After decades of loyal subscription to the popular allusion of a social & professional meritocracy, hundreds of nagging doubts finally coalesce into seeds of conviction. You may, or perhaps you may not have watched as the social butterflies flitted by on brightly colored wings through the summers of your youth. The sons & daughters of society people, they wore the brightest & best fashions of their day, drove the best cars, received invites to all the best parties, and mysteriously disappeared over the weekends and long summers. Sunday school stories of hares and tortoises & of the talents might have reassured your subconscious mind that the carefree days of these butterflies would be short-lived and that they would, in the fullness of time, pay for all their many sins & indulgences. When the final accounts were to be tabulated, you held a deep Puritanical belief that the morally righteous, stern of task and diligent in their studies, would ultimately prevail when the accolades of achievement and the spoils of sobriety were to be counted out and distributed to the deserving. Some decades later you may have found yourself wondering how it came to be that the very people who enjoyed a youth of fashion and frivolity now occupy the offices and corridors of power, delegating all of their needs and many deficiencies to a new generation of underlings who run around gingerly in the hope of catching their eye.
For those of us who devoted our youth to self-improvement, social service & to higher learning, it can only come as a bitter aftershock to find ourselves ruled & regulated by those who do not climb the same sacrificial ladders; those who did not burn the midnight oil, were not tired at 35, and did not suffer years of stressful service. As the mind delves deeper into the dark recesses of society’s ornate towers, we uncover yet more disconcerting truths. Why do people who sit around & delegate get paid so much more than those who can & do, after all, it is not from a position of greater technical competence or relevant experience? Why do our leaders need such lengthy lunch meetings, endless travel arrangements in an age of videoconferencing, and seemingly bottomless expense accounts, while the rest of us have to pay our own way? Why do the elite disappear early on Friday after lunch, and why are they never in the office during the evenings or at the weekends when those of us who do not receive bonuses, six figure salaries, or corporate perks are? The answer is simple, they are the modern manifestation of the ancient traditions of patronage, a social pyramid of human consumption which pre-dates even the Egyptian and Roman dynasties.
Did all of those middle-aged Professors who won Nobel prizes for major discoveries really make those award-winning discoveries in their forties or fifties, or was it some young laboratory student or researcher who toiled long into the night in the hope of recognition? Did Sir Norman Foster really draw all of those award-winning architectural designs over the past few decades, or was it the hundreds of young architects who kept the lights burning in his London and New York offices? Do celebrity models, actresses and footballers really write those compelling autobiographies that sell millions of copies, or are they penned by legions of ghostwriters and scribes? (many of whom are currently on strike in Los Angeles, simply because they can’t afford to live where they work...) Do Presidents and Prime Ministers really write those ingenious economic policy speeches - of course they don’t… Do lawyers and accountants who invoice their clients hundreds of pounds an hour for form letters and for filing papers really compose them all themselves, or do they just sign them? The list is endless, and the pit of social exploitation is bottomless.
Perhaps most disturbing is the thought that our ‘illuminati’ have finally succeeded in creating a world of digital money and of regulatory checks and balances that prevents anyone from engaging in enterprise without the official consent and association of patrons. Those who have become nauseated by such expressions as, ‘who are you doing that with?’ or ‘who’s that for?’, will understand how deeply institutionalized and ritualized our traditions of social patronage have become. Such ‘service’ does not merely end with work, it extends to ownership, charitable activity, intellectual property, and even to sexual subservience. It seems that no human resource is left untapped by high society’s insatiable appetite for power, property and patronage – everyone and everything is monetized. Footballers sell for millions, and so do scientists, mistresses, slaves & prostitutes...
We are all familiar with the concept of food pyramids from high school biology classes. We all know why there should, in theory, be more prey animals than apex predators. After all, such a structure would not be stable if the lower layers that feed the vampiric species were not broader, deeper & stronger in number. So logic would have it, but through the evolution of our virtual, digital social hierarchies, an individual’s net worth to the economy has become completely dissociated from his or her financial and social returns. While all revenues flow into a pot according to their market value, individual rewards seem to be accounted by an entirely different set of social parameters… Over a century ago Marx dreamed of a society which embraced the principle that it should be ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’. This heaven sent ideology has been hell bent into our modern system that attributes ‘to every person according to their desires, and from every man according to his means’.
Rather than creating a perfect pyramidal hierarchy of human consumption, society has in fact evolved into an 'inverted pyramid'. The widely published official distribution of wealth clearly illustrates this point, without any need for conspiracy theories or socialist conjecture. As shown inset, within the US (in 2001, the last set of available census), the top 1% of the population owned 33% of the national riches, the upper 5% owned 59%, and the highest 10% had amassed a staggering 71% of national wealth, leaving the remaining 90% of the population to fight over just 29% of the nation’s affluence. Even the Wall Street Journal, publication of the prosperous, acknowledged that the top 1% of the population own some 60% of all of America’s stocks, bonds & assets, whilst the lowest 50% own a mere 2.5% of US national assets. If you would imagine that the distribution is more just within the UK, France, Greece, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or Brazil then you are much mistaken - they have yachts & mansions & private jets too...
This demographic inversion does not end with the measurement of income; it starts at the point of provision - with our truly remarkable asymmetry of division of labor and services. According to one founding programmer of Brokerbox.com, an IT start-up which started life with a £20 million investment a decade ago - the nascent company employed just two programmers and a lone salesman, who between them supported a board of twenty directors and an entourage of accountants, lawyers and PA’s. There are of course many other examples. One medical laboratory in Dusseldorf had only two PhD researchers and a technician who carried the salaries of three Professors, six secretaries, and three (otherwise unproductive) mistresses. So it is not only the distribution of wealth that is severely skewed, it is also the division of labor. All of this goes on at a far grander scale within the National Health Service, a supposedly socialist institution. Over the past decade GP’s hours have been halved to less than 35 hours a week as their salaries have more than doubled to over £110,000. There are more consultant physicians with reduced hours and higher incomes, and the burden of bureaucracy on the health service budget has increased from 4% to 14% with the advent of ‘specialist managers’ and their BMW's, despite spectacular advances in IT. Naturally, the amount of money available for cleaners and nurses has suffered under the burden of corruption, inept administration, and inflated drug prices (even though we know that many don’t actually work), and the inevitable consequence is a declining quality of care and rampant hospital infections. There are of course countless other examples if you care to comment…
Upon reflection, the model of an inverted pyramid does not truly depict the architecture of social distribution of wealth - it is more akin to a high society cocktail glass… one that could be readily inverted to describe the division of labor. Far from hiding, or even attempting to hide such unsustainable and immoral social structures, the establishment proudly brandishes such asymmetries as a testament to the widely held delusion that such distributions naturally result from (and serve to maintain) a system deeply rooted in meritocracy. As a Rotary colleague once commented in passing, ‘the system works’. Well, if you are a beneficiary of the system, I am quite sure that it does. It is entirely true to claim that money makes money, and that wealth is a self-polarizing force. However, 90% of our laws pertain to the ownership of property and its maintenance, but even so, our system is intricately designed to resist the entrepreneurial forces of wealth redistribution and free marketeering. If you doubt this conviction, just conjure up a business idea and use the Internet to explore just how many rules, regulations, bank charges, laws, and barriers to entry have been constructed to keep insiders in and outsiders out. Freddie Laker once dreamed of cheap air fares for all across the Atlantic, and in 1966 he founded his vision of Laker Airways. Soon after British Airways, whose lucrative monopoly had been threatened, duly collapsed their trans-Atlantic fares and ran the route at a massive loss, subsidized by the banks and the British government, until Freddie’s dream was well and truly bankrupt. Quod erat demonstrandum - that’ll teach the upstart to cut into the margins of a well-heeled market…
The development of social networking however offers us some threads of hope. After all, if modern giants like E-bay and MySpace can trade merchandise, intellectual property, and social contacts online, then why would a social networking site that trades time & services not be equally feasible? Imagine, if you will, a website that we shall call TimeTraders.com for simplicity, a social networking interface that allows all people to trade their services without any exchange of currency. For example, an IT executive offers to help a personal trainer to set up a company with five hours of his personal time, and a lawyer offers to trade two hours of his personal time to do the necessary paperwork. This time could be reciprocally exchanged for seven hours of personal training, or else could simply be recorded as seven hours owed by the trainer and seven hours banked by our two white collar workers - time that they could redeem on the system as & when they have need of a plumber, electrician, or a gardener… What is interesting is that these hours would entail no direct fee, no illegal currency would be created or traded, and a virtual exchange rate for time could evolve according to the purist laws of economics. For example, imagine that a young babysitter wants to trade her time for music lessons on the guitar. It might be agreed between the two parties that three hours of unskilled babysitting is worth only an hour of skilled guitar tuition, an exchange rate which would then propagate throughout the system as an averaged rate of exchange… Consider now a scenario where an ‘apex’ accountant or lawyer, currently paid upwards of £500 an hour, attempts to trade an hour of their time for fifty hours of a plumber’s skilled time & energy… fortunately, such a website could be engineered to block offensive hand gestures… (and please if there is anyone out there who has the time and expertise to take up this idea then please do… )
It is not only wealth that is self-polarizing, but also the ideas and genes which created the modern world. Ideologies that established our wealthy elite also created a powerful inertia against change in their wake, a resistive force of influence, corruption and nepotism. Power corrupts and decadence duly follows, and before long social elites become incestuous, hedonistic and delusional. Such ivory towers of power willingly conceive economic untruths, deny environmental cataclysms, promote without merit, spend without prudence, and wage unwinnable wars. The elite breed amongst themselves and even within extended families, and self-perpetuating houses inevitably emerge. Take, for example, the Rockefellers, Hiltons, Bush's, & the House of Saud, dynasties which are unable to see the writing on the wall for whitewash and marble floors. In ancient Rome, Sparta, Athens and aristocratic France, such dynasties became decadent, corrupt, and duly fell; as will the houses of Saud and the West in overdue time….
Why must there be a thousand paupers for a prince to prosper?
