If you have to ask what a picture is worth, then you probably can't afford this column.
In The Power of Collective Wisdom we wrote "seeking collective wisdom is a conscious attempt to elevate group life from its history of fighting tooth and claw to reach the top of the hierarchy or achieve dominance over others." And we referred to the human capacity for empathy, compassion, and the role of mirror neurons in allowing for the permeability of emotional life.
So check out these words below from economist and best selling author, Jeremy Rifkin, the author of The Empathic Civilization. If you want to see his ideas come to life in pictures, however, check out this graphic illustration of his ideas (sent by my colleague, Gabriela Melano, this is a 10 minute synthesis of a much longer presentation – brilliant).
"Economic activity is no longer an adversarial contest between embattled sellers and buyers but, rather, a collaborative enterprise between like-minded players. The classical economic idea that another's gain is at the expense of one's own loss is replaced by the idea that enhancing the well-being of others amplifies one's own well-being. The win/lose game gives way to the win/win scenario.
In the distributed economy, where collaboration trumps competition, inclusivity replaces exclusivity and transparency and openness to others becomes essential to the new way of conducting business, empathic sensibility has room to breathe and thrive. It is no longer so constrained by hierarchies, boundaries of exclusion, and a concept of human nature that places acquisitiveness, self-interest, and utility at the center of the human experience."
Robert Moffat, senior vice president of IBM systems and technology group, was recently arrested by the FBI for conspiracy involving insider trading. The arrest sent shock ways through Wall Street exposing illicit, back channel dealings between prominent high tech executives and hedge fund managers. My information comes directly from Fortune Magazine, also seemingly shocked by it all, and reminding me of the policeman character in Casablanca played by Claude Rains who closes Rick’s Café by telling Humphrey Bogart, “I’m shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on here.”
Robert Moffat apparently was a hard working and respected executive considered a potential successor for CEO at IBM. The Fortune article describes him as a numbers cruncher, former Eagle Scout, and a man weighing in at 6-foot-2 and 265 pounds – a solid guy on all fronts. He had become sexually involved with a woman who worked for a hedge fund and she was quoted saying that trading business information was for her “like an orgasm.” The tale becomes more complicated as she was in love with her married hedge fund boss but it didn’t work out. Shocking.
One of Moffat’s attorney colleagues summed it up best: “There was no planet on which I could have understood what was being said about Bob. I just shut down.”
So we have insider trading among millionaires and billionaires, an Eagle Scout who seems to have it all risking everything, a woman who finds stimulation rubbing shoulders (at least) with powerful men, and another man who simply cannot comprehend how a straight shooter like Bob could go wrong. Well, there certainly is a lot to be shocked about. What we have here is a collective collapse. Most disturbing to me is the notion expressed by Bob’s colleague that he knows of no planet to understand what happened?
SEARCHING FOR NEW PLANETS
To be simply less shocked is not an answer to collective collapse but instead an even more cynical and destructive position. Following the lead of Bob’s attorney friend, I propose we look for new planets in which this behavior can be understood. We must also look for planets in which terms such as business ethics and collective wisdom are real practices as opposed to oxymorons.
PLANET INNER GALLEON (named after a hedge fund, Galleon Group, involved in the scandal):
On planet Inner Galleon, people are acutely aware of self-deception and self justification. Business schools take seriously the Arbinger Institute’s caution that “Over time, as we betray ourselves, we come to see ourselves in certain self justifying ways.” People on this planet have become comfortable acknowledging that collective folly is always a possibility in groups and that while we are capable of extraordinary acts of grace and kindness, we are also capable of acts of cruelty and deception. People on this planet embrace this paradox and thereby become more capable of wisdom.
They are also acutely aware that unlike the mythic view of the alpha male protecting the troops, spearheading the hunts, being exemplars, and keeping order among the group, the top ranking males are closer to their baboon ancestors in looking after themselves, seeking access to females, and always scouting for the highest and safest spot in the tree to protect themselves. This collective self knowledge allows them to speak intelligently about rules and regulation for the group and for choosing wisely those people who will administer the regulations. Even more critical, an ethic of doing what is right is reinforced constantly among the members of the group who deal directly with power and money because everyone recognizes its seductive influences. The community realizes that self deception and collective folly do not happen overnight but build slowly within a community and take root when no one seems to notice or care.
PLANET SAVATTHI (named after an ancient city in India)
On planet Savatthi, there is great regard for community and a deep understanding that all of us can get caught up in addictions of alcohol, drugs, gambling, and careless sexuality. There is a belief that guides them that these addictions represent an inner suffering and must be addressed by finding the proper antidotes within a loving community, including prayer, meditation, and healthy conversations. The people of Savatthi pay great attention to their physical and emotional environment, always cultivating beauty and reverence mixed with earthy humor and outright irreverence. On this planet, looking out for oneself or just your immediate friends and relatives is considered selfish. Both the community and planet itself is viewed as medicine, if taken properly.
On planet Savatthi, people take seriously that to lead a happy life one has to live in the company of wise and caring friends and that a community should honor those who truly contribute to the greater good of the whole. They understand one must constantly practice speaking generously from the heart and that words and deeds must be aligned.
To seek happiness on this planet means to live a simple life and to constantly marvel and delight in small things. To remain humble is understood as the greatest asset and that to pretend humility is an act of serious insincerity. Children are taught that when they speak, they should not hope that no-one disagrees with them, because without disagreement, self righteousness can flourish.
To persevere and to be open to change is considered the greatest gift and the greatest challenge. Everyone is asked to contribute their particular talent or gift and everyone is expected to cultivate their talents and apply them to a craft or profession.
PIERCING THE VEIL
No doubt these planets are obscured by heavy mist and clouds, but we are capable of knowing they are there just as we would not forget the moon exists because of a cloudy evening. We can and must look beyond our current world or we will shut down, caught in confusion and disbelief. We are explorers by nature; let us travel together in wisdom.
The magazine Leadership Excellence dedicated its recent issue to wisdom and wise judgment. Review the entire magazine, including my article, Collective Wisdom: Where has all the wisdom gone in organizations?
From my article:
Peter Senge writes in the foreword of our book, The Power of Collective Wisdom: “Few words have a longer historical association with leadership than wisdom and few words have less credibility in that association today.”
What has happened to account for such a discrepancy? And, what does the concept of wisdom offer today in a networked world driven by speed, time pressure, and fierce competition? Download my article (pdf)
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Fifteen
Moving from Factions to the Whole: Paying Attention in New Ways
Part III: Social Perspectives>
Time Range: 1811, Current Times
FLASH POINT
“If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Duane, 1811
Social Perspective: How Inequality Gets Under Our Skin What societal pattern might connect a heightened sense of mistrust, poor health, violence, diminished life expectancy, and low job status? If you guessed social and economic inequality, then we are beginning to think collectively together. But why? Why should this be the case? We would need to explore the multiple interlocking factors that determine and influence the frequency and distribution of this kind of pattern. We would need epidemiologists willing to use their training to identify the root causes of illness and other health-related events in social and economic circumstances, unrelated to any particular economic theory or ideology.
Remarkably, this is exactly what epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett set out to do in their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. With mind-numbing charts, diagrams, and statistical comparisons, these two professors documented why, by virtually every measure of well-being, the distribution of wealth far outweighs the importance of overall wealth in a community, region, or nation. Boiled down to its core, the results of these studies demonstrate how social and economic factions fracture the whole and make it worse off for everyone.
How so?
Social
and economic inequality creates exaggerated differences in social
standing, and social standing — our place in groups — has a dramatic
influence on our health, intelligence, well-being, and positive images
of the future. Here are three dramatic examples from animal and human
studies drawn from Wilkinson and Pickett’s work:
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
At Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina, 20 macaque monkeys were initially housed in individual cages and then placed in groups of 4. Observers noted social hierarchies that developed, with special attention to the evolution of dominant and subordinate characteristics. They performed scans of the monkeys’ brains before and after the monkeys entered their social groups. Next, they allowed the monkeys to administer cocaine to themselves by pressing a lever. The results were unmistakable. The dominant monkeys, who showed evidence of increased dopamine activity in their brains after becoming dominant, took far less cocaine than the subordinate group. A plausible hypothesis was that the subordinate monkeys were in effect “medicating themselves against the impact of their low social status.” Conversely, the dominant monkeys were producing natural forms of stimulation and required fewer external boosts.
In 2004, World Bank economists reported on a remarkable experiment. Three hundred twenty-one high-caste and 321 low-caste male children from rural areas of India were asked to solve various puzzles involving mazes. They did this without any knowledge of the other children’s caste, and the results were similar, with the lower-caste boys doing slightly better. Then the experiment was repeated, but this time with the announcement of each child’s name, village, and father’s name and caste. The results were dramatically reversed, with the lower-caste children’s performance dropping significantly. The epidemiologists noted the profound effect on performance and behavior in education based on “the way we feel we are seen and judged by others.”
The Whitehall studies in England followed civil servants to assess the impact of job status on health issues. The initial study, which followed only men over a ten-year period, attempted to investigate the causes of heart disease and other chronic health problems by looking at job-related responsibilities. The initial hypothesis was that heart disease would be correlated with the stress of the highest-status jobs. The exact opposite was shown. Men at the lowest pay grades had death rates three times higher than their higher-grade administrators. A second study, Whitehall II, which included men and women, showed lower-status jobs related to higher rates not only of heart disease but also of some cancers, chronic lung disease, gastrointestinal disease, depression, suicide, sickness, work absence, and back pain. The study revealed that not only were the lower-status civil servants more likely to be obese, smoke, and have higher blood pressure, but these obvious health risks accounted for only one-third of the subjects’ increased risk of death. Poverty and unemployment were not factors, as these were all working people. The epidemiologists concluded that job stress and “people’s sense of control over their work seem to make the most difference.”
Wilkinson and Pickett highlighted the multiple ways in which heightened degrees of inequality lead to social disaster. The social disaster cannot be changed through techniques of mass psychology or medication or even education, which tends to replicate the existing social status of parents. What mitigates the effects of inequality is greater equality and greater signs of respect.
Greater economic equality might mean a goal of shrinking the economic disparity between the richest 20% and the poorest 20% of a nation to a ratio closer to 4:1, as it is in Japan and Scandinavian countries like Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and less like 8:1 or 9:1, as it is in Singapore, the United States, and Portugal.
Respect might indicate behaviors that demonstrate an understanding that how we are seen by others is a major factor in physical and mental health, including anxiety levels, drug use, depression, the use of violence, and the experience of pain. Signs of respect are indicated by the presence of greetings, curiosity, honest feedback, and positive regard for others, and the absence of condescension, aloofness, and constant negativity. Dignity is a universal human need, and regard for the dignity of others is a foundational element of healthy social groups.
With this kind of social perspective on the nature of factions, we turn on its head the conventional ideal of who we should seek to emulate and why. In an article titled “The Pay Gap Is Vexing, but Don’t Blame the Rich: A Defense of the 1%,” Fortune magazine editor Nina Easton makes the more typical argument. She writes that while blaming the rich is convenient, it misses the point that this group of people demonstrates a level of talent, advanced degrees, and two-income, two-parent families that should be the envy of everyone.
To her credit, she points out that the nearly 1.4 million households in the United States that make up the 1% are quite a diverse lot, some with household incomes that, while substantial, are nothing near those of the billion-dollar-a-year hedge fund executives who have become the symbol of this faction. She concludes, however, on a point that is simultaneously misleading and dangerous: “It’s entertaining to wail about fat cats and the greedy rich. But if we’re serious about addressing widening inequality, we should figure out what the 1% is doing right — and apply some of those ideas to closing the gap.” (Nina Easton, Fortune, April 30, 2012.)
The remark is misleading because regardless of the diversity of this group, what makes them special is their household income, not their talents or degrees. We can’t all be in occupations that provide us with incomes offering more than the other 99% of the population. Further, based on the data provided by Wilkinson and Pickett, we would expect to see the group with the highest income demonstrate higher levels of education and lower rates of divorce. We would expect to see greater time and devotion to the success of their offspring. This is how class is replicated.
It is also to be expected that the higher-status group will be fascinated with why they are more successful than others, believing it must be their character, intelligence, or work ethic rather than the arbitrary nature of economic distribution or rights associated with privilege. The danger of this form of analysis is that it reduces the argument over economic distribution to one of simple human envy.
A dangerous social narrative is created that castigates anyone who dares to criticize economic arrangements and pivots the discussion back to the psychology of the individual. “Oh, you’re just upset because you don’t have a million dollars and a second home on an island.” This recourse back to the individual is supported by two deeply rooted assumptions: (1) there is no system better than the one we have, and (2) we cannot change human nature.
These may be comforting narratives for the status quo, but they ultimately fall into conflict with leadership theories on transformation. A transforming leader is one who willingly confronts uncomfortable issues with a belief that positive change can occur if people work together. Greed and self-interest may be obvious realities of human beings, but they need not be the basis for constructing our social world.
Factions destroy the ability to work consciously toward a union capable of holding disparate elements. In the end, it is not about the 99% against the 1%; it is about saving the dream of prosperity from collapsing into all-out warfare. Prosperity for all, in all the different ways that might be manifested, is a goal worth working toward. The majority of the 1% simply benefited from the arrangements granted them, and like any group of privileged human beings, they are not inclined to simply give them up. So be it. There are many among the 1.4 million wealthy households who would embrace a system that truly included them rather than putting them up on a pedestal or violently threatening to take them down.
Let there be no doubt that there is common cause for creating a world that works for all — on a relative if not absolute basis. So much creativity is yet to be released by working across sectors of business, government, and community initiatives. If there is to be sacrifice, it must be for everyone. The privileged should be the last group that seeks to be spared. Beyond sacrifice, however, there is much to be gained by truly unleashing the talents and passions of groups working on behalf of healing this planet that we inhabit together. This is the image of the future that we should hold dear.
This ability to hold an image of a positive future for all is deeply embedded in the collective psyche of this nation and this world. The Founders of the United States were for the most part privileged white men who negotiated a common cause at the expense of others, most specifically African slaves, whose freedom they denied. Yet among them were extraordinary figures like Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. None of them were pure; all of them were tainted by the prejudices, animosities, and conflicts of their time. Yet, they shared an almost mystical understanding of union and common cause. This is the meaning left behind by Jefferson’s words to William Duane:
“If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object …”
Never forget the true purpose of the journey. Do not be deluded by the long, winding, indirect path that must be followed. We can only reach the goal in mass.
“… but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.”
Be ever alert to individuals and factions promising a more direct route or advantages to only a portion of the collective. Stay united, even in your differences, or you will be subject to those who will return us to tyranny and unadulterated privilege.
Sitting off in a corner on a barstool is a disgruntled gentleman. He’s not one of the 1% or conservative guardians of privilege. No, it’s our old friend Karl Marx, and he’s not a bit happy.
NEXT WEEK: The Dark Prophet
Growth was virtually the only means to deal with shrinking profits, and it would engineer the need for excessive consumption of energy and other natural resources as dictated by the needs of the marketplace. Although Marx is not known for addressing ecological concerns, he predicted that the absence of any mitigating influence on capitalist laws of motion would result in undermining the “original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Nine
Wages Decline, Credit Expands, Rapidly Time Range: 1978-1985
What I did not know, setting my sights on creativity and meaning, was that the economic rocket ship we were on was about to sputter and go sideways. For 150 years, capitalism in the United States had functioned, despite its busts and booms, to move in an upward spiral. Working people, on average, saw their real wages rising decade after decade.
Until the 1970s, every generation had a reasonable chance to expect a better life than the previous one. Imagine if my father had not believed that. If he had believed that his sacrifices would make little positive difference for his children’s circumstances. Yes, he was disappointed in me and likely wondered if my crazy talk would ever lead anywhere, but I was in college. I would have a degree that was never an option for him. Anti-Semitism was on the decline. He had no reason to fear that roads would be blocked in front of me. And they were not, but wages for the average worker hit a wall.
From 1978 to 2011, real wages after adjusting for inflation went flat, nada, nothing. I’ll say it again. As best as we know from our economic models, there have been no wage increases for the average worker since the year I finished working at St. Johnsbury prison in 1978. This means that many of the inmates who found jobs in lumber mills, retail services, maintenance, and construction would be earning exactly the same amount today, once adjusted for inflation, as when they began. Or they might be unemployed. How did this come about?
Dr. Richard Wolf is an economist with an impeccable professional pedigree. He received his undergraduate degree at Harvard, his master’s at Stanford, and his doctorate at Yale. He was educated at institutions with a reverence for capitalism but supplemented his studies with a curiosity about its critics, most notably Karl Marx. He argues that beginning in the 1970s, there were at least four trends that help us put today’s circumstances in perspective.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
The first was the introduction of new technology, accelerating the use of computers to replace labor. Imagine, for example, the use of scanning devices to replace people physically counting business inventories. Human beings count slowly and get distracted. Forget jobs that are repetitive and can be automated. Gone.
Second was the increasing use of offshore factories for manufacturing. Recall that surplus value is enhanced when the cost of labor decreases. Finding workers on other continents who could be paid less was the perfect marriage of increasing profit while simultaneously creating new markets.
Third was downward pressure on wages as an increasing number of women and immigrants entered the workforce. This was the period when corporations began to deal with the visible reality of diversity, but the economic effect of a greater labor supply was far less visible or obvious. Women were consistently paid less than their male counterparts, and the greater overall labor supply meant more competition for jobs, thus creating a labor market in which supply outstripped demand.
The fourth trend was a response to the first three, increased use of personal debt. As the earning power of workers was eroding, the rapid rise of credit cards began to supplement income, but at a huge cost. Will Rogers’s famous aphorism that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging, became instead a search for bigger shovels. And there was no bigger shovel than credit cards and eventually mortgage debt. All these developments were slow moving and never in a straight line, but we can now see where they were leading.
Other social and economic forces were operating as well. In roughly the same 30-year period when workers’ wages were slowing down to a crawl, Fortune 500 companies saw corporate profit increasing as they grew in size and complexity. Amid this growth, fascination with the organizational leader (CEO) became quasi-cultish, symbolized by life-sized cutouts of Chrysler’s CEO, Lee Iacocca, filling bookstore windows. His autobiography was the best-selling hardcover nonfiction book in both 1984 and 1985. And just two years earlier, the birth of popular management books began with the hugely successful In Search of Excellence, attributing success to management savvy.
The success part turned out to be illusory, but the fascination with heroic leadership and management techniques became a major industry. Meanwhile, no one paid attention to the calculus of surplus value, how limiting wages was a driver of capital profits. In academia and professional consulting, we may have become more conscious of organizations as systems and the need for strategy, discipline, and leadership, but as citizens, we for the most part did not question the economic institution we operated within. We were, to put it simply, unconscious of capitalism and its myriad influences.
FLASH POINT San Francisco, 1984
In a friend’s San Francisco apartment, I dictated my doctoral dissertation from handwritten notes to a typist working with one of the first home computers. For someone who had never mastered the typewriter and whose handwriting was virtually illegible, this was a technological event with great personal meaning. Advances in technology literally gave me an opportunity to pursue my life’s work.
The subject of my dissertation, however, was somewhat off the beaten trail of society’s progress. I was researching the parallel historical conditions of social institutions such as prisons, mental institutions, public schools, and workplaces. My thesis was that surveillance and control had become dominant characteristics of these institutions, resulting in the institutionalization of the soul. We were losing a fundamental relationship with both nature and our own inner world. We were losing a spiritual connection to the transcendent, a perspective larger than just our own self-interest.
What I had not considered was another kind of person who was gaining greater and greater freedoms. This was the corporate person. I don’t mean the organizational man of the ’50s and ’60s. I’m talking about a corporate entity with the legal rights of a person and whose sole legal concern was self-interest.
Next Week:
Chapter Ten: Corporate Persons: What Does Not Serve Me Shall Not Be My Concern
Who even knew that corporations had legal rights as if they were actual persons? In a strange twist of legal gymnastics, the originating idea of a corporation being birthed and legitimized by a government grant had been transformed into a corporate body beholden to no one but its owners.
Economic self-interest was the law of the land, and the corporate persons cultivated in such an environment could be as sweet as your dear auntie or as self-serving and weird as the guy down the block wearing just a raincoat.
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
“Slowly and painfully, we are seeing worldwide acceptance of the fact that the wealthier and more technologically advanced countries have a responsibility to help underdeveloped ones. Not only through a sense of charity, but also because only in this way can we ever hope to see any permanent peace and security for ourselves.” ~ Sir Edmund Hillary, Schoolhouse in the Clouds
World Population, 1967 “[H]istorians have estimated that the world’s population at the beginning of the Christian era was 250 million. By the middle of the seventeenth century it had doubled, rising to about 500 million. By the middle of the nineteenth it had doubled again and reached the first billion mark.… By 1965, it was well over three billion, and the doubling period had shrunk from 1,500 years to about 35 years …
“Returning to the planet as a whole, the prospect is: 7 billion people in 2000; 14 billion in 2035; 25 billion a hundred years from now. ‘But,’ as a sober Ford Foundation report says, ‘long before then, in the face of such population pressure, it is inevitable that the Four Horsemen will take over.’” — Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine
United Nations, 1969 I do not wish to seem overdramatic, but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as secretary-general that the members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control. — U Thant, Secretary-General, United Nations
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
New York City, 1973 In the early 1970s, I worked summers for my father delivering packages and assembling hand machines that stapled nailheads and rhinestones into fabric. His shop was almost exactly two miles from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on 23–29 Washington Place, which burned down in 1911. It was hot and muggy in his shop, and I didn’t enjoy working there, but it was nothing like the sweatshops that had existed over a half-century earlier. One reason for this was unions.
Marx was correct in predicting, counter to the sentiment of his time, that workers would not simply have more children, diluting their bargaining power, but would become ever more skillful in negotiating their immediate and mostly economic self-interest. For Marx, however, it would be this very advance that would trigger the system’s instability, as the workers’ demands would threaten profit and control. Owners would reject their workers’ ever-increasing demands, and workers would seek to strike back. Marx was quite certain that both sides would remain unconscious of their predicament. They would battle ceaselessly with each other until social unrest upended the whole system. How different circumstances were for me.
I recall one evening riding home with my father on a bus that took us from Manhattan to Queens. He wondered if I would be interested in taking over the business one day. It was an awkward moment between us, and I sat in silence looking out the window. “I don’t think so,” I mumbled. He didn’t respond, and we sat together in silence the rest of the way.
For me, taking over the business would have been abandoning myself. I would have preferred stapling nailheads through my hand. I was in college and passionate about finding alternatives to what I believed were soul-crushing institutional forces beginning in public schools and continuing through college, professional education, and most definitely the workplace.
My plan was to chart a new path, although how I might do that was unknown to me. I shared, with many others, a belief that economic survival was no longer the key determinant of career choices. Survival was at the bottom of a hierarchy of needs that included meaning, creativity, and human development. The work of the future involved social change, greater personal and interpersonal depth, and healing our planet earth. The stars in the sky proclaimed that this was the Age of Aquarius—or at least the stars on Broadway shouted it out loud, which was good enough for me.
Next Week: Wages Decline, Credit Expands, Rapidly
What I did not know, setting my sights on creativity and meaning, was that the economic rocket ship we were on was about to sputter and go sideways. For 150 years, capitalism in the United States had functioned, despite its busts and booms, to move in an upward spiral. Working people, on average, saw their real wages rising decade after decade. Until the 1970s, every generation had a reasonable chance to expect a better life than the previous one.
From 1978 to 2011, real wages after adjusting for inflation went flat, nada, nothing. I’ll say it again…
