Enjoy Capitalism!
Working with numbers has never been my long suit. I’m not good at mathematics, and I’ve never been particularly fond of arithmetic. Fact is, numbers don’t seem to be my friends. Consider for a moment the things numbers say to me.
Every morning, except on weekends, Mary Ann hands me a printout of our daily cash flow spreadsheet. That document consistently tells me that our expenses are rising almost as sharply as our income is declining. Not a happy trend.
Numbers tell me that I’m within spitting distance of senior citizenship (which, I continue to insist, does not begin a minute before the age of 65). AARP sees that same number and is prompted to continually send me membership solicitations. AARP approaches marketing, I am told, scientifically.
Mary Ann quite cruelly told me this afternoon that she sees the window closing on my opportunities to play professional baseball, and she used several numbers to justify her thinking. The numbers pertained, largely, to such things as size, weight and speed, and none were flattering.
Anyway, those are just a few examples of why, as a general proposition, I don’t like dwelling upon numbers. Still, I do recognize that we can’t just ignore numbers altogether, especially the ones that tell us things we’d rather not hear. Closing our ears and tuning out mathematical truths is a prescription for trouble, and it’s trouble that I fear is sneaking up on us all—sneaking up on America and preparing to throttle the life out of her.
My son is better with numbers than his father. In fact, he’s quite the mathematician. He has studied such things as multivariate statistics and a lot of other high powered ciphering systems. Yesterday he acquainted me with something called the GINI coefficient. I didn’t want to hear about it at first, but he told me anyway. I’m glad I listened.
The GINI coefficient, my son explained, is a measure of statistical dispersion. One of its common uses is as a measure of inequality of wealth or income. Here’s how he explained it.
One of the things that the GINI coefficient is good at is describing the relative distribution of income across a population. In other words, is there a strong middle class, or is there a big gap separating the haves from the have-nots?
The GINI index, arrived at by application of the GINI coefficient, allows us to see at a glance the extent to which income has become concentrated within a population. In a population with a GINI score of 100 all income would be concentrated in a single individual. A score of 0 would represent complete, utopian communism. There are no countries with scores of either 0 or 100. Countries fall somewhere between those two extremes.
To review, a high GINI index within a population means that a greater portion of total income is concentrated in a few people, while a low index means that income is more evenly divided among everyone in the group. If you wanted to think of a low GINI index as an indicator of economic democracy, justice and fairness, you wouldn’t be far off the mark. Conversely, a high GINI index would indicate the emergence of a plutocracy.
I told you that numbers usually tell me things I don’t like to hear, and the GINI index is no exception. Here’s the bad news.
Here in the U.S. our GINI score (as calculated by the U.N. and various other organizations including our own C.I.A.) is around 47. This score tells us that in the U.S. a greater portion of income is concentrated in a smaller number of people than in any European country. Whereas European countries typically have GINI scores around 27-30, the soaring U.S. GINI index score alerts us to the fact that middle class is disappearing in America.
“Wait a minute,” you say. “Are you one of those blame-America-first guys? Don’t you know that capitalism and free markets have made this country great?”
No, I’m fully aware that capitalism and free markets have made this country a fantastic place to live—for the few at the top. Not so much for everybody else. America today, right now, is ruled by an empowered plutocracy which has a double Nelson chokehold on our economy and, by very real extension, upon our entire social and governmental structure.
This GINI index business, I thought, squares perfectly with something I heard President Obama say a couple of weeks ago. He said that the top 1% of Americans (ranked by income) have more income than the bottom 95% combined. That makes us a lot more like Zimbabwe, China, Central African Republic and Gambia (all with high GINI scores, like ours) than like France, Italy, Great Britain, Denmark, even Canada, (all with GINI scores far below our own). Sorta puts us to shame, don’t you think?
Okay, you get the picture. Enough about that.
My son went on to tell me that the GINI index has been shown to correlate closely to the general mental health of a population. In populations where the GINI index is high, a higher incidence of diagnosable depression prevails. He’s a psychologist, so I’ll take his word for it. Besides, it makes sense.
When men and women are consumed with worry about making ends meet, caught in a pressure cooker of mounting debt, dwindling income and rising prices, embroiled in office politics and constantly scratching and clawing to get a leg up on co-workers to snatch that up-for-grabs sliver of the economic pie, bad things happen to the psyche.
When people are put out of their homes and onto the street by foreclosures, driven into debt servitude by predatory lenders, made indentured servants by overwhelming student loan debt, and reduced to poverty by soaring medical costs, depression isn’t to be unexpected. And, Americans are depressed—just as our high GINI score predicts.
The U.S. leads the world in the prevalence of both depression and anxiety disorders. According to a 2004 World Health Organization and Harvard Medical School study 9.6% of our population suffers from depression and 18.2% suffer from some form of anxiety disorder. Geez… that’s a lot of anxious people. You get enough pressure in the pot and the lid blows off!
So, now a question arises. Why are we tolerating this? We’re not only tolerating it, but a very large percentage of Americans are acting like nothing’s wrong. They’re tuned in to Fox News and are mainlining the purple corporate Kool Aid®, drawing mustaches on pictures of the President and channeling Joe McCarthy, and, like so many victims of domestic abuse, beating off the first responders who are trying to help them—sort of a Stockholm Syndrome epidemic.
Millions upon millions of Americans spend their days in chat rooms, Twittering and Facebooking, attending rallies and town hall meetings, and blustering across lunchroom tables in an impassioned campaign to preserve and protect their captors. It makes no sense, but psychological disorders, by definition, are not sensible.
We cannot expect patients with disordered minds to responsibly evaluate treatment options and seek appropriate care. It’s up to those of us who yet have clear minds to excise the malignancy that is killing America and Americans.
Here’s where numbers can be important again. There are more of us than there are of them. There are more Democrats in the Congress than there are Republicans. There is only one president, and he is a Democrat.
Almost one year ago a clear and convincing number of Americans elected a president and Congress who proposed promising treatment plans for many of our country’s most threatening ills. If treatment is administered in a timely way, the prognosis is good.
It’s time to hold the patient down and administer the medicine. The numbers are on our side.
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Little did I know that a scientific measuring system is in place, however it makes certaint sense to me Prentice. I have instinctively known what you have written, although I just called my knowledge an educational assessment.
Now though I wonder where do I go from here? I’ve studied, researched, voted, rallied, phoned, petitioned, facebooked, written cards political leaders.
Now that you have validated what are probably the “hunches” of many of us, will you blog about the solution? PLEASE!!!