From Edward Fullbrook It seems generally agreed that populism tends to rise up after a prolonged period in which governing elites have blocked from public discussion the declining economic welfare of a significant proportion of the population. These declines take two forms, usually simultaneously and interdependently: A decline of income and wealth in absolute terms and/or relative to the elites and their agents. A decline in key characteristics of employment through time (quality, security, real and relative wage levels) creating persistent high level of unemployment. Though the latter is interdependent with the former, the real level of unemployment can be hidden. Elected elites and their patrons have a strategic interest in holding back public awareness and discussion of both
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from Edward Fullbrook
It seems generally agreed that populism tends to rise up after a prolonged period in which governing elites have blocked from public discussion the declining economic welfare of a significant proportion of the population. These declines take two forms, usually simultaneously and interdependently:
- A decline of income and wealth in absolute terms and/or relative to the elites and their agents.
- A decline in key characteristics of employment through time (quality, security, real and relative wage levels) creating persistent high level of unemployment.
Though the latter is interdependent with the former, the real level of unemployment can be hidden. Elected elites and their patrons have a strategic interest in holding back public awareness and discussion of both declines for fear of losing elections and for fear that the upward redistributions of income and wealth will be stopped or even reversed.
Until three years ago the ruling elites in the United States were extremely successful at keeping the severe upward income and wealth redistribution that had been “progressing” since the early 1970s out of public view. GINI coefficients and graphs showing from 1970 onwards median income levels and relative shares of the bottom 90% and bottom 50% were never part of public discussion and but rarely of economics. Instead income discussion focused tightly on GDP and GDP per capita, which with rare exceptions increased year by year.
True, from the early 2000s the Real-World Economics Review featured numerous papers calling attention to the long-term upward redistributions taking place in the United States, and in other venues Saez and Piketty did the same. But it was not until the publication of Piketty’s empirical blockbuster, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that a substantial hole was opened in the public wall of silence regarding the 40-year relative income and wealth decline of a large proportion of the American population in particular. This cultural breakthrough has made it marginally acceptable for the declining fortunes of the majority of citizens to be mentioned in corporate media and even in some neoclassical journals. Without Piketty’s book the rise of Trumpism would have been for our era’s overriding neoliberal narrative even more of an unexpected and inexplicable historical phenomenon.