Today, I came across this article on Medium: The Rich Are Hoarding Wealth—Because They Know What’s Coming by Angus Peterson. I have regularly referred to the state of our species as a crisis of global warming, exhaustion of the earth’s resources, and species extinction (including ours). Peterson expands this list of the polycrisis to include “climate change, biodiversity loss, resource overshoot, economic instability, and authoritarian creep.”
From my perspective, I would adapt this a bit.
Though capitalism is an unstable system without any doubt, the feature that is most in play today is its staggering capacity to increase income and wealth inequality across the globe. We are spawning new billionaires at a frightening pace, and prospects for our first trillionaires are only a few years away.1 This is not to say that we might not soon experience a global financial meltdown from an economic sector that is intensely busy with speculation on an accelerating basis.
“Authoritarian creep” likewise seems to understate the threats at hand. When you have a president inaugurated with three billionaires seated in the front row and some 13 billionaires nominated for the Cabinet and other high positions in government, you can no longer speak of “creep.” Trump’s billionaire government has more wealth than the wealth of more than half the countries in the world combined.2 You might complain that they are billionaires and not necessarily authoritarians. This ignores the fact that they spent millions helping Trump get elected. Trump is definitely an authoritarian. And there is certainty to the idea that they will exercise their power to protect and expand their wealth.
Footnotes
- See my post “Thoughts on ending billionaire wealth – “Every billionaire is a policy failure””
- https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/how-many-billionaires-are-in-trumps-administration-and-what-is-their-worth
