Joseph Stiglitz, writing in Vanity Fair, is hardly the only commentator to notice how modern America’s grossly disproportionate concentration of wealth by the richest 1 percent is bad for the nation, and the world, as a whole.
Stiglitz’s addition to this argument is his observation that the richest’s pigginess isn’t good for the richest either. America’s (and the “industrialized” world’s) prosperity is a direct result of publicly-funded infrastructure, from roads and shipping lanes to the now embattled “social safety net.”
Then there’s the simple matter of having a middle class with enough disposable wealth to buy the stuff the rich people’s companies sell.
If all those are in tatters, Stiglitz asserts, the basis of the richest’s own prosperity is endangered.
His solution, like a lot of “solutions” offered in essays such as this, is vague. But it’s centered on the need to finally pay attention to the needs of the less than filthy rich.
In other words, those who aren’t the targets of Vanity Fair’s advertisers.
Stiglitz and his editors at VF have achieved an impressive rhetorical feat.
They’ve framed an anti-elitist argument in a manner compatible with the mission of an elitist publication.
It’s not the first time this has happened, however.
A few years back, a freelance writer whose name I unfortunately forget told of submitting a story proposal about hunger in America to the NY Times Sunday magazine. Its editors wrote back to him asking him to make it “more upscale.”
A lot of our allegedly “liberal” media institutions are so exclusively aimed at “the target demographic” (i.e., the upper-upper middle class and above), they have nothing to say to, or about, today’s epidemic of downward mobility.
That’s even the case of so-called “alternative” media outlets. If you’re not likely to hang out in hip bars or wear the coolest new styles or consume either gourmet burgers or wheat-germ smoothies, they’d rather not have you mussing up their audience metrics.
The building of a true populist socio-political movement will have to address all this (and, of course, much more).
