This isn’t to say that the introduction of computers and networks has made no difference in our lives, or doesn’t represent a very important change; obviously it does. The change is not ontological, however. The physical world itself is “made of” information, as I noted above. Furthermore, all of human culture has involved sending and receiving signs using varied media, from speech to graphemes to paintings and poetry; even the human body itself can be seen as flows of information. Now information flow uses new systems which are far faster, which enable much more rapid copying and dissemination across vast physical distances which do not require owning broadcast media towers or printing presses. That is, of course, a change of a very important kind, but it’s not an ontological change, it’s not a creation of a new and separate world.

The world isn’t divided into the “real” and “virtual” any more than the introduction of radio or television divided the world into “real” and “on the air”. It’s introduced new channels for flows of information, and these flows have interesting, even radically new properties, but the existence of new flows doesn’t create a separate reality. We haven’t lived with these patterns of flows for very long, so they feel strange to us, and like every change they induce an instinctive counter-reaction; nostalgia for a past we are more familiar with, and a not entirely irrational fear that the change may introduce social, cultural, or physical phenomena into our lives which negatively impact our lives or destroy cherished features of the world we are replacing.

Bruce Sterling pointed this out quite poignantly in his always-funny and always trenchant SXSW closing talk: even as we change the world, even if in sometimes positive ways, we are simultaneously destroying parts of it. The internet hasn’t created a separate world but it has changed the world. Newspapers and bookstores are on their way out. Even things that came into being with the internet are getting paved over by later iterations of it, as the closing of Google Reader illustrates. The internet has facilitated and accelerated change, and it’s not always just for the better: what comes next rises over the ashes of what we’ve replaced. It’s worth thinking about what we might be losing as we move on, but the world hasn’t bifurcated, and there’s no “going back” to the “real” world — this is already the real world.

This reminds me of a story about my cousin Midori when she was a young girl, maybe 3 years old, visiting with my aunt and uncle. We were hiking in Tecolote canyon in San Diego, and she was throwing rocks into the stream. My aunt said, “don’t throw rocks into the stream, let natural process take care of it!” My cousin said, “But I am part of natural process!” “Natural” doesn’t always mean good or better, however. Denying digital dualism doesn’t foreclose paying attention to the features of change, for the better, the worse, or, as is usually the case, both.

It’s a peculiar tension, because, despite this, Buddhism does talk a lot about realization, enlightenment, and so on. From one point of view, it appears that they’re referring to a process in time, something you build up to and eventually attain (they even use a word which translates to “attainment”.) Yet, it’s not attainment in the ordinary sense, the result or product of ordinary effort in time, because that would be a self-contradiction. The resolution of this seeming contradiction is a central koan, so to speak.

I’ve been attending a meditation retreat, and I came across this book, “Buddhahood Without Meditation”, and flipped open randomly to two pages which seemed quite poignant to me, related to these topics. In the first passage, a mysterious teacher has appeared, and is giving instruction:

“…all sentient beings… are confused because they become fixated, investing apparent phenomena with truth, even though they are in fact like the unfolding of dream images—they cannot be established to be more than mere appearances, empty and without objective existence.

“If you thus come to a definitive conclusion regarding the apparent phenomena that arise from confusion, realizing that they lack true existence, are empty and do not exist objectively, you will have dredged the pit of cyclic existence from its depths. By arriving at the decision that buddhahood is none other than your own inherent ground of being, and by gaining this confidence within yourself, you will actually attain what is referred to as the ‘natural freedom of the many buddhas.’

“Ah, powerful lord of space, omnipresent vajra, you must come to the definitive conclusion that none of the phenomena of samsara and nirvana exist but that all are empty, and you must realize their inherent nature to be that of nonexistence.”

Saying this, he vanished from sight.

Then I flipped to another page, at random, discussing various points one should master:

1) Collapsing the false cave of investing buddhahood and its attendant pure realms with true existence, as objects of hope

Even ”buddhahood” and the various phenomena associated with it do not have real existence and should not be wished for as something one hopes for in the future, as the future result of an ordinary process in time.

a) Negating fixation on conceiving of buddhahood and its attendant pure realms as some final limit

They warn against thinking of “buddhahood” as a limit case of a process or series.

b) To that end, examining the five senses and their attendant objects and refuting the exaggeration of ascribing true existence to these

To begin to realize this, they recommend starting with understanding the constructed, contingent nature of objects of ordinary perception.

2) Collapsing the false cave of investing the states of cyclic existence and their attendant pleasures and pain with true existence, as objects of fear

At the same time, this could potentially lead to the opposite extreme, i.e., thinking of samsara, apparent “reality”, with its pain and pleasure, as something one ought to be afraid of, avoid, attempt to “escape”. In other words, they’re warning against both problematics: setting up “buddhahood” as the limit case of a process in time, or, alternately, seeing “samsara” as a problematic, something one ought to be afraid of, escape, fear. One of the most famous Mahayana sayings is “samsara = nirvana, nirvana = samsara” — not two distinct realms or modes, but two aspects of one unified reality. Yet at the same time, this doesn’t mean there’s no issue — just that the way to work with this tension isn’t via ordinary effort in ordinary time, but rather via an opening to something which is always already the case.

NOTE: There are so many ways to help in the wake of the storm. We’ve collected several that require your actual labor — not your donations or your clicks. The most important thing to understanding what’s going on is to actually go to the areas that need attention. People who need help will not always ask for it, or be able to ask for it. This is a do-it-yourself guide: call or internet if you can, but ultimately just go. Also, we’re running regular event listings below the volunteer opportunities, not because we’re trying to pretend that everything is fine — like certain fucking marathons — but because after you’ve spent the day washing out muck water or running up stairs, dancing feels double good.

* Red Hook: Volunteers needed today at to cook food and coordinate aid. 767 Hicks Street, Brooklyn. Come anytime from 10a-10p and bring something to share. Contact: Paulie Anne Duke: paulieanneduke]at]gmail.com. Also: Norton Records needs helps. This is an indoor job, pulling records out of wet boxes, etc. If anyone has a vehicle of any sort to assist in getting wet boxes from the Red Hook warehouse to HQ in Prospect Heights, please call. No reception in Red Hook. Email is best bet at nortonrec]at]aol.com. Billy’s cell 917 671 7185 and the office landline 718 789 4438. Don’t leave a message. We are working from 11a until 11p every day.

* Coney Island: Coney Island USA’s flooded building needs help. They’re looking for people with dehumidifiers, fans, squeegees, mops, mop buckets, household heavy duty rubber gloves, respirators, paper towels, cleaning cloths, brooms, bleach, disinfectant. They’ll be accepting donations from noon-6p Friday and Saturday. They also need people to help with the clean up. Coney Island USA, 1208 Surf Avenue, corner of West 12th Street, Brooklyn. @ConeyIslandFun

* The Rockaways: Help the clean up effort in Rockaway, where houses were completely devastated by Sandy. Contact: Zack Tucker: 201 320 0226. Today: Veggie Island, 95-19 Rockaway Beach Boulevard, Queens, near Beach 96th Street. Clean and serve food. Contact: Bobby at 718 772 3803. House of Yes is also taking volunteers and supplies: boringincorporated [at] gmail.com

* Williamsburg: Donate blood. 10,000 pints of blood were lost in NYC as a result of cancelled blood drives. Donate blood on Saturday at the Williamsburg Church, 231 Ainslie Street, off the Graham stop on the L train from 10a-4p.

* Lower East Side: Rosie Mendez’s office is doing a check-on-neighborhoods bridged today from 9a-5p. 237 1st Avenue, at 14th Street. Also: The Henry Street Settlement has received an 18-wheeler of meals and donations. They need vehicles, bikes, and humans to help distribute: 265 Henry Street. Also: Some volunteers are going to set up an aid station at ABC No Rio (food and a portable generator for people to charge cell phones) today starting at 10a. 156 Rivington Street between Clinton and Suffolk. Also: GOLES needs help: 169 Avenue B, between 10th and 11th streets, goles.org.

* Chinatown: A strong community effort is happening over at CAAAV, a Chinatown-based community organizing group located at 46 Hester Street, between Essex and Ludlow. They are looking for volunteers. 212 473 6485

* Citywide: The Red Cross needs volunteers who are able to lift 50 pounds and are comfortable working in stressful situations. Contact: staffing (at) nyredcross.org. Also: New York City Public Advocate’s Office needs volunteers. Sign up here to help: bit.ly/nycpaohelp

* More hands-on ways to help:

bit.ly/SandyNonsense

interoccupy.net/occupysandy/

#SandyCleanUp

#SandyVolunteer

#SandyHelp

#SandyAid

Can people be woken up by the same entertain me ideology that has replaced deliberative discourse with all bumper stickers and cutsey memes all the time?

Samuel L. Jackson to Obama Supporters: “Wake the F*ck Up”

Here’s the new online video from the Jewish Council for Education & Research, a liberal super PAC that has had some success in the viral political ad field befo…See More

What you point to as a “humor advantage” I experience as the disadvantage of being earnest. In my experience, earnestness (about anything but especially big, political things) tends to be censured (via informal social means like mockery, ostracism, just being ignored) MORE in lefty circles than in righty. Who has time for democracy? Apparently not the scores of people who rushed to Photoshop before the “debate” (a word that has lost most of it’s literal meaning thanks to US Presidential runs) was over to make ironic little picture to share and click.

Immediately I leap in between them. There’s this whole crowd of people, nobody is doing anything except gawking, and the two men are grabbing each other’s throats and fists are flying and they’re grabbing shirt collars and I’m trying to keep them separated. It’s REALLY tiring doing this, believe me. I get them to stop grabbing each others’ throats. Some of the flying fists glance off my face (not serious, but I can feel it an hour later)… but somehow I manage to push the drunk guy out of the door and I interpose my body between the two of them. The sober guy walks into the store and meanwhile River is talking to the drunk guy and I turn around and we’re telling him to chill, it’s not worth it, it’s not worth it, and he finally calms down and walks away.

The central concept of this panel “Program or Be Programmed” might immediately bring up performance anxiety issues for many people in this audience. As Stephen Ramsay put it recently, the very notion of the tech-savvy digital humanities as the newest “hot thing” tends to bring up “terrible, soul-crushing anxiety about peoples’ place in the world.” For those in composition, the anxiety might be even more acutely soul-crushing in light of existing labor politics. Every time the subject of learning code comes up, one can almost see the thought balloons appearing: “How can I learn Python in my spare time when I can’t even see over the top of the stack of first-year papers that I have to grade?”

One needn’t spend years or even months gaining a basic literacy with code — in reality, the basics of most computer languages can be learned relatively quickly, in hours or days. What’s less easy to obtain is a feel for software architecture, the properties of algorithms, the strangely brittle, powerful, frustrating, and liberating qualities of software engineering, the subtle relationship between design, human unpredictability (we build software for human use, in the context of a social, biological, and economic ecosystem), the ways in which people constantly surprise creators of software, the unpredictable nature of the cycle of design-build-observe-redesign… the many techniques people have attempted to employ to get a handle on these dynamics… all of this goes far beyond the confines of learning code, but are actually, I think, if anything more important for a critical engagement with technology. To get a feel for coding, I’d recommend trying something like Processing or, for the more adventurous, trying to build a simple site using one of the many Rails tutorials. However, after that, I’d stop — and go read a book like Design Patterns, which takes its inspiration from the work of the great architect Christopher Alexander. Then go read up on user experience design, starting with user-centered design up to more current iterative development approaches, and research development methodologies such as waterfall and agile approaches. Getting a grip on some of these subjects would, I think, be far more valuable in terms of understanding the nature of how software is built both today and in the past, how it might be built in the future, and the ways in which software development has gone far beyond the confines of a purely mathematical or engineering discipline to being a discipline which by its very nature has to include many other disciplines within it, ranging from visual design to sociology to aesthetics to ethnology to psychology to statistical analysis to economics — a sense for all this has become essential to developing software, yet at the same time there is a strong need for more and better critical understanding of the larger-scale effects of technology on/in the world. Despite all the sophistication of both the technology and many of the methodologies, there remains a curious naivete, in my view, among many who practice in the field, regarding the sociopolitical, economic, and social implications of technology.

Who are you? You sleep in the sky, and I dream of you, and suddenly you laugh and I roll towards you and remember.

I wrote this to you:

…there are two ways to think… either running on and on and on… Or… stopping to go deeper and deeper into it, to let yourself seep into it, permeate it and let it permeate you, until you’re thoroughly in it and it is in you, you are it, and then you let it breathe and live through you until suddenly it comes bursting forth as brilliant light.

]]> http://www.syntheticzero.com/?feed=rss2&p=1582 http://www.syntheticzero.com/?p=1545 http://www.syntheticzero.com/?p=1545#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:54:39 +0000 mitsu http://www.syntheticzero.com/?p=1545 I dreamt I was in a strange situation, difficult, like war or something, and I was talking with Susan and decided to make an analogy to the Talking Heads song “Life During Wartime.” I started to say, “it’s like that song…” but then I realized I only remembered the last two cities in the line I wanted to quote… “Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh P.A.” … but I wanted to remember the first city in the list because that was cooler sounding. I Googled the lyrics… but the site came up with the part of the lyrics blacked out. I kept trying it on my phone and then my laptop but it just kept stalling and not working. Finally, I dreamt I woke up, and I thought, “Oh, the internet doesn’t work in dreams…” I tried it again but it STILL didn’t work! I realized I was STILL dreaming so I forced myself to really wake up, and Googled it… the answer was ”Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh P.A…”

I would have thought that perhaps somewhere in my unconscious memory there would have been a fragment of knowing the answer was “Houston” but even using an internet search in my dream, I couldn’t call it up. I think this dream was my unconscious telling me there are limits even to unconscious knowledge, and while I believe in hunches I shouldn’t rely too much on them; sometimes you just have to wake up and find an answer out in the world.

Due to the magic of credit card rewards points, I’m staying in by far the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in in London, the Novotel London Greenwich, which I chose primarily because it’s reasonably close to Jenny’s place in Deptford. My room is actually almost normal-sized by American standards, even though it’s the most affordable room type in the place. It’s a bit funny, however, because, despite the fact that it’s quite spacious, it still sports many of the same features present in the super-cramped closets that you find at most budget London hotels; as though the fact that hotels often have to radically conserve space has set up a “standard” which hotel designers follow even if they have the space to do it differently. There are some tiny closets for hanging your clothing, but no dresser drawers at all. The bathroom has one of those microscopic London sinks (even smaller than this one) next to the toilet, even though, inexplicably, it also has a normal-sized sink. There’s a towel rack placed on the other side of the toilet from the bath/shower/sink, making it quite difficult to access and forcing you to step near the toilet when you’re trying to reach one of the towels (not exactly the most hygenic feeling), something that would make sense if the bathroom were too tiny to allow a more convenient arrangement, but in this case, completely unnecessary, given the spaciousness of the room.

I arrived in the early evening with a friend who had been to the protest a number of times already; we wandered about the park, which was quite crowded and well-organized; there was a food area, many bags of garbage neatly stacked, people cleaning the park obsessively, many people standing in small groups talking or trying to squeeze past each other, a table where the anarchists were passing out guidebooks, and it was for the most part relatively calm. I stayed for the entire General Assembly meeting, to get a feel for the process. It was, at times, rather excruciating to have to wait for every sentence fragment to be repeated by the group, but overall I came away quite impressed with the thoughtfulness, organization, and deliberation of those gathered there.

It opened with a long explanation of the process, the hand signals we were supposed to use, and the fact that this night (prior to a feared cleanup and eviction which was not to come to pass) required some urgency. Bloomberg had told the protesters they had to vacate the park temporarily to allow the owners to clean it; the protesters, in a little-reported move, responded by obsessively cleaning the park themselves. Many of the announcements during the meeting related to the cleanup or to temporarily removing stuff the protesters had been using for safekeeping during the cleanup. In addition there were brief reports from the various working groups, ranging from legal to “direct action” to Internet… but what I found most interesting was the debate at the end of the GA regarding the drum circles, which, as my friend pointed out, gave one a feeling a bit like observing an ancient Greek debating assembly.

The discussion opened with a report from a representative of a working group responsible for liaising with the larger community (in this case, as represented by the Manhattan Community Board). He started by telling a brief story about how strongly Scott Stringer, the Manhattan Borough President, supported the movement, and how intensely he had defended #ows’s right to assembly and free speech to the press. This was a relatively clever rhetorical move on his part, I thought, because he clearly wanted the crowd to be positively disposed towards their proposal… which he phrased as a compromise, or a request, which was, basically, that really loud drumming (drum circles) be confined to two hours between the hours of 11am and 5pm. A number of people raised concerns, questions, and issues, at which point he pointed out that this wasn’t a “they” trying to oppress the protesters, but rather people who so strongly supported the movement that they were going to come out and sit in solidarity with the protesters at 5am to resist the eviction by the owners. I thought it was a brilliant move on his part to hold that information until later in the debate, to help turn the tide.

Finally, before the vote, there were two “blocks” — i.e., people who felt so strongly about the issue they were willing to block consensus. A couple of the drummers felt that the drumming helped draw people to the park and the hours should be longer than 2 hours — more like 4, or that the window should be extended to include evening hours. The community board liaison countered that the drummers could bring the issue up again at a later Assembly, and reminded them that individual, intimate drumming performances would always be allowed. The drummers persisted in their block, so they moved to “modified consensus” rules at this point — which means that the community could override the consensus with a 90% vote, which occurred.

I had several observations about this: first, I was impressed with the rhetorical skills of the participants. I was also impressed with the willingness of the assembly to work with elected officials (who repaid their trust later on, as Bloomberg later said a big reason the eviction was called off was due to a flood of calls from elected officials to the park owners). The “modified consensus” process seemed to be well-thought-out and ultimately effective. I was a little concerned about what seemed to me to be a bit of a cultural/ethnic divide, however, in the debate about the drum circles — which is one of my general concerns about activism in the US in general (see below) — the two drummers who attempted to block consensus and some of the other people voting “no” were African-American, and, as is common in many activist crowds, most of the people there were white. Overall, however, the portrayal of some in the media of the movement as being rather disorganized, unfocused, etc., was belied by the reality of the thoughtfulness of the rhetoric, the willingness to cooperate with the local community, and the careful organization of the working group reports and cleanup announcements throughout the meeting.

I have to admit my initial feelings about #ows had been ambivalent; I had been happy, of course, that someone was finally protesting the terrible inequities in our current economic system. However, I often feel that activism in the US tends to be rather insular; culturally and even somewhat ethnically insufficiently diverse, disdainful of the need to talk with people of good will of differing views: lacking in sufficient outreach to the very communities progressives hope to help. There can be a bit of an echo chamber feeling, in my mind, where activists talk mostly to each other rather than to the community at large, and too many seem to come from a similar cultural niche; these are people devoted to inclusion who often seem not to include enough people among those we all hope to help (working class people, minorities, and so on). However, there’s no question that this time, for once, a progressive protest in the US has finally really gained the attention of the nation and the world, perhaps for the first time in decades. Adbusters was right, after all: public, physical protest, carefully positioned, can make a significant difference in the public dialogue.

Every person I passed seemed to shout at me their condition, their situation, so to speak (not that “their condition” actually means something all that well-defined…) and so I started to contemplate this. The tremendous sense of responsibility, a desire to try to work with this odd situation, this strangely okay yet at the same time suffering- and error-filled “situation”.

After a while I started to think, well, this is sort of hubris, it’s not as though I don’t still have much to work on for myself, but the whole “project” of working on my own practice seemed a bit odd. It’s clearly possible for humans to live in this radically, radically different manner, vastly more open and present and engaging with much more of the present being-ness than we usually consciously engage with. Yet at the same time, what’s the implication of that? It seems to be the primary implication is at the same time everything opens up in this vast way, one is also hugely aware of the suffering as well (although “suffering” isn’t really as problematic as it seems, it’s still a serious matter). It just seems to me all my “projects” really ought to be contextualized in this larger situation of the whole world and suffering and pain, so even as I continue to work on my own errors and issues, the problem of how to work with this larger context is still always vividly present.

It is beginning to feel as though part of my larger self includes a vast net which catches the beauty and the pain of the world all at once. It’s excruciatingly, even painfully beautiful and powerful and vast and wise and sad and lovely and breathing and tired and vivid and tragic and satisfying and nourishing and dirty and depraved and cruel and compassionate and light, light, light. The net drags on, gossamer-like, invisible, without weight, trawling up all this and feeding it through my body/energy/mind which isn’t separate from any of it.

As an engineering manager in the tech industry, I have to say this article is totally, utterly misguided and wrong. If anything, college has already moved far too much into the vocational school arena. The purpose of a university education isn’t, I repeat isn’t and shouldn’t ever become mere job training. If you want job training, go to ITT Technical Institute. If you want an education, go to a liberal arts college or university.

One of our singular strengths as a nation is our post-secondary educational system. While we lag far behind the rest of the world in primary and secondary education, we remain far ahead of the world in terms of college education, at least at the elite level. Our top universities consistently rank far ahead of the rest of the world. Furthermore, only in the United States and Canada does the ideal of the liberal arts education really have a strong foothold — and this is something we should continue to encourage, not move away from as this completely misguided article suggests.

As a manager who is constantly looking for employees who can think critically, I am constantly grateful for the liberal arts tradition in our country. Liberal arts doesn’t mean simply the existence of degrees in literature and the humanities — it means that every student at our colleges has access to a broad educational palette to choose from. Even people who graduate as physics or engineering majors typically also have taken some literature and history in college; it’s usually required that students take a broad array of distribution requirements. This is not something which happens in other countries; in the UK, for example, students go straight from high school to medical school or law school, completely skipping the undergraduate level, with the notion, perhaps, that getting a broad education is unnecessary if you’re going to go into a profession such as medicine or law.

But what we need in today’s economy is broad-based critical thinking. I don’t want or need to hire an engineer who can’t communicate well in English or who has no ability to work with designers, marketing people, project managers, user researchers… Building products for the next century requires not only a deep but a wide understanding of the human condition, of how people live, how they think, how they function in the world. I’ve hired engineers who were English majors and designers who have degrees in architecture and technical project managers who are also novelists in their spare time. And all of those hires were spectacularly successful, in no small part to the liberal arts education they all received as undergraduates.

We have a proud and long tradition of the liberal arts in this country. It’s no wonder that Europe and Japan, which lack this tradition, have been unable to catch up with us in areas of tech innovation. They don’t and have never understood the value and power of liberal arts. Now is not the time to start copying them.

Moving away from the liberal arts ideal is not only bad from an intellectual and moral standpoint; it’s bad from an economic standpoint.

For many, many years after I left the Coop I had dreams about the place; in particular, in my dreams I would often find hidden passageways with more rooms. (Later I found out many of my fellow former Coopers had the same recurring dream, oddly enough.) We lived together, cooked together, had strange conversations late into the night. There was an air of possibility, of new ideas, a sense that at any moment we might stumble upon the secret to the universe in one of those bull sessions. And I think we did, at times, touch on parts of it; it wasn’t just a feeling that it might happen, it really did, sometimes, in fragments.

It’s been many years since I’ve spent a lot of time with Elisabeth (not for want of trying — long story); we talked about all sorts of things, ranging from educational policy to Deming quality control to the tech industry … but we also talked about the old days. She reminded me of a few incidents which stood out for her in her mind, things I did — for example, one of her most vivid memories of me was when, one day, she was making bread in the kitchen, and the counter was covered in flour, and I came in and just leaned over until my nose was an inch from the flour, and I stayed like that, for quite a while, not making a sound, until Elisabeth couldn’t resist coming over and tapping me on the back of my head so I got flour on my nose. We both laughed, of course, and she asked me what I had been doing. I said, “I was experimenting with horizontal and vertical.”

1) Real wages for the middle and lower classes have been stagnant for the last few decades (particularly the last decade) while income for the top 1% has skyrocketed and continues to climb. The net effect of the above is that, due to massive improvements in efficiency and productivity, wealth generated by American businesses has gone up steadily for decades, nearly all of the benefit of this has accrued to the ownership class.

2) The speculators invented a crazy system of securities in the wake of financial deregulation which hinged on an unbelievably stupid application of the Gaussian copula function for estimating default correlation. This one mistake amplified what could have been a “normal” real estate bubble into a bubble of gargantuan proportions. The danger to the real economy was drastically worsened by the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the lack of regulatory oversight of the shadow banking system. As far as bubbles, they’re not all alike; I personally would much rather see a bubble caused by excessive speculation on actual companies (i.e., IPOs) than a bubble caused by speculation on synthetic securities whose value was based on a fantasy. At least venture capitalists are trying to build something new, and if we have to go through some mild crashes as a result, I think that’s worth some risk (the economic consequences of the tech crash of 2000 were far less severe than the synthetic  securities crash of 2008).

It seems to me that 1 and 2 are relatively independent problems. 1) is probably caused by the decline of unions, the rise of Ayn Rand thinking among the upper classes: the ownership class believes that it truly is virtually solely responsible for the generation of wealth, almost single-handedly taking all increases in proceeds and giving none of it to the people who actually do the work. Furthermore the drastic lowering of tax rates on the wealthy has further contributed to this steady, unfair imbalance. 2) is a problem of speculative bubbles and insulating the regular banking system from the speculative system. Obama addressed 2) to some degree with financial regulatory reform: the creation of a somewhat weakened Volcker Rule, intended to isolate speculative activity to some degree from the operation of “normal” banking, regulation of the shadow banking system, and so forth, but he has not yet significantly addressed 1).