Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Read online

  I always knew that the climate fight would be hard, harder than anything humans had ever done before. In The End of Nature, I said I doubted we’d make progress fast enough to hold off the wholesale transformation of our planet. But I was twenty-eight then, and unable to conceive that even as I was writing the book, a few of the most powerful people on Earth were sitting down to hatch a lie that would make the task infinitely harder. I’ve lived the last thirty years inside that lie, engaged in an endless debate over whether global warming was “real”—a debate in which both sides knew the answer from the beginning.

  It’s just that one of those sides was willing to lie. And so, we need to understand where that lie came from.

  PART TWO

  Leverage

  8

  I said I was a naïve young man. Let me prove it again.

  A year out of college, reporting for The New Yorker, I went to a little Mississippi Delta town called Tunica. I was there to write about a stretch of shacks along a small and fetid creek called Sugar Ditch. The town’s residents, all black, lived without plumbing or running water. Jesse Jackson had called it “America’s Ethiopia,” and soon it became a scandal. Eventually, 60 Minutes arrived to do a special report. The neighborhood stank in the hot sun, the walls of the shanties were alive with bugs, and the people who lived there seemed as beaten down as it was possible for me to imagine. A stone’s throw—a stone’s underhanded lob—away were the suburban streets of the town’s white residents, which looked like the cul-de-sacs and split-level ranches I’d grown up among.

  I wasn’t naïve about the existence of poverty—in those days, I was also running a homeless shelter in the basement of my Manhattan church. I was naïve about the future. I thought we’d do something about homelessness, and I knew for sure that Tunica was an aberration, something out of the distant past. That’s how everyone else covered the story, too: somehow this overlooked remnant of a sadder day had survived, a sort of anti-Williamsburg depicting the worst of the sharecropping era. It was an echo, as much an oddity as an embarrassment. And the next year, right on schedule, the federal government began razing the homes and replacing them with newly built apartments. After all, as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development pointed out at the time, more than fifty diseases were associated with contact with human waste. Diseases from human waste obviously made no sense in a rich country.

  My naïveté stemmed naturally from the fact that I grew up at precisely the moment when America was making huge strides toward reducing inequality, when it seemed that the obvious task was to make our world fairer. I was born in 1960, between the New Deal and the Great Society. My childhood featured the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. I thought that was what politics was about. The year I graduated from high school, 1978, was the year the top 1 percent of Americans saw their share of the nation’s wealth fall to 23 percent.

  Which, as it turned out, was as low as it would ever go. Since then, the wealthy’s share of the take has doubled. CEOs made less than 20 times as much as the average worker when I was born; now they make 295 times as much.1 And with the rapid rise of inequality has come a rebound of truly gross poverty, the kind I’d seen in Tunica and imagined was a relic. In 2017 the United Nations sent its special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights to tour America. After a two-week visit, this Australian expert concluded that “for one of the world’s wealthiest countries to have forty million people living in poverty, and over five million living in ‘Third World’ conditions is cruel and inhuman.”2 He recounted many horrors—fourteen thousand homeless people in San Francisco arrested for public urination when the ratio of toilets to people in the city’s Skid Row “would not even meet the minimum standards the UN sets for Syrian refugee camps”; and the people he’d seen without any teeth because adult dental care isn’t covered by Medicaid—but he focused most closely on the prevalence of hookworm in rural America. Hookworm (Necator americanus) is a parasite that enters the body through the soles of bare feet, and eventually attaches itself to the small intestine, “where it proceeds to suck the blood of its host. Over months or years it causes iron deficiency and anemia, weight loss, tiredness and impaired mental function, especially in children, helping to trap them into the poverty in which the disease flourishes.”3

  In one county that researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine studied (Lowndes County, a hotbed of the Alabama civil rights fight in the 1960s), 34 percent of residents tested positive for traces of the disease. As in Tunica decades before, raw sewage was at issue—reporters following up on the study found trailer parks where sanitation was simply a cracked pipe leading into the woods, crisscrossing the pipe that carried water back into a trailer. “The open sewer was festooned with mosquitoes, and a long cordon of ants could be seen trailing along the waste pipe from the house,” the Guardian reported. “At the end of the pool nearest the house the treacly fluid was glistening in the dappled sunlight—a closer look revealed that it was actually moving, its human effluence heaving and churning with thousands of worms.” Researchers estimated that twelve million Americans might now be suffering from neglected tropical diseases such as hookworm across warm parts of the country.4

  * * *

  This is not a book about poverty and inequality. There are many such books, and there need to be many more, because real people are having their real lives blighted every day. But poverty and inequality and injustice are not going to end the human game. The pendulum can, and will, eventually swing back the other way, toward the kind of efforts at egalitarianism that marked my childhood. It will happen through reform or through revolution; that’s a repeating rhythm in human affairs. We need to speed up that rhythm, and done right, the fight against inequality meshes powerfully with the fight against more existential threats such as climate change. That’s why, at 350.org, we talk a great deal about “climate justice,” convinced that it’s both right and smart to work most closely with communities on the front lines of environmental damage. It’s why we’re excited by efforts such as the Poor People’s Campaign, or the Leap Manifesto that Naomi Klein produced with an assortment of labor unions and indigenous people. It’s all the same struggle.

  But for this book, the rapid rise in poverty and inequality will primarily serve as a marker of who we are right now and how we got here; what we care about; how we understand the world. And for those purposes, the most important part of this “we” is the people in power, either formal or informal, who have allowed this poverty and inequality to shoot up over the last four decades. Not allowed—encouraged. Within days of the UN special rapporteur’s report on extreme American poverty, the U.S. Congress responded by passing a massive tax cut that virtually every economist predicted would make that inequality much worse. As the UN expert noted in his official report to the world body, “The strategy seems to be tailor-made to maximize inequality.… It seems driven by contempt, and sometimes even hatred, for the poor, along with a ‘winner-takes-all’ mentality.”5 Winner takes all and winner controls all: one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans provided 40 percent of the campaign contributions during the 2016 presidential campaign—that is to say, 24,949 people.6 These are the same people, or at least the same class of people, who have kept us from taking action on climate change. And so, we need to understand what drives them. We need to diagnose the intellectual and spiritual hookworm that has entered their bodies and attached itself to their brains.

  * * *

  The first thing to say is that current levels of inequality are almost beyond belief, deadly serious but also cartoonishly comical. The world’s eight richest men possess more wealth than the bottom half of humanity. This trend, not surprisingly, is most pronounced in the United States, where the three richest men have more wealth than the bottom 150 million people taken together.7 The richest tenth of 1 percent own about as much as the poorest 90 percent combined.8 Jeff Bezos, pre-divorce the richest human, would have to spend $28 million every day just to keep his wealth fr
om growing—which is funny in a sick way, given that in 2017 his median employee made $28,000 a year.9 One family, the Waltons, of Walmart lineage, have more wealth than 42 percent of American families combined.10

  The situation, of course, is worst for precisely whom you’d expect. The average black family in America has household wealth of $1,700, and that’s been falling steadily.11 And of course it’s getting worse for each generation that comes along, as student debt increases and wages stagnate. (On the bright side, Credit Suisse reports a global uptick in billionaires under the age of forty; there were forty-six of them in 2017, up from just twenty-one in 2003.12 And in the summer of 2018, Forbes reported that Kylie Jenner, youngest of the Kardashian clan, was about to become the forty-seventh, on the strength of her lip gloss line.) American children are now far less likely than members of previous generations to earn more than their parents, a pretty basic change in how we perceive the world.13

  But even if we’re the lucky ones earning more than our parents—even if we’re winners—that inequality carries a real cost. In 2009 a pair of epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, studied a range of high-income countries. They found that as inequality rose, so did the number of prisoners and school dropouts, the rate of teen pregnancy and drug use, the incidence of mental illness and obesity. They compared a baby born in Greece with one born in America, where per capita income is twice as high and where we spend twice as much per person on medical care. But the Greek baby will live, on average, 1.2 years longer. “There are now many studies of income inequality and health that compare countries, American states, or other large regions, and the majority of these studies show that more egalitarian societies tend to be healthier,” they observed.14 It’s an experiment that works for everything from literacy rates to murder rates. It’s not, it turns out, because inequality hurts those at the bottom; it hurts everyone in a society.

  In 2015, two statisticians pointed out another remarkable trend: death rates had begun to rise for middle-aged white Americans. The numbers were so unexpected that at first the researchers didn’t believe their own work. “Mortality rates have been going down forever,” said one of them, the Nobel Prize–winning researcher Angus Deaton. “There’s been a huge increase in life expectancy and reduction in mortality over 100 years or more, and then for all of this to suddenly go into reverse, we thought it must be wrong. We spent weeks checking our numbers because we just couldn’t believe that this could have happened.” Convinced that the numbers were in fact correct, and that, indeed, the trend stretched back to 1999, Deaton and his research partner started looking for explanations. The hardest-hit groups were working-class Americans. So, in contrast with people in other parts of the world, they weren’t as poor—they had televisions and cell phones—but they also had the anxiety that came from being near the bottom of a shifting economy in a country with a limited safety net. The researchers labeled this new mortality “deaths of despair.” It comes from suicide and opioid abuse and bad nutrition, and it doesn’t show a similar rise in the far more equal countries of Europe that, of course, were dealing with the same global recession, the same rise of China, the same hollowing out of manufacturing economies.15 In 2016, Alan Krueger, the former chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, released a study showing that half the prime working-age men who’d dropped out of the labor force were taking pain medication daily. They were also, on average, watching screens of one kind or another forty hours a week, as if it were a full-time job.16 That’s life for a great many people in the richest, and most unequal, society the world has ever built.

  * * *

  There’s a tendency on the left to attribute all this—the inequality, the sanctioned greed, the environmental destruction—to “capitalism,” and on some level, that’s correct: the winners in this class war have used the mechanics of our economic system to gain their advantage. But it also lets the villains in this story off too easily. I mean, if you go to Scandinavia, you’re in a recognizably capitalist world—there are markets, and you hand over money for goods, and some people get richer than others. (They’re good at it, too. In the course of the twentieth century the Swedish stock market outperformed all others.) But it’s a remarkably different flavor of capitalism. In fact, if you wanted, you could call it democratic socialism. It comes with high taxes and generous social services, with thorough government regulation and a commitment to rough equality. (Just to give the smallest example, Scandinavians sensibly base traffic fines on a person’s annual income: a Finnish cell phone magnate recently paid $103,000 for riding his motorcycle the metric equivalent of forty-five miles per hour in a thirty-miles-per-hour zone.) The kind of capitalism turning America into a creepy jungle is very different: call it laissez-faire, or neoliberalism, or “getting government out of the way,” or being “corporate-friendly.” Whatever you call it, it’s a particularly rapacious variant that’s causing our current problem, one that’s worth careful study.

  Race, too, has clearly played an enormous role in driving our political transformation: It is the great stain on our nation, our irreducible sin. And there is no question that the wealthy used the hatreds and fears of too many white Americans as a massive lever to shift the country’s politics. The Republican “Southern strategy” has been the spectacularly successful effort to play on deep reservoirs of racial hatred (in every region), and it has its echoes in the right-wing nationalisms of many other nations. It’s particularly obvious right now, when an actual racist, Donald Trump, presides at the White House. And yet I think the men who really conceived and carried out that shift, from the Nixon era to the Reagan era to the present, were themselves driven less by white supremacy than by cynical calculation. They may have been racist in their intentions, and certainly in their effects, but they were also driven by a different kind of raw ideological energy.

  This ideological energy needs to be understood. Something else has happened here, alongside profit-seeking and race-baiting. Some of us have come, in short order, to have a very different sense of what it means to be a person. Basic human solidarity has, especially for the most powerful among us, been replaced by a very different idea.

  9

  You could argue that the most important political philosopher of our time is the novelist Ayn Rand. Indeed, given the leverage of the present moment, leverage that is threatening to end the human game, you could argue that she’s the most important philosopher of all time. She would have agreed: she once told a reporter that she was “the most creative thinker alive,” and that the only other philosopher who’d influenced her was Aristotle.

  At one level, that’s nonsense. Rand might as well have written with a crayon; her ideas about the world are simple-minded, one-dimensional, and poisonous. But you don’t need to be right to be influential. Her books animated many of the people who dominated American politics at crucial moments. When the United States was occupying the role of superpower, charting the course for a planet, she was occupying the hearts and minds of many of its most powerful people.

  Consider Alan Greenspan, the avatar of neoliberalism and the chief architect of the world’s economy in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union—as The Economist once said, “the money men” regarded him as “Saint Alan.”1 He met Rand in the early 1950s, when he was a twenty-five-year-old economic forecaster. She was already the famous author of The Fountainhead, and he joined her circle, coming to her New York apartment every Saturday night to listen as she read drafts of her forthcoming novel, Atlas Shrugged, to her acolytes. When that book was published in 1957, the Times panned it, but Greenspan wrote a letter to the editor in its defense: “Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”2 For the next decade, he published articles in Rand’s magazine, The Objectivist, and when he was named by Gerald Ford to chair the pre
sident’s Council of Economic Advisers, Rand stood beside him at his swearing in. She was dead by the time Ronald Reagan named Greenspan to chair the Federal Reserve, but thanks to people like Greenspan, her influence lived on—the Thatcher-Reagan years were, in the words of one writer, “the second age of Rand … when the laissez-faire philosophy went from the crankish obsession of right-wing economists to the governing credo of Anglo-American capitalism.”3

  And it was precisely America, in precisely those decades, that may have decided the planet’s geological and technological future. Rand called her theory “objectivism,” and usually it’s grouped with “libertarianism,” which at its most sophisticated and academic is a real economic school, with graphs and charts and equations. It has detailed theological arguments, some of them leading to sensible conclusions—that the war on drugs was a stupid failure, for instance, or that people should be able to marry whom they like—but its emotional core, channeled perfectly by Rand, is simple: Government is bad. Selfishness is good. Watch out for yourself. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. You’re not the boss of me. When the New York Times described Rand as the “novelist laureate” of the Reagan administration, those were the kinds of raw attitudes it was referring to. Reagan’s secretary of commerce, for instance, was a man named William Verity, who had inherited a steel fortune. He kept a card on his desk with a typically snarling quote from Rand: “There’s nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you do will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they’ll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people.”4