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I recently went to a local reunion of my high-school class, so the phrase “class reunion” brings up fond memories for me.  However, in another context, “class reunion” represents my wishes for the future on this May Day, namely, that the growing economic inequality in this country can be reversed.   I tend to be somewhat sympathetic to the conservative position that there should be economic equality of opportunity, but not necessarily equality of outcome.  However, the problem with the current economic inequality in this country is that it is creating feedback loops of corruption of the political process which could end up threatening the legal foundations of democracy in this country.

The science fiction writer H. G. Wells, in his novel The Time Machine, postulated what would happen if economic inequality between the social classes grew to the point where the upper class and the lower class became essentially two different species.   However, even in that far-flung future, the classes ended up having a symbiotic relationship.

Ideologies on the left and right side of the labor/capital divide point to their side as being the real host of economic activity and pointing to the other side as being a sort of parasite on that host.  In Ayn Rand’s novels, for example, evil is a parasite on the good, and Rand’s heroes must continually fight against those parasites who demand the benefits of the heroes’ labors, with the government collaborating with those parasites to extract those benefits.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, on the other hand, sees the so-called 1% as the parasites who are extracting the wealth of the 99% with the collaboration of the government.  So there is a current of mutual disregard that is set in the background of today’s May Day festivities.

There is a new book out called Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by MIT Economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James Robinson in which they describe the difference between developing economies which are successful and those which are unsuccessful.

I watched an interview of Daron Acemoglu on the Up with Chris Hayes program last Sunday, April 29th.  I have not yet read the book, but Isobel Coleman, a Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council of Foreign Relations, summarizes the thesis of the book in her blog Democracy in Development as follows:

Successful nations have good institutions that are “inclusive” and “pluralistic” and create incentives for people to work hard and invest in the future. Unsuccessful states, on the other hand, are characterized by “extractive” or “absolutist” institutions that economically and politically benefit a small group of elites at the expense of everyone else.

The problem with extractive institutions is that they end up bringing down the temple by destroying the source of their wealth extraction and themselves with it.

I’m sure that was not what the elites in Rome or Britain intended to do at the end of their empires, but the American economic and political system could end up collapsing as well if we don’t realize that the various classes in this country actually depend on each other, ideologies of left and right notwithstanding.

As Benjamin Franklin once said to his fellow colonists in the context of the Revolutionary War, “if we don’t hang together, we will all hang separately.”  Let’s have a class reunion in this country before it is too late.

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