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 previous issue                         issue #53,  posted 6 /26/ 2017                      archive of all  issues

America: Toward a More Perfect Union or Winner Takes All? 

in the news:  As poor people in America worry they'll lose health insurance coverage with Republican work to repeal The Affordable Care Act proceeding, "Shifting Dollars From Poor to Rich Is a Key Part of the Senate Health Bill" headlines a New York Times story. Meanwhile, Time magazine's June 26 2017 cover story—about "upheaval at the world's most valuable startup" Uber being "a wakeup call for Silicon Valley"—is seemingly unrelated. Or is it? 

commentary and analysis (by Stephen P. Cook, founder and manager, project Worldview, www.projectworldview.org): The Time story describes Uber as "not...the only tech company with a winner take all worldview." How might we concisely describe such a worldview? As it relates to Uber,  The Time authors do this using phrases like "brash, aggressive approach," "driven by plain greed," and  "ends justifying means." The last issue of this Project Worldview blog—"The Circle: Perfectibility Through Participatory Social Interaction"—characterized the most successful tech companies in terms of various worldview themes, notably: #19B Corporate Capitalism , #22A Expansionism (Economic growth),  #26A Consumerism, #26B More is Better Mentality, #43  Seeking Wealth & Power, and #46A  The Technological Fix Mentality. Yet both our last blog and the more recent Time cover story note there's another side to this characterization: that Uber and companies like it are (or at least are trying to be) good guys with a progressive agenda. 

Perhaps rather simplistically I associate such companies with the San Francisco Bay area in general. Perhaps nowhere else in America is the contrast between the "haves" and "have-nots" in such dramatic display as San Francisco. If you're downtown walking to catch the Google bus (which probably few do, rather they hire an Uber car!) to ride to work in Silicon Valley you'll undoubtedly encounter homeless people, some asleep, some panhandling. In terms of (2015 Brookings Institute) numbers, the income gap between rich and poor in San Francisco indicates the richest 5% of households rake in an average of $423,000 a year, while the poorest 20% make around $24,000. Despite this inequality gap, even Republicans view this part of the world as dominated by "do gooders" / liberals who care about the plight of poor people and want to strengthen the societal "safety net" associated with the Social Welfare state (see theme #49A). In imagining the Silicon Valley future, one wonders: Will the do-gooder tendencies or the greedy self-interested ones prevail? 

Recognizing that Silicon Valley in particular, and California in general, is both key to American economic growth and longtime trend-setter, one can ask the same question about the American future in general. While numbers of homeless people have stabilized / perhaps even dropped in recent decades, since the 1980 the American wealth / income inequality gap has steadily grown.  Many view the 2016 election as evidence that the "forgotten" people (especially in the Rust Belt) who have steadily lost economic ground since the 1980 have finally had enough. Many of these folks fully expect their supposed champion—President Trump—to help them "start winning again."

Critics charge that the latest Trump backed Republican effort at healthcare reform is, as former President Obama put it, "a massive transfer of wealth from middle-class and poor families to the richest people in America.” Rather than a win for the "have nots," they see this—what they might also characterize as another attempt at shredding the safety net—as another step toward America becoming "a winner take all society." 

Much has been written about this topic. The March 2014 article "The impact of the winner-take-all phenomenon" by University of Virginia Business School dean Robert F. Bruner examines it in terms of who gets rewarded and why in today's society. And one can connect winner take all to "survival of the fittest" / Social Darwinism. In this reckoning, losers in the evolutionary game become extinct. In a properly functioning democracy (see theme #31), one might idealistically say that the built-in feedback mechanism will lead to lots of "have-nots" voting out the self serving bums rectifying the situation. And perhaps it will...But, if American voters are cynical (see theme #36A) and don't vote, or are misinformed or have opinions increasingly based on lies (see note #1 below), "fake news" or conspiracy theories (see theme #36B), this may not apply.  Sadly—rather than moving toward fine tuning its democratic system and "a more perfect union"—many see the vast gulf between the sides in recent Republican vs. Democrat battles as more evidence of the breakdown of American democracy.

Notes
1) The battle between President Trump and a representative of what he calls "the fake news media"—namely The New York Times—has escalated this week with the latter publishing a catalog of "Trump’s Lies". On 94 of his first 153 days in office, the paper claims, he has told lies,. In compiling the list they claim to have set a very high bar and used "a conservative standard"— which means many of the President's "dubious statements" have not been included.