix itself — this belief will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And while the ascendance of the BRIC powers (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the stagnation of Western economies and an unprecedented concentration of wealth are real enough, the end of Western salience is hardly written in stone. What is more disturbing than the challenges we confront is the collective despair we see in our tracking of public mood.
The exuberant optimism which defined the close of the 20th century in Canada has given way to pessimism, even resignation, over the past decade. The evidence is clear that economic outlook is on a slow and steady downward cycle, to the point that many now fear the slide will become a maelstrom. Our politicians’ economic policy offerings do not seem to have arrested this erosion and may well be seen as part of the problem.
Many claim that this sense of falling backward is neither unique nor particularly troublesome. As our research has shown in time series the first point isn’t true and the latter response seems a rather blasé attitude to a converging set of bleak economic outlook indicators. We have speculated that the rising economic success of non-Western nations, the failure of Western/U.S. foreign policies in the Middle East and rising signs of fiscal and debt crises have all contributed to this malaise.
The other key factor is rising inequality and a failing middle class. Our evidence has shown that as economic issues have become the dominant concerns for Canadians they are — for the first time in our research — twinned at the pinnacle of public issues with blended concerns about fairness and inequality. These are not the traditional and more modest concerns we have seen about the gap between the rich and poor. The new and more potent linkage is the gap between the über rich and everyone else. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in what can only be described as the crisis of the middle class.
The middle class has always been by far the most popular self-defined class denomination in upper North America — one of the reasons it is such a popular political target. The 20th century ascension of the United States to the “hyperpower” status it enjoyed as little as a decade ago was largely the culmination of an unprecedented period of middle class ascendance.
This probably began in the origins of that nation, but most clearly expressed itself in the expansionary period which followed the Great Depression and continued almost uninterrupted to the close of the 20th century. Canada largely followed in lockstep and it was not unusual in the 60s and 70s to see Canada and the U.S. at the top of the standard of living charts (they are now well down that list and have been so for some time).
In our tracking over the past decade or so we have seen something new and important happening to that category of self-defined middle class. Once, nearly 70 per cent of Canadians called themselves middle class; that has now dropped to less than 50 per cent. Moreover, there is a virtual public consensus that over the past generation no class has fallen more steeply from economic grace than the beleaguered middle class. The middle class is shrinking, pessimistic and convinced that it is the clear loser in the economic reordering of the last twenty five years.
In analysing why societies fail, Daron Acemoğlu has a very insightful theory that suggests the harbinger of societal failure is a shift from an ‘inclusive’ to an ‘extractive’ economy. The swelling of upper North America’s middle class in the 20th century is a shining example of a successful inclusive economy. Among other examples, Acemoğlu argues that Venice went from backwater to world powerhouse and back to a sterile urban museum-in-waiting when it shifted from an inclusive to an extractive economy. The diminution of taxes and public services and the rise of the ‘one per cent’ has been coupled with a similar shrinkage and relative decline in the North American economy — and could be a chilling harbinger of our future economic well being.
There are few, if any, modern examples of economic and societal success which do not see a rising, optimistic and growing middle class. These features are common to all of the modern emerging Asian powerhouses. In Canada we have a shrinking, stagnant and pessimistic middle class which has lost faith in the ethic of progress. Uncorrected, this will lead to further decline.
The fact that only 15 per cent of the public think their children will inherit a better world underlines just how formidable the challenge is. This dark future is by no means inevitable — but the dominant challenge of our time is to reverse this infectious belief that progress is over and produce a vibrant new liberal capitalism for the 21st century. Growing and invigorating the dormant middle class is job one in any blueprint for a brighter future.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Frank Graves
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