Source｜Yuanchuan Research Institute(ID : Caijingyanjiu)
Author｜Li Motian, editor｜Boss Dai/Director Huang
Head Image｜CFP, June 29, 2020 local time, New York, New York Stock Exchange
The first half of the American economist Robert Reich’s life was a textbook-level model of the American dream: he suffered from a disease called Fairbank’s disease, resulting in a height of only 1 Mi 49, suffered from campus bullying. In such an environment, Reich, who was physically disabled and determined, went all the way to a J.D. and got a ticket to the elite.
In high school, there was a friend named Michael Schwerner (Michael Schwerner) who often came forward to protect the little Rick. After graduation, Sweener joined the vigorous black civil rights movement in the 1960s and was murdered by extremists. This incident affected Reich’s school and career to a certain extent, prompting his research direction to shift to social justice and wealth distribution.
In 1964, Reike was admitted to the Ivy League college Dartmouth College with honors, majoring in economics. Although there are shortcomings in the hardware conditions, Rick is full of personal charm, love and academically. For example, in his sophomore year, he inter-school talked about a girlfriend from Wellesley College-Hilary Rod Hm.
After graduating from undergraduate, classmate Riker won the Rhodes Scholarship from Oxford University. On the ship going to England, Rick, who was seasick, was tortured by the rough Atlantic Ocean. He thought he was going to die on the ship. At this time, a young man who went to Oxford knocked on his cabin door, brought him chicken soup and biscuits, took care of him all the way, and later became Rick’s lifelong friend.
This person is the future husband of his ex-girlfriend-Bill Clinton, the “good couple” of the house of cards didn’t know him at that time.
In 1992, Clinton was elected as the President of the United States. He put forward the policy of “Putting People First” and strongly invited Rick to join the cabinet as the Minister of Labor. During his tenure, Reich proposed a series of policies such as restricting the salaries of corporate executives, increasing taxation of the rich, and strengthening the power of labor unions, which led to the hatred of Wall Street consortiums and draw boundaries.
After leaving the White House, Rick did not go to the top 500 companies as a director with an annual salary of one million. Instead, he returned to the university to lecture and write books. From “The Next American Frontier” to “The Power of Public Opinion”, from “Why America’s Future Is So Worry” to “Saving Capitalism,” Rick’s thinking on American social equity and wealth distribution systems has become increasingly clear.
In 2013, Rick and director Jacob Kornbluth (Jacob Kornbluth) co-produced a documentary that combines his views, called Inequality for All, which translates to “Inequality for All.” The Hong Kong compatriots are obviously more aware of the topic of unequal distribution of wealth, so the Hong Kong version of the name is more simple and rude: Fuck fairness and justice.
The core content of Inequality for All can be summed up in one sentence: From the early 1980s to today, the US GDP has been rising all the way, and the US labor productivity has also been increasing. The salaries of the executives of large enterprises have been rising, and the stock market has become more uniform. Soaring to the sky, the wealth of wealthy people’s property income has risen, but after eliminating inflation, the wages of the American working class have never risen since the early 1980s.
U.S. labor productivity and working-class wages trends
After the documentary was released, the response was mediocre, but Rick’s predictions in the film have been realized one after another: Since 1980, Dow Jones pointed outThe S&P 500 index has doubled by nearly 30 times, but the booming stock market has not benefited everyone. The top 10% of the richest people hold more than 80% of the value of stocks, while 2/3 of the US Of Americans still live the life of the moonlight clan.
This made us curious about two questions: The first is what happened in the United States in the early 1980s? The second is the US problem. Will it also become our problem?
01. Differentiation: How the poor become poor
The bifurcation of history often originates from some humble cross-sections.
On August 3, 1981, due to the failure of negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration, the Air Traffic Control Staff Association (PATCO) organized a strike involving 13,000 people and gave President Reagan, who had just entered the White House, a blow. The president of the actors’ union immediately announced that if work is not resumed within 48 hours, all workers participating in the strike will be fired.
The workers who participated in the strike were ordinary people. Among them were many veterans of World War II and even Reagan supporters. However, 48 hours later, Reagan did what he said. He fired 11,345 air traffic controllers on the spot, and then the Federal Court added the icing on the cake, declared the strike illegal, ruled that the strikers could no longer serve as air traffic controllers for life, and directly banned PATCO by the way.
For many American workers who have not finished high school, fighting for wages is not based on ingenuity, but on the bargaining power of the union. But Reagan’s actions sent a signal to all American companies: the unions are all paper tigers. After the PATCO strike took place, the status of the American trade union plummeted, and decades of painstaking efforts by the American left wing began to decline.