The End of Power

http://reason.com/archives/2013/04/14/the-end-of-power

by pelle • 13 years ago

37 27 13 years ago

vonskippy• 13 years ago

When a small fraction of one percent controls well over 2/3 of the world's assets - explain how the "current power brokers/structure" is ending.

This article is nothing but pie in the sky fantasy.

coolsunglasses2• 13 years ago

Yes but it's libertarian pie in the sky fantasy, so we like it.

sultezdukes• 13 years ago

I'm sure there's a Paul Krugman article coming up soon.

eruditely• 13 years ago

It's a reason.com right-libertarian sky fantasy. Please make the distinction.

akiselev4• 13 years ago

Who cares who controls the majority of the world's assets when global standards of living are increasing, apparently quite drastically? It seems like living in the developed world puts you in a bubble relative to the world that is similar to the culture on Wall Street. It doesn't matter that everyone (still there after the recession) is stil getting paid an order or two of magnitude more than 99.5% of the country, many traders are still ridiculously competitive and hung up on the fact that there are people up the ladder making more than them while entirely taking their good fortune for granted.

The world is getting better for everyone and the point of the article is that the luxuries that come with increased wealth (internet, mobiles, greater political awareness, travel) make old power structures harder and harder to maintain, in almost every facet of society.

It's easy to get lost in the massive problems and doom and gloom facing everyone but if you step back and look at the forest, it's not all that gloomy.

coolsunglasses2• 13 years ago

Things are pretty gloomy if you like fish.

adventured2• 13 years ago

Because whether you can use that mobile phone or not is determined by who controls the money.

Whether we're talking cartels, the Fed, Congress, oligarchs, big corporations, or good 'ol fashioned free market billionaires. They dictate ultimately whether your phone 'works,' whether you can get on a plane, whether you can use Google or the Internet, or drive a car, or draw power when you plug into an outlet (at least for 99.9% of the population).

None of that has changed one bit, and none of it is going to. You can swap one power broker for another, but what you can never do is remove them. You can start by asking who has the military weapons, who has the control over money standards, who controls taxing authorities - and then you can follow the chart of money / power on down.

angersock• 13 years ago

Yes, indeed, the average cage is getting bigger and shinier.

unclebucknasty2• 13 years ago

>Who cares who controls the majority of the world's assets

The author. The article is about power and it's safe to say that he who controls the majority of the world's assets holds the power (and vice-versa).

rvkennedy• 13 years ago

Revolutions occur not during, but after times of intense hardship. When the general population has enough time and resources to inform themselves of perceived imbalances in the power structure, and isn't expending all their efforts on survival, they have the opportunity to become politically active.

This is why smart dictators keep their populations in constant poverty and either war, or war-readiness.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

The funny thing about wealth (even gold) is that it has value only in so far as other people let it have value. And there are certainly many extreme examples from history where massive amounts of wealth can go away quite quickly. Both through economic change and through political upheaval. Indeed, it can be surprising how fast such processes can work, and how quickly large concentrations of wealth can shrink, even when it's merely through economic and industrial change.

As it turns out, a lot of the "wealth" that is owned by that small percentage you describe is actually just paper wealth, the sort of wealth that goes away the easiest. It's also worth remembering that the world's economy is doubling about every 15 years or so. So the wealth of the elite can easily become a much smaller portion of the whole if they don't keep up.

michaelkeenan• 13 years ago

> a small fraction of one percent controls well over 2/3 of the world's assets

Citation for that? Wikipedia says that the richest 1% of adults owned 40% of global assets[1], though that figure is from 2000.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#21st_cen...

msutherl• 13 years ago

I find it interesting that many of the claims to progress cite percentage deltas, but presumably those statistics don't factor in population growth. Could it be, for instance, that just as many people are in extreme poverty as in the 70's, but that there are simply more well-off people now?

chad_oliver• 13 years ago

Quite possibly, but on the other hand population growth is inversely correlated with affluence (Higher income results in less children).

akiselev4• 13 years ago

Going from six to seven billion people is a 16% growth whereas a lot of the statistics show much larger changes so even before factoring population the figures are probably still significant. There are nuances such as the exponential effects of the internet and mobile phones (a mobile phone or internet connection can have a massive impact on a remote community) and other unknown factors. If you dive into the academic literature I'm sure you can find some analysis of the figures.

I believe the extreme poverty goal used absolute numbers. Percentiles wouldn't make sense to begin with because extreme poverty is largely inherited and as you said could be dwarfed by population growth.

signalsignal• 13 years ago

Is a person in "extreme poverty" with a cell phone?

bhb916• 13 years ago

Doubtful. The World Bank cites [1] extreme poverty statistics for 1981, 1990, and 2008 as 52%, 43%, and 22% respectively. Using world population statistics that would equal extreme poverty populations of 2.31B, 2.27B, and 1.29B. I imagine a huge percentage of that drop is China.

[1] http://go.worldbank.org/4K0EJIDFA0

rodrigoavie• 13 years ago

I agree with the three "revolutions" described in the article. I really believe they are happening and actually believe we can expect them to continue happening.

Its just that the numbers are to good to be believed. I may be biased tho.

Anyway, I sure hope the article is 100% correct.

akiselev4• 13 years ago

It's definitely way more nuanced than the author suggests. By developed world standards, poverty is not much better than extreme poverty (but fed is better than not), many of the stats regarding international commerce and investment came with unforseen social and political consequences, and much of the social progress in the middle east has resulted in the unaffected countries to become more paranoid and governments that are different, but not necessarily much better.

But this is an upward trend going for three decades now, let's hope it continues.

adventured2• 13 years ago

I disagree with the core premise. There's nothing fundamentally new about what's going on. Authority is not being undermined more than it was in the past. Technology may be speeding up the process, and enabling easier communication however.

The Christians effectively toppled (or consumed from within) the Roman empire, starting from an exceptionally small base.

Starting from a small group in each country, Communists took over Russia and China - the world's largest countries by land mass and population - and they did it exceptionally quickly considering.

Other examples: Simon Bolivar, Fidel Castro, the Founding Fathers, Khmer Rouge, Saddam Hussein, 1979 Iranian revolution, the Taliban. And those are just a few examples from the last couple hundred years. History is littered with a gazillion more, small and large, of varying ideologies. None of which needed smart phones or the Internet.

These types of things have always happened throughout history.

unclebucknasty2• 13 years ago

Good point. In fact, I would go further and say that there is a new mega power emerging to which all of these new and emerging "micropowers" are subjugated.

All of the "progress" we see in developing nations joins them to the global economy as both consumers and sources of cheap labor. Increasingly, the spoils of this globalization are accruing to a smaller and smaller subset of corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals.

When you look around at recent so-called disruption that potestors and modern "revolutionaries" enact, you realize that none have succeeded in displacing powers that are aligned with the global capitalist agenda. Indeed, those that do succeed have all served the interests of that agenda.

richardjordan• 13 years ago

Agreed.

The libertarian fantasy that once we sufficiently undermine governments they will fall and a utopia of individual action free of tyranny will reign is just that - a fantasy. Governments are being weakened by the forces of corporate globalization and the winners aren't the masses. They're a tiny band of corporations and a small wealth elite that controls access to resources via control of those corporations. While overly oppressive government can indeed by a terrible problem, it is often overlooked that an elected government is the only means by which the masses can effectively contain the voracious appetites of giant corporations (which will often act in ways that aren't even in their own long term interests, destroying much of the economy on which they feed).

Free markets when well regulated by a government accountable to the people represent a happy medium, which served us well for an extended period in the 20th century. We seem to have lost that. Instead we're left with crony capitalism and government which acts on behalf of the highest bidder. The worst of both worlds. It is a lot harder to overthrow our corporate overlords in this world of weak governance than to overthrow an oppressive ideological political regime.

hobb0001• 13 years ago

Agreed. Since 1995, I've been hearing wild-eyed "visionaries" predict that the internet will bring about equality and the Age of Aquarius. They seem to forget that the same sort of things were said about radio and television. (And probably the telegraph, too.) Proponents of television believed that people would take distance learning courses by sitting in front of the TV. Instead, it turns out that it does nothing more than further propagate least-common-denominator pop culture. My, how things do change...

GHFigs• 13 years ago

The book analyzes and attempts to explain the motives of the various types of personalities that give rise to mass movements; why and how mass movements start, progress and end; and the similarities between them, whether religious, political, radical or reactionary. As examples, the book often refers to Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Christianity, Protestantism, and Islam. Hoffer believes that mass movements are interchangeable, that adherents will often flip from one movement to another, and that the motivations for mass movements are interchangeable; that religious, nationalist and social movements, whether radical or reactionary, tend to attract the same type of followers, behave in the same way and use the same tactics, even when their stated goals or values differ.

parasubvert• 13 years ago

I think the author is correctly pointing out that the nature of power bases are shifting, but otherwise I think this article is mostly a bunch of wild stabs in the dark.

That said, these sorts of articles do resonate with an idea that's been growing in my head the past few years, that the dominant base & form of power is changing as technology has progressed, and the old power base is ramping up its efforts to fight this trend.

In that vein, a philosophy book that really hit home for me on the nature of power in today's IP-connected world was __Protocol__ - How Control Exists after Decentralization, by Alexander Galloway. Now, this sort of read may not be everyone's thing, and as with most philosophy books in the French tradition (think Deleuze & Guattari) , it often tries too hard.... but it's a provocative way of looking at how Internet protocol architecture and its resulting conflict patterns are starting to bleed into real world politics -- e.g. the control that others have over you by remaining connected vs. the power of being disconnected; "exploits" as the new dominant form of resistance against the power of protocols to control, etc. I'm not doing it justice here, but may be a good read if you're at all interested in postmodern philosophy (other than to laugh at, or justify the first two Matrix movies... which admittedly, is mostly what the discipline is good for).

The End of Power

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