Spinning.

The other day in this space, I wrote a smidgen about Long History. That is, looking at the world not just with a view of the last two, five, seven or eleven cataclysms, wars and disasters, but through looking at the last few thousand.

Long history tries to make sense of the present by looking at centuries, even millennia past. It tries to discern trends that you might miss when you view things through a narrow aperture. For instance, if you watch the sensation nightly news--at least in amerika--you're likely to hear a cacophony of murders, abductions, sexual assaults and more. It takes a step away from our quotidian mayhem to discern if life is getting more or less violent, more or less stable, more or less chaotic. Even comparing decades of data doesn't really do the trick.

The goal in a lot of in-the-moment reflection on current events is to bolster one particular agenda over another. It was very easy to paint a picture of inflation being out of control at the onset of the Covid pandemic. The data looks different if you can look at it through a different lens. 

A lot of people my age, for instance, will wank on about gas being fifty-cents a gallon in 1975. They use that data point as proof of some global serenity. Ignoring that fifty cents in 1975 is equal to roughly $3.40 today. So all the apoplexy about out of control gas prices was really just politicking, not science.

Same with eggs for that matter. Adjusted for inflation, they're about the same price--give or take a yolk--that they were 50 years ago. 

The figure that's really grown disproportionately is the one no one talks about: CEO pay.

In 1975 CEO wages averaged twenty times median employee wages. So, if a median worker made $15,000, the CEO made $300,000. Today, the average CEO makes three-hundred times their median worker. So if the median worker makes $75,000, the average CEO makes just under $23,000,000.

Then there's this, which should be self-explanatory.  Workers are making more, and getting less. The profits from productivity gains are going to the C-suite, not the you-and-me-suite.

Now, to the aforementioned Long History portion of today's post.

If you go back to the Black Death, either it's 14th century or 15th century occurrence, when about half of Europe's population was killed, something else happened in Europe. Workers--there had been a glut of them before the plague--gained power. They could break their indentures. They could leave their Lords. They could strike for higher wages. 

In short, the balance between capital and labor was altered by the cataclysm. You heard a lot of fretting about this during Covid. The great resignation. $15 minimum wage. No workers.

Taking a Long History view of our era, I'd suggest that with the Great Depression (roughly 1929-1941), World War II, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society, labor--that's you and me--gained an upper hand. The highest marginal tax rate was over 90-percent, and as stated above, workers wages were in line with those of management. Plus, at least theoretically, taxes were somewhat redistributive. The wealthier helped the less fortunate.

My view is that that arrangement--since the Reagan years--has come under attack. I believe Project 2025 is evidence of that. As is the evisceration of employee benefits and generally lower wages. What's more, something like 45-percent of workers in amerika are "contingent," gig workers. They're permalance. With no security, no benefits, no real investment in amerika or its economy.

What we have today is Reverse Robin Hood capitalism. Steal from the poor to feed the rich.

There's bonafide smart people--not advertising bloggers--who write about this stuff. One is Walter Schiedel, a Stanford University historian who's book "The Great Leveller," is tough-going, but a must read. 

You can read a short interview with Schiedel from "The Economist" here.

At the least, you might want to read these few sentences:

My usual enemies will read this and screed at me that I'm living in some liberal fantasy world. That's fine.

I think if you look at long history from serfdom to union busting to today, you'll see there's been a constant battle between capital and labor. When I grew up, labor was still ascendant. The legacy of the New Deal, the collapse of world capitalism and, I suppose, luck. 

Today, the tables have turned.

The little guy--and we're all little guys--is being rotisseried. Project 2025 is evidence of that. And I can't believe that the four or five agency holding companies don't have their own version of Project 2025, call it Private Jetting, that they're slowly enacting. 

I've seen it.

It sucks.