Panel 1: A big cake on a table on a table has been cut into two slices–a very small one, labelled “pobres” (the poor) and a very large one, labelled “ricos” (the rich). Two people on the poor side look angrily at the man on the rich side.
Panel 2: The rich man has taken a knife to cut the already small “pobres” (poor) slice in half, now marked “izquierda” (the Left) and “derecha” (the Right). The two poor people are now looking angrily at each other while the rich man knowingly smiles.
This week I came across a fascinating working paper on air conditioning in schools by Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz, Jisung Park, and Jonathan Smith. Using data from ten million students, the authors find a relationship between hotter school instruction days and lower PSAT scores. They also find that air conditioning offsets this problem, but students of color in lower income school districts are less likely to attend schools with adequate air conditioning, making them more vulnerable to the effects of hot weather.
This is a key problem for making social policy in a changing world. If global temperatures are rising, at what point does adequate air conditioning become essential for a school to serve students? At what point is it mandatory to provide AC for the safety of residents, just like landlords have to provide heat? If a school has to undergo budget cuts today, I would bet that most politicians or administrators wouldn’t think to fix the air conditioning first. The estimates from Goodman and coauthors suggest that doing so could offset the cost, though, boosting learning to the tune of thousands of dollars in future earnings for students, all without a curriculum overhaul.
Making such improvements requires cultural changes as well as policy changes. We would need to shift our understanding of what air conditioning means and what it provides: security, rather than luxury. It also means we can’t always focus social policy as something that provides just the bare minimum, we also have to think about what it means to provide for a thriving society, rather than one that just squeaks by. In an era of climate change, it might be time to rethink the old cliché, “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
Evan Stewart is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota. You can follow him on Twitter.
Lower-income people, on the other hand, spend almost everything they have – which is becoming very little. Most workers aren’t earning nearly enough to buy what the economy is capable of producing.
The result is a gap between potential output and potential consumption.
None of this is sustainable. At some point, widening inequality causes the economy to collapse.
We’ve seen this before. Years ago, Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, explained that the Great Depression occurred because the buying power of most Americans fell far short of what the economy was producing.
He blamed the increasing concentration of wealth at the top: “A giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. As in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.”
While the wealthy of the 1920s didn’t know what to do with all their money, most Americans could maintain their standard of living only by going into debt. When that debt bubble burst, the economy tanked.
Fast forward 100 years and we see the same pattern. While the typical Americans’ wages have barely budged for decades, adjusted for inflation, most economic gains have gone to the top, just as Eccles’s so-called “giant suction pump” drew an increasing portion of the nation’s wealth into a few hands before the Great Depression.
The result has been an economy whose underlying structure is far more fragile than it may seem.
Remember the housing and financial bubbles that burst in 2008? We avoided another Great Depression then only because the government pumped enough money into the economy to maintain demand, and the Fed kept interest rates near zero. Then came the pandemic.
The Fed has had to keep interest rates near zero. And the government has had to pump even more money into the economy. While these programs have been crucial to staving off a pandemic-induced depression, they’re only temporary.
Over the long term, the real worry continues to be on the demand side. Widening inequality means not enough demand.
America’s wealth gap is now more extreme than it’s been in over a century. Until this structural problem is remedied, the American economy will remain perilously fragile.
It will also be vulnerable to the next demagogue wielding anger, racism, and resentment as substitutes for real reform.
Closing our staggering wealth gap is crucial to the survival of both our economy and our democracy.
When I mentioned taking a day off to move house, my manager asked who I went with for my mortgage
When I told him I was renting he asked “why don’t you just borrow ten grand or so off your parents for a mortgage deposit?”
Sir, we lead very different lives
Have you considered being born into wealth? You should try it some time. It’s not hard. I was born into wealth all by myself!
I once visited a coworkers house and a cleaning service van pulled into her neighbors driveway. She said ‘They’re using THAT maid service now? How cliche! What service do you use?’ I felt like I’d somehow been transported to another dimension.
One time I was working at a thrift store as a cashier and talking with this dude about how expensive living and school were, and he looked at me and was like “Just go over to Europe, school is free there. Have your accountant write it off as a business expense so you won’t have to pay taxes on it” and I was just so fucking baffled I couldn’t speak
the skiing is by far the least batshit thing on this thread
‘zacly, I don’t think we should discriminate against the super rich just because they happen to be Russian. there should be a more equal and egalitarian approach!
Bezos has pledged to donate $1 billion to his charity. Although this might seem good at face value, “billionaire philanthropy” itself is created by the problems it purports to solve.
There has been an unprecedented transfer of wealth to billionaires during the pandemic - their fortunes grew to a record high of $10.2 trillion while millions of workers sunk into poverty.
These two phenomena – surging wealth inequality alongside the increased social role of “charitable” handouts from the super-rich – are closely intertwined. Without extreme levels of social inequality, it wouldn’t be necessary to rely on the alms of billionaires “donating” the funds back to society just to meet critical social needs.
Now, some of these billionaires have decided to donate a small fraction of the wealth they gained during the past two years. It’s important to note the sources of this increase in wealth:
The fact that the pandemic has accelerated the process of monopolisation and concentration of capital.
Trillion-dollar corporate bailouts like the CARES Act, which placed vast financial resources at the disposal of the ultra-rich (conversely, the debt this incurred will largely have to be paid off by the working class)
Capitalists refusing to halt non-essential production, sacrificing workers’ health and lives in the pursuit of profits.
It is from this sort of immoral shit that billionaires have accumulated the fortunes from which they now dispense their “moral” donations.
To top it all off: Billionaire philanthropy allows the ultra-rich to exert great influence over non-profit organisations and public policy discussions. Often, so-called philanthropic organisations function as little more than vehicles to promote the interests of their wealthy donors. In any case, they will never challenge their interests. Bezos’s foundation calls for “market-based” solutions to climate change and will fund lobbyists to promote “market reforms” rather than government regulation. Convenient.
Tl;dr In order to combat climate change, fight infectious disease and cure other societal ills, we cannot rely on the scraps donated by the ultra-rich, to be used as the ultra-rich dictate according to their own individual whims and interests. Particularly when this money was obtained by contributing to these problems in the first place + will not be used to challenge such problems on any fundamental level, but instead be used to sustain the status quo that allowed them to become billionaires in the first place.
Mental Health and Los Angeles’ Homelessness Crisis: Why “Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” Is One of the Most Important Documentaries on Netflix
The series observes the devastating impact of mental illness and the stigma surrounding it and teaches us that the dire problem of homelessness in the city of Los Angeles is only getting worse
SPOILER ALERT: It may be best to only read on if you have already watched the documentary series.
“Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” is not about a cursed hotel. This documentary series is so much more than that and I personally believe that it is one of the most important documentaries to air on Netflix. So many current issues are covered that are generally brushed under the carpet and left to rot and this is one of the reasons why it must be watched.
Elisa Lam believed that experiencing Los Angeles would change her life for the better. She wanted to discover “La La Land”. Instead, what she discovered was not the glamorous city she had in mind - staying only a few streets away from Skid Row in a hotel infamous for its tragic history, riddled with stories of death, drug abuse and serial killer lodgings, Elisa was faced with a gruesome reality - that reality is Los Angeles’s gaping wealth divide which is only widening as time goes on.
Elisa’s dreamy expectations of LA being heavily dampened by the poverty she found herself in would have no doubt contributed to her worsening mental state during her stay at the Cecil Hotel. Los Angeles is often depicted as the city where people go to find themselves - after all, it’s Hollywood’s home - but the reality is that the city has many more dimensions that are not represented on holiday websites or tourist leaflets.
I have seen for myself only a fraction of the poverty which adorns the streets of LA when I visited in 2019 and what I saw was shocking enough. People are living in tents only streets away from where millionaires sleep comfortably in their high-rise apartments and mansions. A taxi driver told me “The council are building more apartments in downtown LA but it’s only for the wealthy. They won’t do anything about the problem of homelessness.”
This is brought to light in the documentary also and it is clearly highlighted how much the homeless have been forgotten about in the city - for 100 years they have been shoved aside to make space for rich newcomers. Last year it was estimated that there are about 66,433 people living on the streets in Los Angeles and this increased by 12.7% between 2019 and 2020. The main cause of homelessness in the city is too many underpaid jobs and lack of affordable housing.
The fact that Elisa ended up losing her life in a place where she was looking to escape from her troubles is truly heartbreaking. She was incredibly bright, but severely mentally ill, and I believe that parallels can be drawn between Elisa’s condition and the way in which the impoverished are treated in LA. Elisa was the victim of bipolar disorder, a mental illness which is heavily stigmatised like many other mental health conditions. Some people might speculate that Elisa should have been more responsible and taken her medication as it had been prescribed to her - and whilst I agree that we all have a responsibility for our own self care, there can be many reasons why people don’t take their medication. These can include the stigma behind being prescribed medication for a mental illness and not wanting to become dependent on medication. In Elisa’s case, the fact she strongly believed going to Los Angeles would help her find herself may have made her feel as if she wouldn’t need her medication once she got to the City of Angels - she’d be okay without it.
But as the documentary demonstrated, the symptoms of bipolar disorder can become so severe that they cause people to do things that are completely out of character and even lead to a person’s death. This is why mental illness needs to be better understood and why Elisa could have had more help - her sister mentioned she had had severe psychotic episodes at home previously, so why didn’t her family make sure she was 100% safe and well before she travelled alone? It would be wrong lay the blame on her family though - Elisa was an adult after all and they had to let her travel if she wanted to.
The problem of homelessness in LA suffers the same stigma as Elisa’s illness in a society where the elite are catered to and the poor are simply pushed aside. A Los Angeles Times analysis conducted in 2019 discovered that 67% of people living on the streets suffer from a mental illness or substance abuse disorder - a direct result of the city’s lack of social care for its poorer residents. Just like those living on Skid Row, Elisa felt rejected by society, misunderstood. Her worsening mental health was a product of the same system which has left millions of Americans deprived - a system which belongs to the billionaire class, a system which wants to maintain a spectacular image at all costs, a system which doesn’t want to talk about mental health issues.
The Cecil Hotel, too, is a product of its environment. It is not a cursed place in the paranormal sense - it is cursed in the fact that lives have been needlessly lost there through the lack of resources and funding that are contributed to Skid Row. Although the Cecil Hotel has provided many with shelter, tragedies are bound to happen when people are not given the help they need to battle drug addiction, mental illness and crime involvement. The lack of security at the hotel was also shocking to begin with.
These are the reasons why “Crime Scene: Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” is so desperately relevant in today’s society. With the pandemic taking hold of the world, more people than ever before are grappling with mental health issues and the wealth gap continues to increase worldwide. There will be more deaths like Elisa’s if we don’t start to talk about mental health and more people will resort to living on the streets if we continue to value wealth over human lives.
