Newswise — Occupy Wall Street is a grassroots movement fueled by dissatisfaction about financial and social inequities being borne by growing numbers of ordinary Americans—the 99%, to be more precise.
The 99% movement has evoked varied responses from blatantly dismissive-- Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain: “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”—to, in your face-- “We are the 1 percent” sign posted on an eighth floor window of the Chicago Board of Trade –to soft sympathy from Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, “They blame, with some justification, the problems in the financial sector for getting us into this mess, and they’re dissatisfied with the policy response here in Washington. And at some level, I can’t blame them.”
The New York Times defined the motives of the 99% this way, “…income inequality is grinding down th[e] middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people. …the protesters are giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity.”
The good news is that the emergence of the 99% movement is evidence of a healthy dynamic system in action, at least, in my humble opinion. It is not a threat to be quashed but rather a source of vital information to be processed through the system. Though difficult for many to accept, there is nothing sacrosanct about the current economic design.
In The Origin of Wealth (2006), Erin Beinhocker tells a provocative tale of the wealth of nations and fleshes out the role of evolution in the economy. According to Beinhocker, wealth creation follows a simple but profoundly powerful three step evolutionary process: differentiate-select-amply. Designs are discovered by trial and error with the successful retained, replicated and built upon; the unsuccessful discarded.
Beinhocker asserts that “economic evolution bounces between two patterns for selecting the operational design of an economy: Big Men versus Markets.” He says simple survival was the driving force in the early market economy but as society and the economy grew more complicated, the Big Man system emerged.
This so-called Big Man economy clearly reflects the current status quo as evidenced by the hyper- concentration of wealth and power in the hands of Big Men and their cronies. But as long as the distortions of a Big Man system are not life threatening, it often goes unchallenged.
The emergence of the 99% movement is the first visible populist challenge to the power and wealth distortions of the America’s Big Men since the 1960s. Why now? Because the system has stopped working for Joe and Jane America—unemployment is becoming entrenched, real median household income has fallen, the poverty rate is rising, more of us are without access to a personal doctor or health insurance and just putting food on the table in a home we call our own is becoming increasingly difficult.
The road ahead for the 99% will not be easy--Beinhocker warns that “[a]s long as people are merely close to starving, as opposed to actually starving,” wrestling the system from the Big Men can take a very long time. To go the distance, to raise awareness of the social inequities of a self-indulgent system, to bring about change, the 99% are going to need more of the 99% to get involved and stay involved.
Kay Strong, Associate Professor at Baldwin-Wallace CollegePh.D., Southern Illinois University, M.T., University of Houston, M.A., Ohio University Areas of expertise: international economics, contemporary social-economic issues, complexity and futures-based perspectives in economics. Blogs at http://bwecon.blogspot.com/
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