Millennials Thinking Revolution?

“A much smarter Malcolm than I, Malcolm X, said you don’t have revolutions without bloodshed, and he was probably right. But we’re in a situation now where the ruling class feels so powerful and I’m not sure what it will take to change things. I mean, we have thousands of Americans dead in Puerto Rico, and that’s an attack by the ruling class. You had all these vulture funds that swooped into Puerto Rico, threw them even deeper into debt, and eviscerated the public services, and people died because of it. That’s an attack by any definition.”

Why Are Millennials Burned Out? Capitalism, Vox, Sean Illing, Feb 4, 2019

Okay, I was afraid of this. Now I know I complain a lot about the kind of capitalism we currently have but I do not want to totally abolish it: I just want to change it from something like an unbridled market with predators to a more inclusive kind of world that still has some kind of competition to instill the press for innovation. But I’m concerned about the millennials though…We already know that millennials are attracted to socialism and possibly communism, but there may be a tiny, hopefully just a tiny, fraction that feels a revolution is the only way out for them. This is what happens when you have a capitalism that separates wage gains from productivity. We used to have a capitalism that works for all Americans (well, maybe for most of them…I’m thinking about the blacks) but now it works for only the shareholders and the senior executives. Capitalism is great when it is used for the benefit of all people as it used to before 1970; it is not so great when it is used in a predatory way. When the financial companies got away with nearly crashing the economic system in 2008, people started to get angry. Millennials entered the workforce during this time, facing complaints that they did not have the right skills, or later, they did not have the right soft skills, or even later, they were too narcissistic and on and on and on. In the meantime, they faced degree inflation for jobs that did not require a degree, toiled in unpaid internships, and incurred huge student debt. And it was during this time that the famous productivity – wage chart started appearing in the news. One gentleman feels the millennials may need a revolution because the current capitalism we have is exploitative and he sees no other way out.

Millennials will no longer be civil ‘cuz…
“That s— doesn’t work.”

A generation of millennials feels let down by our elders, experts, institutions or some combination of the three: those whom we were asked to look up to and trust in the most important arenas of life. Their supposedly surefire paths to success (or at least stability) now feel more like scams. We’re building up to a backlash.

Michelle Obama Just Said What We’re All Thinking, Washington Post, Christine Emba, December 4, 2018

“It should come as no surprise that a few billionaires want to continue to hoard as much wealth as possible, increasing their corrupting influence over our political system,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). “The reality is we cannot make progress on the greatest challenges of our time — whether climate change, student debt or health-care costs — unless we ask those with the most to give in our society to contribute more.”

Billionaires Strike Back as Democrats Embrace Higher Taxes, Economic Populisam, Washington Post, Damian Paletta, February 6, 2019

Here’s a current listing of various proposals coming out of the Democratic party. If you want to avoid a revolution of sorts, because nobody wins in a revolution, then I suggest embracing some kind of higher taxes and possibly sharing power with the workers.

Some even suggest “abolishing” billionaires. This article lays out a very convincing case: it is dubious that they are really worth that amount of money, very few are generous enough to help out their fellow man, and money, and its partner power, corrupts. There are a few good billionaires but most billionaires are not charitable. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Tom Steyer were mentioned as being one of the very few that tries to do well. And I would add Nick Hanauer as he seems to be real about his efforts. They may be others but I just don’t know them. And those are the kinds of billionaires that I don’t want to see adversely impacted. (And read to the end of the article…the ending is a must read.

“Some ideas about how to make the world better require careful, nuanced thinking about how best to balance competing interests,” [Tom Scocca, editor of the essential blog Hmm Daily,] began. “Others don’t: Billionaires are bad. We should presumptively get rid of billionaires. All of them.”

Abolish Billionaires, New York Times, Farhad Manjoo, February 6, 2019

“Until a few years ago, I didn’t think this was a very complicated subject; the Luddites were wrong and the believers in technology and technological progress were right,” Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury Secretary and presidential economic advisor, said in a lecture at the National Bureau of Economic Research five years ago. “I’m not so completely certain now.”

Tech is Splitting the US Workforce in Two, New York Times, Eduardo Porter, February 4, 2019

Note, in the prior list, there is one tech guy and 3 financial guys who are listed as being the “good” billionaires. Tech guys are going to be undergoing a lot of opprobrium, especially when automation and artificial intelligence aggressively take over jobs. There is a concept of technology where the tools are used to augment the human skills rather than replace them, but with the shareholder-value-at-all-cost capitalism we have, I don’t see that happening. Companies will replace humans to maximize profits and this article seems to lay out the evidence of this. Workers without tech or engineering skills are being shunted into service industries that do not pay well. There’s a lot of talk that you will need skills in empathy and creativity in this new world of work but those empathy skills are utilized in mostly service industries and they don’t pay well. By the same token, the creative skills appears to be paid well only n the tech industries. You still need empathy and creativity but I fear that will not be enough.

So, millionaires, billionaires and big corporations, if you want to fend off this increasing populism or worse, you need to start paying your share of taxes instead of sheltering your income overseas, give in to some of these policies and let some of them become law, stop touting the non-existent benefits of tax cuts (the last big tax cuts proved there is no uptick in investments or other trickle down effects), end squelching wage increases, especially minimum wage, and halt the deregulation march. You will still be wealthy beyond anyone’s dreams and we will still keep the positive aspects of capitalism. And, we just might be able to avoid a revolution.

“In the background…is our super-rich president and his super-rich Cabinet. They’ve demonstrated repeatedly how out of touch they are with regular people. Most recently, during the partial government shutdown, the multimillionaire (and reported grafter) Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had his “let them eat cake” moment when he told CNBC that he couldn’t understand why furloughed workers would go to food banks when they could instead get loans to carry them through the loss of pay.”

1 Reason Everyone is Hating on Billionaires Right Now: Trump, Huffington Post, Emily Peck, February 8, 2019