Journalism Goes Only So Far in Empire-Scale Democracy

A news story only goes so far; only so much “digging” is possible against a pressing deadline. Moreover, we humans are not particularly good at “connecting the dots” when they are far afield. Through natural selection in an environment in which humans were prey as well as hunters, we are still “hard-wired” to privilege the immediate. So it takes more than a bit of effort to counter this natural predilection in order to make a truly informed judgment that takes into account the relevant tributaries. One such judgment concerns the impact of U.S. President Joe Biden’s age on his fitness to serve a second term.

The full essay is at "Journalism Goes Only So Far."

When Platitudes Undermine Real Change: The Case of U.S. President Obama

U.S. President Obama’s 2010 speech at the UN’s annual opening lacked tangible proposals.  For example, he urged progress on the Middle East peace talks, but proffered no proposal.  He said Africa could be prosperous agriculturally, but gave no proposal for how.  He claimed that corruption in governments of developing countries is a problem, but offered no solution.  Pointing to corruption in general diffuses responsibility so talking about it does not shame anyone into making hard choices. Such platitudes belied the president's claim to being an advocate of real change. 

The full essay is at "Platitudes Undermine Real Change."

Addressing Systemic Risk: Beyond the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010

After the financial crisis in September 2008 in the U.S., the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, admitted to a Congressional committee that his free-market notion that a market will automatically self-correct itself had a major flaw. He had come to this realization because the financial market for mortgage-backed bonds had failed to correct in terms of price for the dramatic increase in risk. Instead, that market, and that of overnight commercial paper, had seized up rather than simply adjust price to the decreased demand. Fear had paralyzed what had hitherto been thought to be a self-correcting market. The failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers introduced us to the concept of systemic risk, wherein the failure of a bank (or company) causes a market to collapse. Such a bank is thus too big to fail. If actualized, such risk interferes with even the basic operation of a market, not to mention its self-correcting feature. One question is whether banks that are too big to fail should merely be more adequately regulated or broken up, as the U.S. Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil in 1911.

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank

   The full essay is at "Addressing Systemic Risk: Alan Greenspan."

Leadership vs. Management: Change vs. Constancy?

In the "leadership vs. management" dichotomy, "management focuses on getting work done on time, on budget, and on target--in other words, steady execution and control--while leadership focuses on change and innovation." However, this contrast of implementation and innovation is a different dichotomy. Abstractly speaking, a category mistake may be involved in this false dichotomy. Change would be occurring in the execution of an innovative vision. In the realm of change alone, formulating and selling it can be distinguished from making the change. Therefore, the “leadership vs. management” distinction does not reduce to “change vs. status quo."

Material from this essay has been incorporated into The Essence of Leadership: A Cross-Cultural Foundation, which is available at Amazon. 

On the History of Thanksgiving: Challenging Assumptions

We humans are so used to living in our subjectivity that we hardly notice it or the effect it has on us. In particular, we are hardly able to detect or observe the delimiting consequences of the assumptions we hold on an ongoing basis. That is to say, we have no idea (keine Anung) of the extent to which we take as unalterable matters that are actually quite subject to our whims individually or as a society (i.e., shared assumptions). In this essay, I use the American holiday of Thanksgiving, specifically its set date on the last Thursday of November, to illustrate the following points.

The full essay is at "On the History of Thanksgiving."

Protest Movements 101

David Johnston of Reuters opined on October 7, 2011, the Occupy Wall Street “protests show signs of sparking a major change in U.S. politics by creating common ground among people with wildly divergent views. The key to their significance will be whether they foster a wholesale change in political leadership in 2013 or whether Americans return a vast majority of incumbents in both parties at all levels of government.” But are “wildly divergent views” really represented, and did the movement translate dramatic camera-ready protest parades and sit-ins into grassroots work to get specifically anti-corporate candidates past the primaries and into office in 2012?  I contend that from the get-go, the Occupy Wall Street movement set itself on a trajectory antithetical to being able to answer both of these questions in the affirmative. In so doing, the movement’s “non-leaders” sowed the seeds of the movement’s demise—or at the very least of being relegated as partisan and thus contained as a sub-part in the system.

The full essay is at "Protest Movements 101."

Business CEO’s Overstating Political Uncertainty in the United States

The impact on business of political uncertainty in countries that are seized by revolution can be substantial—so much so in fact that CEO’s and board directors are motivated to avoid the uncertainty itself. I submit that business analysts of political risk tend unwittingly to routinely overstate the uncertainty arising from incoming U.S. presidential administrations. If I am correct in this claim, CEO’s and board directors pay too much heed to political uncertainty itself in the making of major strategic decisions involving operations in the American context.

The full essay is at "Business CEO's Overstating Uncertainty"

Going Off-Shore, Dodging Sanctions, and Laundering Money: The World of the Richest of the Rich

On April 3, 2016, 2.6 terabytes of data—more than 11.5 million documents—leaked from Panama’s law firm, Mossack Fonseca. The documents show that the firm “helped heads of state, oligarchs and celebrities launder money, dodge sanctions and avoid taxes.”[1] Over 40 years, 214,000 offshore shell companies in 200 countries implicate individuals including the family of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and that of British Prime Minister David Cameron, several friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmunder Gunnlaugsson; financial institutions implicated include UBS, HSBC, and Société Générale.[2] I contend that the markets themselves had been tilted in the interest of the greater power (i.e., the rich), so systemic rather than incremental or piecemeal efforts would be necessary to solve the problem.

The full essay is at "Going Off-Shore."

On the Tyranny of the Status Quo

Ever wondered why so much energy must be expended to dislodge a long-established institution, law, or cultural norm? Why does the default have so much staying power? Are we as human beings ill-equipped to bring about, not to mention see, even the “no-brainer” changes that are so much (yet apparently not so obviously) in line with our individual and collective self-interest? In this essay, I look at Ukraine, Spain, and Illinois to make some headway on this rather intractable difficulty.

The full essay is at "On the Tyranny of the Status Quo"

Online Sales: Breaking the Egg

Was the 2013 holiday season really a turning point in terms of online purchases? Can a business environment change so drastically from one Christmas to the next? If not, what can we say about a commercial system that buckles, at least at its weakest link, under the pressure of a moderate change in buying habits? Put another way, does such buckling necessarily indicate or point to the existence of a threshold point that has suddenly and unexpectedly been crossed? Alternatively, the system itself may be weak.

During the November-December holiday season of 2004, online sales revenue in the U.S. increased 25 percent from the year before.[1] CNN Money reported the increase as 29.5 percent—almost a third of total holiday sales.[2] This healthy numbers can be deceiving, however, if the base is low relative to the total. That is, if the online holiday sales figure as a percentage of total holiday sales is around 2 percent, an increase of 25 percent from the prior year’s online sales is immaterial in terms of the change in the percent of online sales to total from the prior to the current year. As shown below, fourth quarter percentages-of-total (rather than of increase) increased from roughly 1.7 in 2003 to 2 percent in 2004. This change is hardly earth-shattering.

Estimated Quarterly U.S. Retail E-commerce Sales as a Percent of Total Quarterly Retail Sales

4th Quarter 1999 to 4th Quarter 2004[3]

So let’s look at percentage-of-total figures specifically for the combined (November and December) season of Thanksgiving and Christmas, two of the major national holidays in the United States. In 2012, the season’s online sales revenue accounted for 19.3 percent of the total retail sales.[4] Keeping in mind the magnitude of the changes shown in the graph above (0.6% to 2.2% over five years), the change from roughly 20 to 25 percent in 2013—from just one Christmas to the next—seems relatively dramatic. Yet a shift from 20 to 25 does not in itself seem very significant. Even so, it was enough for journalists to label it a “sea-change,” “threshold,” “turning point, “and “major re-alignment, capable of unleashing a virtual tsunami.

One business practitioner interviewed on CNBC in mid-January, 2014 made the startling claim that the turning point had come quite unexpectedly in just one year. I contend that conclusion is overly dramatic, though I readily concede that the five-point difference was oddly too much for a part of the system. Specifically, “an unpredictably large number of packages overwhelmed UPS,” with thousands of Christmas presents left undelivered by Christmas Eve.[5] Natalie Godwin, a spokesperson at UPS, explained. “The volume of air packages in our system exceeded the capacity of our network, as demand was much greater than the forecast.”[6] The network’s capacity itself became transparent as a constraint, as a result of demand having been much greater than anticipated. The words “capacity” and “much” point to, or intimate, a systems-level problem not just for the package-delivery company, but also for the U.S. (and perhaps global) system of commerce.

Crucially, that a percentage change of just 5 percent of total sales revenue represented as increased demand can pierce the capacity of a major link in the commercial chain from manufacturers to customers suggests not a pivotal year, but, rather, a system too (i.e., artificially) inflexible or hard. Rather than being able to adapt to changes in the environment, as any fit species does through the evolutionary process of natural selection, the American system of commerce lacks the built-in ability to stretch (and contract). By implication, reaching a threshold point, such as in demand for products sold online, is in terms of the system and behaves as a wall rather than a semi-permeable membrane. It is worth pointing out that a threshold point concerning the system of commerce also no doubt exists in terms of society (i.e., changes in daily life) and even in terms of products (i.e., transformative products as mainstays as a result of ecommerce). Just as the loud kids tend to get disproportionate attention, a rigid and complacent system gets noticed (i.e., becomes transparent as a system) more than its share. Relying on such a system warrants the warning: Watch out for the “big one”—a major earthquake of sorts capable of a truly dramatic land-shift.

1. Jennifer LeClaire, “Online Holiday Shopping Soars 25 Percent to $23 Billion,” E-Commerce Times, 4 January 2014.

2. CNN Money, “Holiday Online Sales Surge,” 5 January 2004.

3. US Census Bureau, The Department of Commerce, “Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales 4^th Quarter 2004.”

4. The National Retail Federation.

5. Donna Leger, “UPS System Overload Delays Holiday Packages,” USA Today, 24 December 2013.

6. Ibid.

Traditional To Online Publishing: Why Is the Transition So Gradual?

Forging onward to where no one had gone before, the second decade of the 21^st century just catching its breath, the internet in 2011 was already generating the seeds that would subtly yet dramatically revolutionize the world of publishing. Even with traditional publishing houses already making plans to get into digital format as part of an envisioned hybrid market, the alternative of "blogging a book" (by subscription, or profiting off email lists or links to one's "real" books or services) could be expected to reduce manuscript submissions.  Additionally, the higher royalty percentages proffered by digital publishing companies that minimize costs by adapting the old "vanity press" model (without charging authors) could be expected to take a big bite out of the editorial and proof-reading model of the traditional publishing houses. To be sure, even just from their initial adaptations to broaden out to the digital format, such houses were not necessarily expected to become extinct as a species. Nevertheless, the future of publishing could already be seen as happening on the web. The enigma here pertains to why the economic slope toward easier (i.e., sans gatekeepers) and more lucrative publishing has been so sticky.

 

The juxtaposition of very different technologies illustrates the tectonic shift underway. Image Source: Alphapublication.com

 

Undoubtedly, some people found the unfathomable possibilities glimpsed from the internet to be all too alluring. Meanwhile, others held on for dear life to the melting icebergs of traditional publishing as though out of some instinctual reflex hardwired into the human genome. Viewing the shift as a Hegelian leap forward historically in the unfolding spirit of freedom already from the vantage-point of 2013, I found myself mystified as to the sheer gradualness of the massive shift. Inertia? Fear of the unknown? Stifling incomprehension of things very different? Whereas global warming had seemed to hit its threshold rather quickly and the internet was travelling at a rapid velocity through change—perhaps even warping the time-space dimensions in its universe—I found myself wondering when the threshold point of water pouring in would finally sink the vaunted publishing houses that seemed only to be fortifying themselves by closing doors more on passengers deemed marginal (profitwise).

 

I don’t believe the nature of the holdup is merely the refusal of the status quo to give into new theories, as described in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Rather, I think the answer goes back to the staying power, evolutionarily speaking, of tens of thousands of years when homo sapiens lived and passed on genes in a steady-state environment without the artifices of complex societies.  Simply put, just as global warming in the Artic was surpassing the adaptive ability of some northern ecosystems already in 2013, the pace of qualitative change in publishing opportunities was travelling past the speed of the human cognitive-neurological capacity of sense-making, not to mention comprehension and responding to the new stimuli.

Like dinosaurs, traditional publishers could only feel their moorings loosening and wonder what hidden force was causing the tremor. Indeed, the very ground underneath was already slowly moving, with much more kinetic energy to come. Like rats on the Titanic just after the shutter from impact, writers with the least to lose were beginning to sniff around the novel ebook alternative, barely able to make out the foggy shape ahead of an industry without traditional publishers, or at least without their annoying yet presumably necessary gate-keeping function. Vintage labels being required for tenure, young scholars teaching at academic institutions could not very well follow the rats. Meanwhile, tenured scholars were generally too accustomed to their well-worn ways to grasp the potential in publishing online, whether essays (or even chapters in-process) on a blog or entire ebooks linked to a blog and Facebook. With Google getting into the knowledge dissemination “business” and non-profits like Coursera providing free online courses taught by scholars at some of the best universities around, the internet platforms were poised to offer those scholars with some academic freedom and freedom of mind various means to revolutionize not only publishing scholarship, but also doing research and teaching. As in the case of the traditional publishers, the “rub” lies in the capacity of the human mind to move from a long-standing paradigm to think along a new line based in assumptions that would have seemed nonsensical ten or so years earlier.

 

Attached to the industrial framework undergirding the status quo in the modern world that was slowly giving way to another (post-modernity?), traditional publishers reacted by instinct to the sense that the tide was beginning to go out. Specifically, the reactive, knee-jerk strategy hounded costs by letting marginally-profitable authors go in order to prop up profits. It does not necessarily follow that the resulting level of quality would be higher.

 

By 2013, being published online was a formidable alternative to submitting a manuscript to an editor. That some well-established authors had already taken the plunge, even walking from their long-established publishers out onto clear ice with little way of ascertaining its thickness gave the up-and-coming writers enough confidence that they, too, could venture out on the ice without falling through.

 

Whereas the world of traditional publishing was built around scarcity, which could be controlled in order to gain pricing power, the internet platforms thrive in the midst of abundance. Whereas traditional editors are oriented to controlling the content that gets through, the tech mentality is geared to easing the way to publishing so as to maximize content. Whereas traditional publishing depends on mass production of content that can fetch a good price—the manufacturing model of the industrial revolution being still the immediate context—online media companies view themselves as providing services while the users contribute the content.

 

I suspect, however, that the scarcity-abundance dichotomy is overdrawn. Eddies of original content online may in fact be able to capture revenue, assuming that particular users do not “steal” the content by posting it on alternative sites open to the public. Although illegal in terms of copyright law (unless the author allows for duplication or reposting), “stealing” does not seem to quite fit the world of the internet where information is so freely available. Indeed, copyright law itself may turn into a leaky sieve that must inevitably give way on the internet. As in the case of laws forbidding pot, any presumed sense of control may finally be deemed illusory. Assuming sufficient enforcement of copyright law and the existence of writing that is well-crafted, unique, and of value to readers, the internet may turn out to be a spectrum of information ranging from free to highly monetized. Blogs that are essentially diaries will probably remain open-access, whereas on the other extreme ebooks will be priced sufficiently that writers can make a living from them (perhaps by building a large readership up first through a cost-leadership strategy).

 

Even for a given contributor of content, the spectrum may apply. Established scholars, for example, might sell an ebook for a decent price to recoup all the work that went into the research and writing. The same scholar might embed lecture videos in free blog posts that together make up a “book” or “course” that serves as a vehicle by which to bring certain ideas to as many minds as possible. Just as there are pitfalls in “stealing” suddenly not making sense, the potential for leaps in creativity  can be glimpsed just from the sudden obsolescence of  “book” and “course” in figuring out just what something never before seen online is.  “For this world in its present form is passing away.”[1]

 

According to Michael Wolff, traditional publishers focus “on what ought, or what ought not, to be said.” They hold the cards—the control—and they relish it. Like horses with blinders on, they “can only look on in wonder and stupefaction” at what blogging and ebook platforms have been doing.[2] Particularly baffling, attempts to control scarcity in the midst of abundance in order to gain pricing power can only be futile. From the standpoint of the industrial mass-production framework that assumes scarcity, that it is the content that is the product and has market value, and that mass production is necessary to capitalize on economies of scale, it’s all about controlling the scarcity to gain pricing power.  Where the dissemination of content cannot be controlled, the traditional editor would sooner face exhaustion than make the cognitive leap to the new assumptions that don’t seem to make sense.[3]

 

In short, as the web evolves like an ecosystem trying to keep up with accelerating climate change, the apparently sudden arrival of new species on the internet naturally confronts the eye and leaves the human mind grasping for linguistic straws that are too brittle to bend and thus to make sense out of the foreign things. As a result, the lag or gap between the emergence of a potentially fecund online opportunity and actual usage on a large scale can be considerable. I suspect the mind of a homo sapiens can only take so much of the unrecognizable before disorientation as an obstacle in itself to be surmounted kicks in. Because the internet is not based on the old assumptions of the industrial revolution, the human mind is particularly vulnerable to crashing when trying to use new apps or platforms and stubbornly resistant to rebooting using a different operating system and browser. By implication, tech people could help the rest of us out by putting more effort into including basic explanations of what it is that they have created and how to get started.   

---

[1] 1 Cor. 7:31.

[2] Michael Wolff, “’Reader’s Digest’ For the Digital Era,” USA Today, September 15, 2013.

[3] If you have seen the ending of the film, The Others (starring Nicole Kidman), you have an idea of how disorienting it can be to have one’s fundamental assumptions turned inside-out. It is as though societal assumptions somehow get infused into our very being. Not only do we resist any extractions and replacements, many of us may instinctually freeze-up from the sheer extent of disorientation in stumbling upon the unrecognizable alien.

The Financial Crisis: A Systemic and Ethical Analysis

According to a study by the Dallas Federal Reserve, the financial crisis of 2007-2009 “was associated with a huge loss of economic output and financial wealth, psychological consequences and skill atrophy from extended unemployment, an increase in government intervention, and other significant costs.”[1] The study’s abstract goes on to “conservatively estimate that 40 to 90 percent of one year’s output ($6 trillion to $14 trillion, the equivalent of $50,000 to $120,000 for every U.S. household) was foregone due to the 2007-09 [sic] recession.”[2]

 

Interestingly, the Huffington Post “reports” the study’s finding in the following terms:  “a ‘conservative’ estimate of the damage is $14 trillion, or roughly one year’s U.S. gross domestic product. This is based on how much output was lost during the crisis and Great Recession, along with all the damage done to potential future economic growth.”[3] In fact, the article’s title claims that the crisis cost more than $14 trillion! Lest it be thought that the reporter and editor suffer from a learning or reading disability, the gilding here is notably in the direction of “selling more papers.”

 

Ironically, the Huffington Post also published an article pointing to the lack of accountability in that “the executives that [sic] were in charge of Bear’s headlong dive into the cesspool of subprime mortgage lending hold similar jobs at the most powerful banks on Wall Street: JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank."[4]

 

The upshot is that those stakeholders who played a role in the crisis, most significantly the people running the government, the media, and the banks, have gone on, relatively unscathed, while the systemic risk remained or has actually become even greater.  As a first step toward recovery, a systemic map depicting the interrelated parts in the systemic failure and a related ethical analysis can provide a basis for reforms sufficient to thwart another major financial crisis.

 

 The systemic and ethical analysis

 

                                                         

1. Tyler Atkinson, David Luttrell, and Harvey Rosenblum, “How Bad Was It? The Costs and Consequences of the 2007-09 Financial Crisis,” Staff Paper No. 20, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, July 2013.

2. Ibid.
3. Mark Gongloff, “The Financial Crisis Cost More Than $14 Trillion: Dallas Fed Study,” The Huffington Post, July 30, 2013.

4. Lauren Kyger and Alison Fitzgerald, “Former Bear Stearns Executives Seemingly Unscathed by Financial Crisis They Helped Trigger,” The Huffington Post, July 31, 2013. The article was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity.

 

Fixing the Foreclosing Banks: A Hidden Conflict of Interest in Regulatory Compliance

After the financial crisis of 2008, regulators in the U.S. ordered banks to hire consultants to implement more than 130 “enforcement actions,” which represent 15% of the cases. In 2011 alone, regulators mandated that eleven banks hire consultants to determine whether mortgage borrowers had been wrongfully evicted. The consultants collected about $2 billion in fees, which amount to more than half of what homeowners were to receive under the $8.5 billion settlement that ended the consultants’ work. According to regulators, the consultants’ work was plagued with inefficiencies. This is probably the least of it, for virtually any expectations for “an industry that is paid billions of dollars by the same banks it is expected to police” are bound to be chimerical in nature.

The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available at Amazon.

Economic Inequality in the U.S.: A Conflagration of Accumulated Dead Wood

According to the Congressional Research Service, the share of total net worth held by the less affluent half of American households dropped from 3.6% in 1995 to 1.1% in 2010. Meanwhile, the share held by the top 10 percent increased from 67.2% to 74.5 percent. That is to say, ten percent of the American population holds three-quarters of all of the wealth. The top 1 percent went from holding 30.1% to 34.5% of the wealth. According to the report, "Inequality is the term commonly applied to the concentration of total net worth among the relatively few households at the top of the wealth distribution." The study shows that inequality increased in the U.S. during the 1990s and 2000s.

Perhaps of all the statistics listed in the report, the one that leaps off the page as a harbinger of future problems in terms of democracy concerns the fact that half of the American population holds only one percent of the wealth in the United States. This means that half of the population has little at stake and therefore little to lose. It is a feat of the sheer breadth and depth of propaganda from the top one percent via the corporate media companies that the bottom fifty percent continue to buy into the system, figuratively speaking, rather than revolt. At the very least, to have half of a population excluded is dangerous, even if only potentially at the moment. In terms of quality of life, society itself would have a much better feel to it were the wealth not confined to 50 percent of the population (with the top ten percent of the population owning 75% of the wealth).

No one likes to have one’s property taken, even if one would not be inconvenienced by the removal.  Hence the dreaded term of “redistribution” is excoriated. However, trends such as those described above can come from systemic biases rather than by outright taking from the poor; similarly, a design could “lean” in the direction of economic equality without overtly taking from the rich. To be sure, the super-rich, or multi-billionaires, could legitimately be subject to direct redistribution because after a certain point a person’s additional wealth exceeds that which can be spent. To play investment games with wealth while half of a population goes without (including many without healthcare) can be subjected to critique as evincing a rather warped sense of priorities in terms of values.

Therefore, both the design of the American political economy and the assumption that no amount of wealth can ever be too much from the standpoint of societal values could be subjected to critique. Raising such basic questions after the twenty-year trend of increasing inequality could in turn be part of a wider societal awakening in the context of not only a new century underway by a decade, but also a new millennium. Even back in 2000, the recognition could have been that a new status quo should at least be attempted in a “spring cleaning” of sorts during the first decade of the new millennium. It was not already too late even in the second decade for a wholesale re-consideration by society at large of that which had been taken for granted in the status quo.

In addition to subjecting the corporate capitalist system and the related amount of economic inequality to a fundamental debate, a constitutional convention in each of the fifty republics, and one for the U.S. constitution itself could be called on the basis that a new millennium calls for fundamental re-examination of the status quo, which is no longer rightfully the default. For example, the long trend of declining federalism could finally be subject to a decision either to restore that system or make the de facto near-consolidation de jure too, constitutionally.

Admittedly, my suggestion is a pretty tall order, and therefore very unlikely to see the light of day. Instead, the unquestioned hegemony of the antiquated default is likely to go on, unthreatened by any societal awakening, especially from the half of society with a vested interest in upsetting the apple cart. Indeed, human nature itself my strongly favor tomorrow being rather like today, instead of being rid of all the dead wood (which can easily catch fire).

The 1988 fire in Yellowstone spread “like wildfire” in large part because of the years of Interior Department policy against allowing contained fires to incrementally consume the accumulating dead wood. Similarly, the dead wood of economic inequality (and political consolidation) renders the American empire extremely vulnerable. One indication of this sort of unthinking build-up is the $16 trillion imbalance represented by the debt being held by the U.S. Government as of 2012. The less tangible dead wood may be even more dangerous.

Once a fire starts (e.g., higher interest rates or small riots), it could quickly get out of control before anyone has any idea that the ship called America will founder as if by some mathematical certainty. Fifty-one percent on one end of a balancing scale is by definition a majority. To put it another way, what goes around comes around. Lack of concern for the other half is likely to have its own consequences, even if only for one’s posterity.

Source:

Dan Froomkin, “Half of American Households Hold 1 Percent of Wealth,” The Huffington Post, July 19, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/19/households-wealth-american-1-percent_n_1687015.html#slide=more217997