Who likes money?

Money
So they say
Is the root of all evil today

These words are as true today as they were thoses time my roommates got high and blasted Pink Floyd through the house. Or are they? Not many serious people are against money as a concept these days, but a couple of new books highlight one extreme of the influence that the economy can have on democracy.

Jacob Hacker addresses economic security in his The Great Risk Shift. This work appears to combine the twin notions that the middle class is getting screwed by things like the horrendous health care situation and the downward pressure globalization is putting on jobs with the way conservative think tanks and echo chambers have made it difficult to talk about fixing the problems. This doesn't sound like an earth-shattering insight, but the more awareness there is of these problems the better. Plus, I have every reason to think Hacker, whose last book was excellent, is likely to give these problems a trenchant treatment.

Gerry Spence seems to be onto something in his Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power; The Rise and Risk of the New Conservative Hate Culture, which appears to explore the connection between economic violence and actual violence. Says Spence, "It’s easy to hate gays if one can’t find a job that pays more than the minimum starvation wage. It’s easy to jump on the patriotic band wagon to blow the hell out of half the innocent people in Iraq if one has, in effect, been blown to some sort of economic hell and is equally innocent. When people feel hurt they hurt back." This phenomenon may be our contemporary equivalent of Marx' economic alienation, and it reflects the old sociology chestnut that people compensate for uncertainty in their own lives by seeking certainty in the moral order. So once again we find ourselves grappling with the question of what role the economy should play in society.

Anthony Downs gives a classic interpretation of the role economic analysis can play in understanding society in his canonical Economic Theory of Democracy, but this isn't exactly what I'm driving at. What I'm going for can be traced back to accounts of the rise of capitalism in 18th century England and its subsequent spread around various parts of the globe, in which many observers have noted that a middle class seems to be a prerequisite for successful democracy. It's hard to prove any law of causation with certainty in the social sciences, but anecdotal evidence suggests that prosperity does encourage democracy. When Japan first opened up to the West in the mid-1800's, it had a sizable bureaucracy class known as Samurai; soon thereafter, Japan began to prosper and to govern effectively via a democratic Diet. In the United States, the 1890's saw a harsh economic bust cycle, and the period is now remembered for xenophobia and the restriction of rights, among other things. Contrast that to the period following World War II, when America's economic dominance over the world was unquestioned, and when available democratic rights, especially for blacks and women, multiplied.

People aren't in as bad a position today as they were in the 1890's, due to some accumulated wisdom in economic management and some of the social safety net first installed during the New Deal. But things aren't good, either. It has become a truism today that income disparity is a serious and rapidly expanding problem. It's a problem that is going to demand bold solutions to overcome, such as a reworking of the tax code.

But ultimately it may not matter what our tax code is if we continue to ignore our impending environmental collapse. Nothing would be worse for the economy or democracy than an uninhabitable world. A responsive democratic government that evaluates and acts upon relevant scientific evidence would be a good first step to acknowledging and addressing our dire environmental predicament. While we moved towards that goal by dethroning maniacs like Inhofe earlier this month, a strengthened middle class would surely help sustain progress towards a better democracy. If restrictions on democratic rights and polarization of income are problems that build on each other in hurting the environment, then so expansions of the middle class and democratic rights should build upon each other in helping the environment. This is the true division between the Democratic vision and the Republican vision - under their vision, when one person does well, he hoards it to himself, but under our vision, when one succeeds, so do all others.