Land ownership has shaped civilizations from their beginnings, with a constant interplay between great powers—the aristocracy, the state, the Church, the emperor—and those below them. History has oscillated between periods of greater dispersion of ownership, and those that favored greater concentration.
Nothing has revealed the class divide in the U.S. quite like runaway inflation and skyrocketing gas prices. But in addition to the economic impact the staggering incompetence of the Biden administration is having on the working class, there is a political one; it’s undeniably driving working class voters even further from the Democrats and toward the GOP.
But it’s not all good news for conservatives. The recent Amazon vote to unionize could be a precursor to something less appealing to the Right: a nascent rebellion among the vast armies of service workers who for decades have inhabited the lower economic rungs.
The truth is, the rising tide of class conflict is problematic for both parties. The Amazon vote challenges the GOP’s anti-union stance and its free market dogma. But Democrats, too, face an embarrassing conundrum, since the companies most likely to face continued union drives—Amazon and Starbucks among them—are themselves core funders and media stewards of the Democratic Party.
This is not the discussion either liberal oligarchs or Right-wing activists want. They would rather battle over media hot buttons like climate, race, and gender, than meaningfully address working conditions, wages or rapidly rising rents.
In other words, neither party has developed a program to boost proletarian aspirations.
And this despite the fact that the growing class divide could well be the dominant issue of the next decade. Middle- and working-class Americans are widely—and correctly—pessimistic about their economic futures. Even before the civil unrest of recent years and the pandemic, Pew reported that most Americans believed our country was in decline, with a shrinking middle class, increased debt, alienation from leaders and growing polarization.
Almost 70 percent of Americans told pollsters last year that the next generation will be worse off than their parents. And it’s not just the masses. Young people across the country are pessimistic as well: Most people 15 to 24 also think life will be worse for them than for their parents.
They aren’t wrong. The share of American adults who live in middle-income households has decreased from 61 percent in 1971 to 51 percent in 2019, and the pandemic appears to have accelerated this pattern, hitting low-income workers hardest while the recovery helped them least.
Meanwhile, those at the top are raking it in. CEO compensation reached record levels this year, investment bankers on Wall Street enjoyed record bonuses and the giant tech firms now boast a market capitalization greater than the bloated federal budget.
Read the rest of this piece at Newsweek.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Elvert Barnes via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
The notion that “the arc of history” favors humanity extends across the political spectrum from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. Yet rather than facing the dawn of a progressive future, we may be entering “the great regression,” a period where the world becomes more hierarchical and feudal, less prosperous, and much less free.
A decade or two ago, optimism was buttressed by the economic boom that followed the end of the Second World War and was further extended by the collapse of Communism. This “end of history” moment seemed to be the dawn of a future that was more like Star Trek, with advanced technologies used to deliver universal prosperity under a regime of enlightened rulers. Instead, today’s new world order is a springtime for dictators, revanchist ideologies, and the pitiless global struggle for supremacy.
In place of the broad-based prosperity enjoyed by Europe, Australia, and North America that gave birth to capitalism and modern democracy, those regions have become more feudalistic, hierarchical, and profoundly unequal. The middle class, which was critical in destroying feudalism and ushering in the prosperity of the modern world, has lost ground to a small aristocracy of financiers, as corporate and tech hegemons have increased their power over the global economy.
Once-dynamic Western societies are now stagnating as they did in feudal times. Median incomes have stayed flat while the populations of post-industrial societies are growing slowly or not at all—a problem exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The mid-20th-century liberal “golden age” has receded under the rising tide of autocracy. Indeed, according to a recent study by Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, nearly 70% of the world’s population lives under some kind of autocracy, including illiberal electoral regimes, up from 50% in 2011. Belief in democracy is also declining, most disturbingly among young people who are intimately acquainted with the shortcomings of Western liberal democracies but have no historical memory of what life was like under previous autocracies.
Although the united Western response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine offers some hope of a revived liberal alliance, the most likely solutions to the crisis will come from deals struck between monarchs fighting over turf and prestige. While no one is expecting the UN bureaucracy to broker a solution, dictators like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have a vital role to play. At the moment, global oil shortages have already empowered autocrats in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Venezuela. Soon Iran’s mullahs, saved by Europe and the United States, will see their own windfall as Western nations purposely surrender their capacity to generate energy on their own.
The United States’ failure to prevent Russia’s strategic dominance of Europe’s energy sector or China’s relentless drive for global preeminence is not a predetermined fact of history—rather, it reflects choices made by our ruling establishment. Rather than seek, as in the past, to boost the United States’ productive power with investment in manufacturing and energy, corporate and political elites in the United States have comprehensively demonized and dismantled precisely those industries in the name of a green ideology that Joel Garreau calls “the religion of choice for urban atheists.” It is no coincidence that the very industries that tend to spread wealth to ordinary workers, enrich owners, and support an independent middle class are portrayed as being full of deplorables and contributing to the climate apocalypse. Like the early Christians, today’s climate activists employ religion to strangle dissent and control opinion.
Read the rest of this piece at The Scroll.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
By: Ed West
On: UnHerd
Today the richest 40 Americans have more wealth than the poorest 185 million Americans. The leading 100 landowners now own 40 million acres of American land, an area the size of New England. There has been a vast increase in American inequality since the mid-20th century, and Europe — though some way behind — is on a similar course.
These are among the alarming stats cited by Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, published just as lockdown sped up some of the trends he chronicled: increased tech dominance, rising inequality between rich and poor, not just in wealth but in health, and record levels of loneliness (4,000 Japanese people die alone each week, he cheerfully informs us). Read more
By: Robert Bryce
On: The Power Hungry Podcast
Joel Kotkin is a demographer, journalist, author, and executive editor of NewGeography.com. In his second appearance on the Power Hungry Podcast, Kotkin discusses his recent article for Quillette, “The New Great Game,” how China and Russia are allying against the West, why America needs “a new nationalism” to counter this alliance, how California’s administrative state is crushing the poor and the middle class, Michael Shellenberger’s gubernatorial bid, energy, housing, and why despite his many concerns, he remains bullish on the future of the United States.
Listen to this episode on The Power Hungry Podcast
The Great New Game
Welcome to the End of Democracy and It’s Not Trump’s Fault
Buy The Coming of Neo-Feudalism
What’s Left? is a weekly podcast hosted by Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) and Oliver Bateman (@moustacheclubUS). Among other topics, we usually discuss politics, current affairs, culture, and the sleazy world of bourgeois media.
By: Aimee Terese and Oliver Bateman
On: What’s Left?
Urban Reform Institute executive director Joel Kotkin returns to the podcast to discuss housing and development issues with Aimee and Oliver.
Listen to this episode on What’s Left? podcast
By: GB news
On: The Discussion
Joel Kotkin joins host Inaya Folarin Iman to talk about the populism revival.
Joel talks with Inaya about the recent truck driver protests in Canada, the ways in which pandemic policies have contributed to the frustrations of the middle and working-class, how political leaders are failing to address the issues that most affect the working-class, the effect of social media on public debate, and more.
Enthusiasts of “the new economy” long cherished the notion that it would be different from the unenlightened, sluggish, and piggish older one. Yet our economy seems increasingly to resemble not some hippy capitalist utopia, but the deeply concentrated economy of pre-war Japan.
At the time, Japan had developed an economic model around a handful of large corporate conglomerates called zaibatsu. Organized as a “financial clique,” with a bank at the center, these firms extended their interests into virtually all economic activity. They included Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda. Mitsubishi led the way in shipbuilding, steel, and of course aircraft, being the creator of the famous Zero fighter.
We bemoan autocracies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and China but largely ignore the more subtle authoritarian trend in the West. Don’t expect a crudely effective dictatorship out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: we may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the nosiest of dictatorships.
The new autocracy rises from a relentless economic concentration which has engendered a new and fabulously wealthy elite. Five years ago, around four hundred billionaires owned as much as half of the world’s assets. Today, only one hundred billionaires own that share, and Oxfam reduces that number to a mere twenty-six. In avowedly socialist China, the top one percent of the population holds about one-third of the country’s wealth, up from 20 percent two decades ago. Since 1978, China’s Gini coefficient, which measures inequality of wealth distribution, has tripled.
An OECD report issued before the Covid pandemic finds that almost everywhere, the non-rich share of national wealth has declined. These trends can be seen even in social democracies like Sweden and Germany. In the United States, as the conservative economist John Michaelson put it succinctly in 2018, the economic legacy of the last decade is “excessive corporate consolidation, a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent from the middle class.”
This process has developed both in the tangible and digital economies. In Great Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than one percent of the population owns half of all the land. On the European continent overall, farmland has fallen increasingly into the hands of a small cadre of corporate owners and the mega-wealthy. In America, the largest farmland holder is Bill Gates, with over 200,000 acres, while Ted Turner and John Malone preside over lordly estates of over two million acres each — larger than several American states.
As property has concentrated, small-holders have come under increased pressure. Australia historically has enjoyed high rates of homeownership, but the rate among twenty-five to thirty-four year-olds dropped from more than 60 percent in 1981 to only 45 percent in 2016. The proportion of owner-occupied housing in once-egalitarian Australia has dropped by 10 percent in the last twenty-five years. Morgan Stanley predicts that the US will soon become primarily a “rentership society” where Wall Street firms seek to turn homes, furniture and other necessities into rental products.
The digital economy is similarly dominated by a small group of giant firms. These overlords together exercise control of up to 90 percent of critical markets such as basic computer operating systems, social media, online search advertising and book sales. No longer satisfied with controlling the pipelines, the tech oligarchy increasing buys up old news outlets and “curates” the news to its tastes. It increasingly dominates mainstream entertainment too: the pending sale of MGM to Amazon is just the most recent example of its conquest and consolidation of the means of communication.
Like the barbarian princes who shaped the Middle Ages, the new oligarchs have been able to seize their fiefdoms with little resistance from weak central governments. The pandemic accelerated this process; its lockdowns and restraints on mobility proved a bonanza for tech companies like Google, whose profits doubled during the period. In this highly regulated environment, the tech-rich have simply gotten richer: seven of the ten richest Americans come from the tech sector. Apple, by some calculations, is now worth more than the entire oil and gas industry. The already obscenely rich have become richer still. Jeff Bezos alone saw his net worth jump by an estimated $34.6 billion in the first two months of the pandemic, while his company has enjoyed continued revenue and profit growth.
As executive compensation reached the stratosphere in Big Tech and finance, small businesses face what the Harvard Business Review calls “an existential threat.” Experts now warn that one third of small businesses, which comprise the majority of US companies and employ nearly half of all workers, could ultimately shut down for good. Hundreds of thousands have already disappeared, including nearly half of all black-owned businesses. Particularly damaged have been the small merchants along Main Street and those working for them, such as restaurant and hospitality workers.
Read the rest of this piece at The Spectator World.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: Chris Devers, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
America has only a limited feudal past, the plantation aristocracy of the antebellum South and the enormous class chasms of the Gilded Age being pretty much our only examples. Yet today—after decades of social mobility, a digital revolution that was supposed to empower individuals everywhere, and the construction of a vigorous anti-discrimination apparatus that putatively ensures equal rights and status—a rigid new social order with feudal elements has come into view.
This emerging class structure reprises, albeit with far less starvation, the patterns of the Middle Ages, with each class performing distinct social functions and defined economic roles. In this new order, there are two ascendant classes: the oligarchs and the clerisy. And there are two classes struggling to serve the ascendant classes, and to maintain for themselves a decent standard of living: the yeomanry and the new serfs.
The old feudal order evolved gradually, as the last structures of Roman republicanism first weakened, then totally collapsed due to the barbarian invasions. The seizure of Europe by the barbarian hordes upended an entire civilization, including its class structures. The collapse was due as much to the weakness of Roman institutions as to the ruthlessness of barbarian leaders. The feudalism that ensued would simplify society under the rule of two classes, the military aristocracy and the clerical class, while most people lived essentially in bondage to one or the other.
This historical precedent can help us make sense of the socioeconomic trends of America’s last half-century. Since the 1970s, the wealth differential between middle-income and upper-income households in the United States has grown. Data from the Census Bureau show that the share of national income going to the middle 60 percent of households has fallen to a record low. Wealth gains in recent decades have been made overwhelmingly by the top 1 percent of households, especially the top 0.5 percent. In 1945–73, the top 1 percent in America captured just 4.9 percent of total U.S. income growth; in the following two decades, this super-rich cohort gobbled up the majority of it. The combined wealth of the richest four hundred Americans now exceeds the total wealth of 185 million of their fellow citizens. Over the past three decades, the share of household wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent has increased from 7 percent to 22 percent.
This pattern has been accelerated by the pandemic. The number of millionaires around the world jumped to 56.1 million in 2021, with 5.2 million joining the group last year, according to the 2021 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report. The number of ultra-high net worth individuals—those with a net worth above $50 million—grew by 24 percent, to 215,030. Last year, Amazon tripled its profits and Jeff Bezos made $70 billion; billionaires overall have earned more than $1 trillion since March. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft now make up 20 percent of the American stock market’s total value. As one Silicon Valley wag put it, America increasingly resembles “feudalism with better marketing.”
The similarities are not just material. In the Middle Ages, the aristocracy shared common views. Kings and chieftains fought over land and gold, but rarely (until the Reformation) ideas and truths. The ideals of a pluralistic society wouldn’t have meant anything to them, nor would John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas. Now, after two centuries of an Enlightenment-influenced public square hot with dissent and debate, we observe the emergence of a singular mindset among the academy and the media—today’s clerisy—and the oligarchic elite. In the past, political views, religious beliefs, and special interests divided the elite and forced different factions to persuade and cajole and convince the masses of their respective sanctions. Every major city had multiple newspapers with distinct lines on current events, serving as organs for rival powers. Pro-slavery versus anti-slavery, labor versus management, Wall Street versus the farmers, interventionists versus isolationists: It’s a history of ideological conflict.
No such broad conflict exists among today’s nobility. They are unified in their progressive outlook on all things social and cultural. In the Middle Ages, the aristocracy often found allies among the Catholic clergy, who were willing to back the great landowners’ laws and swords with doctrines and rationales. There is a twenty-first-century clerisy, though it is rarely religious and operates in a secular consumer society. Its members aren’t priests. They are journalists, entertainers, credentialed professionals, and teachers. They provide the images, narratives, arguments, and artworks that reinforce the binding outlook, and they police dissenters as vigilantly as did the Inquisitors of old (though fortunately, so far, less lethally).
As society becomes more regulated and more dependent on expertise, the clerisy grows. Michael Lind estimates that this “overclass” constitutes some 15 percent of the American workforce, a far larger portion than the membership of the old First Estate (closer to 1 percent of the French population). Charles Murray describes them more narrowly as the top echelons in law, government, university, and media—roughly 2.4 million people in a country of more than 320 million.
Until the last four decades, the yeoman class—James Madison’s small proprietors—were America’s ascendant socioeconomic group. A study covering the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States shows that all three saw a rapid decline in the concentration of wealth from the 1820s through the 1970s. Never before had so much prosperity and relative security been so widely enjoyed.
Now, the numbers and influence of the yeomanry are declining. They still represent close to 50 percent of the population, notes Pew—a drop from 61 percent in 1971. Globalization has savaged many middle-class jobs, whether in factories or in services, transferring employment to China, India, and other developing countries. In many countries, immigration, much of it from poor countries, has undermined wage rates, particularly for lower-skilled workers, but now for professionals as well. Much of the global middle class is heavily in debt, mainly because of high housing costs.
In the United States, long known as the land of opportunity, the chance of middle-class earners’ moving to the top rungs of the earnings ladder has dropped by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s. The pandemic has been particularly hard on this class. Though large chains have reported record sales during the lockdowns, more than 160,000 small businesses have closed. A survey by the advocacy group Main Street America predicts that as many as 7.5 million small businesses will go out of business by the time the crisis is over. By some estimates, upwards of one-third of small businesses will close down permanently.
The fall of the yeomanry poses a major threat to representative democracy. Once again, history provides a precedent. In Imperial Rome, small farmers and artisans were steadily displaced by slaves imported from the far ends of the expanding empire. Increasingly, occupations and social status came to be determined by heredity. By the end of the Republic, more than 75 percent of all property was owned by roughly 3 percent of the population, while more than four-fifths owned no property at all. Inequality paved the way for the feudal future.
The great social achievement of the mid- to late twentieth century lay in the movement of working-class, propertyless people, including minorities, into the ranks of business owners and homeowners. Today the flow runs in the opposite direction, as prospects for joining the middle class have declined and opportunities for advancement have dried up for everyone outside the professional and elite capitalist classes.
Working-class people, of whatever race, suffer the worst health-related impacts and have paid the most in lives during the pandemic. The same holds economically. In the U.S., roughly half of all job losses last April were in such low-paying fields as restaurants, hotels, and amusement parks; information and finance jobs were barely touched. Almost 40 percent of Americans making less than $40,000 a year lost their jobs in the pandemic, as the wage gains made during the first two years of the Trump Administration have largely evaporated.
Read the rest of this piece at First Things.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: ILO Asia-Pacific Flickr under CC 3.0 License.
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