This book appears to make an excellent companion to The Myth of Normal; both dissect society (primarily American) and consider the entire system as a cause of poverty and poor health. The focus is on the USA, but of the whole developed world, nowhere else has quite their problems. Worryingly, there are real Powers who seek to export that dysfunction to the rest of the world for their own profit.

…socioeconomic inequality is a powerful social destabiliser – and the more inequality in a society, the more problems, including violent crime, tend to occur.

Page 15

Would there have been a French or Russian revolution without huge poverty and such massive gaps between the wealth of the richest and the deprivation of the poorest?

In short, Mr Billionaire, if you want to keep your 24 carat yacht (what?), then you need to make sure that the poorest aren’t too poor.

The Nordic countries have a fantastic dual approach to the structure of their societies (I work with the Norwegian prison service at the moment). They have the lowest crime rates in the world, in part due to a strong social welfare system and a criminal justice approach focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment.

In sum, the legal system morphed from direct racial oppression to indirect by targeting the outcomes of historical and present socioeconomic inequality, rather than any specific group.

Page 20

Today, at work, I was in a meeting where a couple of data scientists were using some data from the American prison system to train an AI model for predicting prisoners’ likelihood of re-offending.

You might have some feelings about that.

It is being used as a learning exercise, rather than as an exercise to actually predict outcomes – more to work out what kind of questions can be asked if the data, and what might be directly or indirectly inferred from that data.

There were a few key attributes that screamed at me: race being the most significant. What is race? In the UK, we use ethnicity. That is also a protected characteristic. I don’t think it would be used to treat a person statistically, except to double check that processes are blind to ethnicity.

We talked about the use of “race” and the process that assigned that attribute to the data. Was this value assigned by the police? Somebody said “maybe people self-identify”, to which I asked “why would you self-identify as a persecuted minority that is going to be subject to a biased legal system?”

Reading “The New Human Rights Movement”, race (horrible word) when used in criminal justice, further perpetuates other factors that contribute to crime: poverty and deprivation.

The Arab Spring event triggered in 2010 is a modern example of this general growing global interest in moving away from overt dictatorship, monarchy, regimentation, and other echoes of older methods of state oppression and elitism.

Page 35

How sad to read that the year that a major democracy seems to have succumbed to an elitist wannabe dictator intent on subverting a long-established constitution – and how it is being done apparently through the constitution. In ways not dissimilar to the way another major democracy was subverted and destroyed in the last century, precipitating a global conflict and millions of state-sanctioned murders.

To view yourself and others partly as self-propelled and partly vulnerable to biological and cultural influences forces a very different sense of how and why the world is the way it is.

Page 95

We are all products of our immediate upbringing, the beliefs of our parents and the society are born into and raised by, the environment, the landscape, our own biology, even the air we breathe.

All these things actually limit our free will, sometimes by simply making certain thoughts unthinkable, some solutions to life’s problems unimaginable. Sometimes we are limited by the socio-economic environment – it most often takes money to make money (for example). Sometimes it is just the physical environment that limits our options. Sometimes it is or biology.

Desperation will limit options – and force the consideration of previously rejected options.

Do we really and truly know how we would resolve a problem until we are faced with is reality?

The old saying “don’t judge another until you have walked a mile in their shoes” remains true.

While trusty many fawn over over the “billions” given to charity by this or that wealthy icon, the real measure of compassion has to do with how giving affects you personally, and that is why the percentage people give us more telling than absolute values.

Page 103

Here the author had previously given examples of how the poor give 3.12% of their income to charity, whereas the rich only give 1.3%. it seems as though the poorer ones is the more compassionate one tends to be.

It is for this reason that I rather support taxing the wealthy more because they cannot be trusted to pay their share in terms to support for society for their own good fortune. It might seem unfair that the wealthy get taxed proportionally more than everyone else, but given that the poor very rarely have any disposable income and may have to choose between food, heat, or shelter.

Even those of the wealthiest who do regularly and sizably contribute to  charity, select the charity themselves (or even set it up themselves and make sure that their name is pinned indelibly to it). This ignores the fact that so often these charities are not targeted where there is greatest need, but only where there is greatest personal glory, or at best the greatest interest to the donor.

And these charities are often opaque sand have zero democratic accountability, and the largest of them can wield significant political power on their own behalf – and on behalf of their donors.

Until economic social inequality and it’s causes are reduced or stored, bigotry and social injustice in many levels will continue as a systemic result. … positive social trends that have occurred have a good probability of reversing in certain ways as looming negative social and ecological pressures mount. … the growth of bigotry, race-based or not, will continue to accelerate rather than decline.

Page 114

This ties with the views given in The Myth of Normal and Stigma. There is a relationship between prejudice and poverty, where stigma is used to to directly control and to distract from the real problems faced by people. There is nothing like a scapegoat to avoid looking at the real causes of problems.

business and industry have contradictory views of what efficiency means. Business employs market efficiency, which is about maximising extraction, production, distribution, turnover, and labour employment. Industry employs technical efficiency, which is about sustainable design, conservation, reduced turnover, per-case labour employment, optimisation of resource use, reduced waste, and effectively being “economical” in the truest sense of the word.

Page 172

Whilst, to be sure, our industrial past (even in its most primitive state) we did produce pollution, it wasn’t in the scale it is today. In our industrial past, craftsmen focused on the efficient use of the resources at their disposal, at creating goods that would last, and in repairing those that broke. Our commercial, market-driven present rewards inefficiency in what is produced by planning obsolescence and ensuring that things need regular replacement through deliberately poor implementation and design, and creating pressures that imbue a constant desire for the new.

Market forces assume an infinite planet with endless resources.

When systemic social mechanisms result in a highly disproportionate benefit to one group while preventing another from meeting basic needs, logic demands the acknowledgment that the effect is, indeed, one of violence.

Page 172

I’ve encountered a number of times in my reading the word “violence” used in ways that are unusual to me. I’m my original thoughts, violence was always immediate and physical: a beating, rape, or murder. I think it might be useful to pause and reflect on the meaning of the word “violence”:

actions that are intended or likely to hurt people or cause damage:

act of violence It seems that the attack was a gratuitous/random/mindless act of violence.

outbreak/eruption of violence The recent outbreak/eruption of racial violence in the area is very troubling.

violence against The report documents the staggering amount of domestic violence against women.

extreme force:

violence of We were all surprised at the violence of his anger/rage.

The storm turned out to be one of unexpected violence.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/violence#google_vignette

Whilst the explanation given from the Cambridge Dictionary website only gives physical examples, the essential definition is “actions that are intended or likely to hurt people or cause damage“.

Under that definition, a system that intentionally, knowingly, or carelessly causes harm that could otherwise be avoided is doing its victims violence.

By that definition, if I have knowingly harmed another I have done them violence. That’s a hard pill to swallow.

Today, true co-opted term “freedom” has nothing to do with one’s right to well-being, justice, opportunity, expression, or ability to choose how one is to focus his or her life in the pursuit of happiness. Rather, freedom now refers only to the freedom of trade – the freedom of the movement of money and deregulation of business.

Page 234

From this side of the Atlantic, it seems that our American cousins are experiencing the final stage of capitalism: the point where the mega-rich devour the state itself. Their only conception of freedom is their freedom to plunder and profit and screw the rest of us.

In my opinion, this is my the mega-rich detest the European Union and complain about us regulations: regulations that actually ease trade for smaller businesses and protect consumers and the environment but get in the way of their freedom to pursue ever larger profits.

Ukraine is now the centre of a four-way war between striving for it’s own existence, as the frontline of the European Union’s high standards of conduct for both business and governments, and the rapaciousness of Russia and the United States for it’s mineral resources.

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Conclusion

The book highlights that capitalism is a scarcity economic model that produces the most profit when resources are limited. Aluminium was, in the time of Napoleon, a precious metal because it cost so much to produce, now it’s used in disposable packaging.

Patents allow individuals and businesses to profit by limiting the availability of a technology. Rarely is the patent made public property (as in the almost unique case of Albert Bruce Sabin and the polio vaccine), instead companies hoard their intellectual property rights and permit death.

If you recall the definition of violence I gave earlier as intentional harm or knowingly causing harm, then withholding a means of preventing disease is violence.

Furthermore, those who rise to power and permit and encourage the rape and poisoning of our planet are doing all of us violence. But I don’t think they care: if capitalism is based on scarcity if resource, how best to increase scarcity other than famine, draught, pestilence, and war. Those that live comfortably being ever more afraid of those who are at the edge of existence.

This is the policy currently being enacted by some of the wealthiest on the planet.

True global security will come from removing socioeconomic inequality and the oppression/deprivation that defines it.

Page 288

This simple statement describes the motives for so many migrations of recent years. The British right-wing panicking over little boats filled with desperate refugees from poverty and oppression would be rendered unnecessary if those fleeing had been living in safety with all their fundamental needs met. Instead, our international creates instability and bemoans the results. Recent wars to end tyranny and bring democracy have spectacularly failed and helped create even more of the kind of problems that cause people to flee the land of their birth.

Indeed, it would seem that creating instability and refugees has been weaponsed by some nations in a new kind of warfare – not against the poor per se, but against other privileged nations. My theory is that Putin of Russia’s war in Syria was conducted with an end game of creating refugees of just the right sort to trouble the European Union’s borders and create complications within is own freedom of movement policies. He has succeeded in splitting the United Kingdom away from that union, weakening both in the process.

More Africans have cellphones than running water.

Page 289

This is the problem with leaving capitalist forces to solve problems: capitalism favours profit over the provision of essential resources.

My final thoughts on the book

Peter Joseph doesn’t seem to distinguish between socialism and communism, there are different differences. Communalism in all it’s realisations failed and created more poverty and suffering. Socialism is an ongoing experiment being trialled with varying levels of success, especially in Europe, where the Scandinavian countries have the safest and most secure societies in the world – without prohibiting private enterprise.

Joseph states that we are inevitably moving towards greater automation, which should be used to increase technical efficiency rather than economic efficiency. However, that will remove jobs that can be replaced by automation, which he suggests would allow people to be more creative and have more free time … I’m rather afraid that if people didn’t have anything else to do that gave time value, they’d probably just watch more television. Our make more babies to fill up an already over-populated would.

There are a number of resource sharing schemes (car, scooter, bike), which benefit the biosphere. Joseph suggests that more of these would reduce waste and pollution enormously. If only the UK had decent public transport <sigh>.

In the software works, there is already a string move from intellectual property to open source. Microsoft and Android actually use this to increase market share by making it easy for developers to create tools and applications, and share solutions. As a developer, I would be significantly less productive if there were no open source libraries and shared knowledge. As I mentioned earlier when I referred to the polio vaccine, parents and hoarding infusion information vital to the health and wellbeing of our fellow humans amounts to violence.

Joseph puts a lot of faith in technology, which requires resources from all over the planet as well as energy. Energy can generally be sourced locally (wind, solar, water), resources for computers require rare heavy metals that can only be obtained from a few places in the planet – Africa being one of them, where horrendous exploitation of workers enables cheap extraction of these material s. AI in particular uses vast amounts of energy and water, depleting water tables wherever it is installed. Abigail Thorne has produced a fascinating PhilosophyTube video about it.

There’s a problem when looking towards the Internet of Things and technical feedback to solve technical efficiency, in that they kind of  require central resource allocation – the question of who decides who gets what resources must be asked: would we rely on a God-computer to decide? Or a democratic process?

Whatever the solution to world poverty and inequality, we must design out inequality.

This book was a hard read, sand not necessarily because the topic was challenging (there was much that I agreed with our chimed with my politics): there was just a lot of words and not enough breaks! I was frequently either forcing myself to read more than was comfortable in a session, or stopping in the middle of a section because they were just too long. That’s just a personal observation though.

This was a thought provoking sand insightful book; it was worth the time it took to read it … but I cannot imagine pushing myself to read it again!