From Laurie Loves Data
Right after WWII, income gains were shared between all income levels in the US
In 1980 that changed
The very wealthy got the lion's share of income and wealth
*Lobbying by businesses exploded
*The power of unions declined
*Trickle-down economics became the GOP mantra
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| "95th percentile" means 95% of the population earns less than you. "20th" percentile means that you are in the bottom 20%. |
The central mystery of our time is why, at a moment when the whole political and social system is out of control and in total chaos, no one seems able to imagine any alternative. The economic system is not delivering the good life it once promised, but is instead creating chaos and hardship for millions. Meanwhile, those in charge of the system are profiting massively from that chaos, feeding off the uncertainty. And the political class are in thrall to an economic theory that has become absurd and corrupted.
I’ve just made TraumaZone, a series of films about another time when that was happening. It was in Russia in the 1990s after communism collapsed. Those in charge began an experiment to create an extreme form of capitalism. I made it because I don’t think we in the west understand what the Russians went through: a cataclysm that tore apart the foundations of society.
The films are made using a unique source of material: thousands of hours of raw footage recorded by BBC crews in Russia during that time, much of it never seen before. What makes it so extraordinary is that it records the experiences of Russians at every level of society as their world fell apart: from inside the Kremlin to the frozen mining cities of the Arctic circle, from life in the tiny villages of the vast steppes to the strange wars fought in the mountains and forests of the Caucasus.
As I watched the footage I decided that I shouldn’t use my voice or paste music over it. The material was so strong that I didn’t want to intrude pointlessly, but rather let viewers simply experience what was happening, because it was out of this – the anger, violence, desperation and overwhelming corruption – that Vladimir Putin emerged. But as I made the films, the growing chaos here in Britain [and the USA] made me see parallels. There are of course vast differences between our society and the Russia of 30 years ago, but the more you find out about the extreme economic experiment there, and what is happening here now with the present government, the more you see that they both share very similar roots that have nothing to do with either capitalism or communism.
The clue lies in the man who imposed the “shock therapy” experiment on Russia. Called Yegor Gaidar, he was at the heart of the communist establishment. His grandfather was the most famous writer of children’s books in the Soviet Union, and Gaidar had married the daughter of one of the Strugatsky brothers, science-fiction writers who wrote the novel the film Stalker was based on. This economist who would become acting prime minister set out to create a perfect capitalist system in Russia. He had to do it fast, he said, to stop communism from ever returning. Overnight, he removed all controls over prices, while the government gave up on any attempt to manage the system. The aim, said Gaidar, was to create a new zone of perfect freedom in which, despite initial pain, the system would find its own natural equilibrium.
But if you look closer, you will see that his plan had little to do with freedom. It was in fact an odd, machine-like vision of the world driven by pseudoscientific ideas. Gaidar believed that by unleashing “free market forces” on an extreme scale, they would act as “market stimuli” that would then automatically lead people into “rational” patterns of behaviour. In reality, it was a simplified engineering system where human beings would be reshaped, turned into the right kinds of beings to make the new system work. In that way, it was like a reverse image of the Soviet plan. It was still a way of controlling behaviour through levers, but just a different way.
And it didn’t work. It led to total chaos.
Both the right and the left see [Friedrich von Hayek] as the man who masterminded the return of the free market, what is called “neoliberalism”. But I think Hayek, who was a powerful influence on Gaidar, was actually far stranger than that.
Hayek believed that economics was the key to the future of the world because it would stop governments trying to imagine new kinds of societies. He wrote a book called The Road to Serfdom, saying that in the new age of the mass, it was impossible to impose a vision of the future on to millions of people without leading to horror – like fascism and communism had. Instead, Hayek had an epic vision in which millions of people would together create a stable social system through the signals they send each other. At the heart of that was the pricing system. Governments should pull back and not control prices – and instead allow a “spontaneous order” without central control. The people, not politicians, would create the new society together as “economic actors”.
Up to that point, economics had been important in government, but only as a tool to help manage the societies politicians wanted to build. But in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, she began an experiment that brought economic logic into the very heart of the political system. The problem was that it almost immediately went haywire. It not only created massive inflation but was one of the main reasons for the de-industrialisation of British society. As her senior advisers admitted, Thatcher very quickly gave up on the experiment and turned instead to the banks to lend people money. And a wave of cheap money and debt covered up the problems until the financial crash of 2008.
In reality, the grand ideas of Gaidar and Hayek had very little to do with ideas of the free market. They were actually rooted in old dreams born in the 19th century that science and rational systems could be used on a grand scale to replace politics, because that would avoid the human messiness and uncertainties that continually push politics off course. In fact, the system Gaidar set out to replace – the Soviet plan – was also rooted in those pseudo-scientific dreams. It had little to do with communism.
In the 1930s, in the Soviet Union under Stalin, the old ideology fell away and was replaced by a giant experiment. Human beings became simplified into components in a system that could be managed in a rational way with predictable outcomes. Those ideas also flourished in America in the 1930s. A mass movement called “technocracy” rose up. Hundreds of men and women, dressed “rationally” in grey outfits, travelled through the US calling for what they called a “Technate”, a new kind of society that would be run rationally by engineers. One of their leading members was Elon Musk’s grandfather.
But all these movements were really the product of a weird overreach of science attempting to grab and colonise the political realm. And in reality, those experiments always failed. Whether in the Soviet Union, or in 1980s Britain, or under Gaidar’s shock therapy, and now with [Elon Musk], it never creates a rational system. It actually creates the opposite: a system that becomes increasingly unequal and open to exploitation by a small elite. And there are no political levers to stop them.
In Russia, the films show moments that capture the terrifying speed with which the chasm between rich and poor opened up. Thousands couldn’t even afford food or pay for heating while the health service collapsed around them. Bewildered shoppers are told “there are no potatoes in Moscow”, while the new elite re-stage elaborate 18th-century balls in old palaces outside St Petersburg.
We see the ruthless self-interest of managers and gangsters as they discover more and more ways to loot the failing state, with machines in the oligarchs’ “banks” endlessly counting millions of rouble notes before they are moved into offshore zones. And no one in the political system could stop them. At the heart of all this was an increasingly drunken president Yeltsin who sat in the Kremlin staring at the wall saying to his bodyguard: “They are stealing Russia.”
And in Britain, quantitative easing and the extreme rise in asset prices and property it brought about are as destructive to the lives of millions of ordinary people as were the oligarchs in Russia in the 1990s. The kind of freedom that this sort of technate offers is always very limited: people are just components in a system, free to do what they want, but only within the narrow logic of the iron cage of pseudoscientific economics. A world where they dance, but only in those chains.
At this time of economic chaos, it feels imperative to reassess what both the west and Russia actually went through in the past 50 years. Perhaps it was neither communism nor the free market that failed, but the Technate. We should clear away the pseudoscience of economics that has politicians trapped in a death grip – and look again at both capitalism and communism for the human values and aspirations they contain. And from that could come real alternative visions of the future.
[Lightly edited]
Neo-liberalism destroyed Russian society, and led to the rise of Putin, who brought "order". Gorbachev hoped that communist Russia would be turned into a social democracy on Scandinavian lines. Instead it became an oligarchy with vast inequality, and a steady growth in tyranny. In the USA, a similar process has taken place, driven by far-right theorists and politicians. Oligarchy is becoming the norm there too. And Elon Musk wants to export this toxic system to the rest of the world.
The problem with unfettered capitalism is that it inevitably gets more and more extreme, and more and more dangerous for democracy. It's like a top spinning out of control. And one day it falls over. |
| Loneliness (Credit: @chantaldgarcia via Twenty20) |
Loneliness has long been associated with ill health but researchers say they have fresh insights into the link between the two.
While poor health can result in people becoming isolated and lonely, studies have also suggested loneliness can itself lead to poorer health.
Now researchers say they have unpicked a mechanism for the latter relationship, finding loneliness can affect the levels of a handful of proteins associated with various diseases and even death.
Prof Barbara Sahakian, a co-author of the study at the University of Cambridge, said the World Health Organization had declared social isolation and loneliness a major problem in the world. “I think the message is that we’ve got to start to get people to realise that it’s part of a health thing, both for their mental health and their wellbeing but also for their physical health, that they have to remain connected with other people,” she said.
Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers describe how they used data from more than 42,000 participants in the UK Biobank project to explore whether the 9.3% who reported social isolation and 6.4% who reported loneliness had different levels of proteins in their blood compared with those who did not.
After taking into account factors including age, sex, education level, smoking and alcohol consumption, the team found 175 proteins associated with social isolation and 26 proteins associated with self-reported loneliness, many of which overlapped. Most of the proteins were found at higher levels in people who had reported social isolation or loneliness, and are involved in inflammation, antiviral responses and the immune system.
The researchers then studied data that tracked the health of participants over an average 14-year period. “We found around 90% of these proteins are linked to the risk of mortality,” said Dr Chun Shen, the first author of the research, from Fudan University in China. In addition, about 50% of the proteins were linked to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and stroke.
The researchers then used an approach known as Mendelian randomisation to look at whether people with genetic variants associated with loneliness or social isolation had a greater chance of having higher levels of the proteins of interest. They also looked at whether people with genetic variants that meant they had higher levels of these proteins were more likely to be socially isolated or lonely.
Assuming these variants are spread randomly throughout the population, the approach can shed light on whether levels of the proteins are a driver, or an effect, of social isolation or loneliness.
The researchers found none of the proteins appeared to cause social isolation or loneliness. However, loneliness influenced the levels of five proteins. “We found all these five proteins are related to numerous inflammation and metabolic markers,” Shen said.
Among other findings, these five proteins partly explained the association between loneliness and cardiovascular disease, stroke, and mortality, with four of the five associated with the volume of brain regions involved in emotional and social processes and the brain’s perception of the body’s state.
Shen said while the effects were not large, they were significant, noting that levels of one of the proteins, known as ADM, could explain, on average, about 7.5% of the association between loneliness and the risk of four diseases and mortality.
Prof Marko Elovainio, of the University of Helsinki, who was not involved in the work, said the study strongly supported previous research indicating that loneliness and – to some extent – social isolation were linked to numerous physical health problems, possibly as a result of systemic inflammatory processes induced by stress.
“A significant contribution of this study is that it now elucidates the biological mechanism – proteins – that may be responsible for the observed connections,” he said.
However, Elovainio suggested stress-related health behaviours, such as heavy alcohol consumption and low physical activity, might be an even more significant factor contributing to the health impacts of loneliness, and might also underlie some of the protein level changes flagged in the study.
“How society should … reduce the health risks related to loneliness is the interesting question, and if we want to focus on the mechanisms, the behaviour is probably [an] easier target than proteins,” he said.
Here's the thing: conventional economics, and capitalism, price everything. And in their models, friendship, affection, love, caring, fun, joy and companionship have no value. Their models don't "solve" for high levels of these intangible things which make life worthwhile.
Neo-liberalism has comprehensively failed. Time for a change in what we value and how we treat each other.
[See also: How Chronic Loneliness Can Trigger Health Problems; Shit-life Syndrome; and Loneliness]
... its power seems inescapable. But so did the divine right of kings.
(I don't know who designed this marvellous graphic. If you do, let me know in the comments or on Mastodon)
The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the globe’s largest industrial co-operative, with workers paying for the right to share in its profits – and its losses. In return for giving more to their employer, they expect more back.
When Marisa Fernández lost her husband to cancer a few years ago, her employers at the Eroski hypermarket went, she says, “above and beyond to help me through the dark days afterwards, rejigging my timetable and giving me time off when I couldn’t face coming in.”
She had a chance to return the favour recently when the store, in Arrasate-Mondragón in Spain’s Basque Country, was undergoing renovations. Fernández, 58, who started on the cashier desk 34 years ago, and now manages the store’s non-food section, volunteered to work extra shifts over the weekend along with her colleagues to ensure everything was ready for Monday morning. “It’s not just me. Everyone is ready to go the extra mile,” she says.
Such harmonious employer-worker relations are the stuff of corporate dreams, and they are no accident here: the Eroski retail chain is part of Mondragón Corporation, the largest industrial co-op in the world. As a fully signed-up member, Fernández co-owns part of the supermarket chain that also employs her. “It feels like mine,” she says. “We work hard, but it’s a totally different feeling from working for someone else.”
That sentiment is echoed by Mondragón’s 70,000 other workers. Made up of 81 autonomous co-operatives, the corporation has grown since its creation in 1956 to become a leading force in the Basque economy. Eroski is one of its most conspicuous manifestations, with 1,645 outlets across Spain. In addition to food, the chain has profitable sidelines in white goods, electronics, insurance and holiday bookings.
More than its economic success, though, Mondragón has become a beacon for the co-operative model, as a more humane and egalitarian way of doing business that puts “people over capital”. Every worker has a stake in the company’s fortunes and a say in how it is run, and receives a share of the profits. But the goal is more about creating “rich societies, not rich people”. That means looking after workers during not only the good times but the tough times, too.
The lowest point for Maite Aguirrebeitia, for example, came back in 2013, when, after 20 years’ service, the Mondragón co-operative that she and her husband were affiliated to, Fagor Electrodomésticos, filed for bankruptcy. Demand for its ovens and household appliances had plummeted after the 2008 financial crisis and despite help from a Mondragón “solidarity fund”, it never recovered.
“I felt this overwhelming sense of pain and grief at the time, as if someone close to me had died,” the 56-year-old communications specialist recalls. “Plus we had two kids and bills to pay and so on. The mental stress of it all was huge.”
Rather than thank the redundant workers for their service and wish them on their way, Mondragón committed to find alternative employment for as many of Fagor’s 1,900 or so workers as it could. After temporary stints in five Mondragón co-operatives in 2022, Aguirrebeitia found a permanent placement with Mondragon Assembly, a manufacturer of equipment for process automation.
Although it has meant a shift in career – she now works part-time in human resources, and part-time as a receptionist – the security of having a fixed job is a “huge relief”, she says. “I always felt confident that somehow I’d be looked after. I talked to other people who were out of work at the time and they had none of that. They were out on the street, totally alone. If I’d had to compete in the open job market against all the youngsters coming out of university, I’m not sure I’d have ever found another job.”
Mondragón’s human-centric approach originated far from any business management school. Its roots lie in a socially engaged form of Catholicism that gained ground in the 1940s, during the early years of the Francoist regime. Its initial champion was a Basque-born cleric named José María Arizmendiarrieta, who, in 1941, arrived in the small town of Arrasate-Mondragón, about 30 miles (50km) south-east of Bilbao.
Taking it as his pastoral mission to revitalise the local economy, the diocesan priest set up a technical school for young men. A few years later, he arranged for some of them to take distance-learning degrees in industrial engineering. “After graduating, they all found jobs in conventional companies in the town, but they felt stifled … they wanted more of a say over their destiny, but their employers thought otherwise,” explains Ander Etxeberria, head of Mondragón’s outreach programme.
With Arizmendiarrieta’s encouragement, five of these first 11 graduates decided in 1955 to set up the now defunct Fagor Electrodomésticos. Seeking a model that reflected their Christian socialist philosophy, they turned to the Rochdale Pioneers, a group of tradespeople from the Lancashire town who, more than a century before, had established the world’s first co-operative. That venture grew to become today’s Co-operative Group, home to the UK’s fifth biggest food retailer and its largest provider of funeral services.
Mondragón’s founders adopted wholesale many of the Pioneers’ core tenets. In their modern-day headquarters, located in a renovated 14th-century tower with a spectacular mountain backdrop, Etxeberria counts off the group’s 10 “basic principles”. The list ranges from the sovereignty of labour and democratic organisation (one member, one vote), to wage solidarity and “social transformation” – which includes reinvesting surpluses to create new jobs, supporting local charities and community development projects, and strengthening the Basque Country’s Euskara language. Top of the list is voluntary and open membership – namely, the opportunity for everyone to have a personal stake in the enterprise where they work. As an early version of the principles reads: “The first form of elemental justice that we need to practise is to consider each other as free human beings.”
These values hold true into the present, Etxeberria explains. The salary differential between the highest and lowest paid workers in Mondragón, for example, remains about six to one; for the largest 500 listed companies in the US, the gap is closer to 272 to one. At the year end, members of Mondragón’s co-operatives also decide collectively on whether they should pay themselves bonuses and, if so, how much. This profit-sharing comes in addition to a base pay rate that, on average, is 40% above Spain’s minimum wage.
Despite its social responsibility credentials, Mondragón remains a competitive business. When Etxeberria presses “play” on an introductory video, the screen shows not pictures of happy workers doing yoga but gleaming industrial facilities and straight-faced technicians in lab coats. Overlaying these images are facts and figures that would have mainstream financiers salivating: €10.6bn (£9.1bn) in annual revenues; a dozen research and development facilities; a global roster of blue-chip clients; and a diversified sector spread – industry, retail, finance and education.
The same no-nonsense, professional vibe is on show at Fagor Arrasate, a Mondragón affiliate located on one of the many industrial estates that ring Arrasate-Mondragón, a vibrant town of cafe-strewn streets and busy bars. A specialist in metal presses and stamping systems, Fagor Arrasate boasts several hangar-sized workshops full of robotic machinery and giant components ready for export. “Some of the installations we make for customers can be three to four storeys high, so these are massive, multimillion-euro investments,” enthuses Edorta Mendieta, the venture’s marketing manager.
Pinned to a cork noticeboard beside a busy production line are photos of a recent charity run, a printout of donations to local causes (including €60,000 for a nearby organic food association), and a poster about a forthcoming “women in science” event. In the centre of the board, an A4 sheet of closely printed text gives notice of the co-operative’s general assembly, where next year’s strategy plan will be put to an all-member vote.
Mondragón’s collective spirit also offers an edge with innovation. In a process that the movement refers to as “inter-cooperation”, co-operatives within the group frequently swap ideas between themselves and engage in joint research.
Over the years, many of the best innovations have come from alliances with Mondragón’s homegrown university. Located on a leafy campus in Arrasate-Mondragón, the university was set up with a strong practical bent to both its teaching and its research. So much so, in fact, that the European Commission recently selected it to co-lead a major “dual training” programme aimed at blending academia with business to tackle global challenges such as the climate crisis.
Mondragón’s approach has proved itself profitable and resilient, so could it become a realistic alternative to the modern corporation?
It’s a moot point. Despite their worker-first philosophy, the movement’s leaders are reluctant to denounce the wealth-maximising nature of modern market capitalism. The reason is as simple as it is awkward: Mondragón must actively participate in that same capitalist system for its survival.
This tactic of being “in, but not of” the world of mainstream business has seen the Basque-based movement face charges of double standards. In particular, critics highlight its outsourcing of some of its production to low-wage countries with weaker labour standards, such as China and Mexico. Mondragón argues that it has checks and balances in place to ensure that its foreign business partners uphold workers’ rights, and that keeping costs low is part and parcel of staying competitive. “For us, workers will always come before capital. But capital is still important because without it we cannot fulfil our mission of social transformation,” says Javier Marcos, Mondragón’s director of communications.
Radical as that mission is, its focus is and always has been primarily on el territorio (the local Basque region); less about rewriting the global economic order and more about improving co-op members’ lives. That said, if others want to copy the Mondragón model, then its doors are always open, insists Etxeberria. In the past month alone, he has hosted large groups of policymakers and business students from the Philippines, Brazil and the US. “They come to see if our approach works in practice,” he says. “They all go back pleasantly surprised, I think.”
Young people, in particular, are attracted to the notion of business and entrepreneurship going beyond just the pursuit of profit, but they “don’t know the co-operative possibility exists,” says Ana Aguirre, a graduate of Mondragón University. The 33-year-old now co-runs Tazebaez, a worker-owned consultancy and education provider that she and eight fellow students created during their bachelor’s degree. For the few who have heard of co-operativism, she adds, most relegate it in the folksy, do-gooder box. “The problem is that it’s portrayed as something to do with charity or [philanthropic] foundations, rather than as a credible business model.”
Pursuing a co-operative model is far from plain sailing, however. Numerous hurdles exist. For one, membership does not come cheap. To join a co-operative, workers typically put up a one-off payment of about €17,000 each. Plus, just as they are entitled to a share of any profits, so, too, are they liable for any losses.
Commercial pressures can also prove acute, as Fagor Electrodomésticos’s troubled history shows. The fact that all major investment decisions have to be put to the vote can also make Mondragón’s co-operatives less agile than their conventional competitors. And finding financing can be problematic as the private capital markets are effectively closed to them, admits Fagor Arrasate’s Mendieta: “We can’t incorporate external capital into the co-operative’s share capital because we are governed by the principle of ‘one person, one vote’, which no capitalist investor would accept.”
In some parts of the world, Mondragón’s approach just looks downright weird. No one bats an eyelid at the co-operative model in countries such as Germany, “but with these ideas in Texas or Kansas, you’re basically a communist,” says Mendieta, only half jokingly.
Across Europe, at least, the co-operative model is widespread. In Norway, for instance, co-ops have a strong heritage in the social housing sector. Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region boasts a long tradition of industrial co-operatives similar to that of the Basque Country. And, as well as the Co-operative Group, the UK’s almost 7,000 co-operatives include the mighty John Lewis Partnership, which has a turnover of nearly £10bn. In total, the EU hosts about 250,000 co-operatives, providing 5.4m jobs.
Increasingly, the movement’s footprint is also being seen in company law. Germany has long required corporate boards to have worker representatives, for instance. Similarly, Spanish law allows unemployed people to lump together their unemployment benefit to set up small businesses – known as Sociedades Laborales – as long as they are majority owned by their employees. The rise in mainstream corporations now talking the language of employee autonomy, horizontal management, dignified wages and similar themes suggests co-operativism is leaving its mark on business company practices if not – yet – on capitalist ownership
Back in Mondragón’s fort-like headquarters, Etxeberria is quietly confident about the movement’s prospects. Co-operativism, he says, is a little like zirimiri – the Eusakara word for “drizzle”. “It’s the same ideas that keep falling; they’ll settle eventually.”
“What we need is equality without conformity.”“Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.”“Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.”“You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”“We were outside the world, we didn't even own things -- some clothes. . . . This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from 3 millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, to make things, or satisfy one's curiosity, or play. That is utopia.”“And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.”“Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.”“History was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren't looking -- an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.”“That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.”“That's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”
Worldwide, 49 percent of all wild bird species are in steep decline. BirdLife International’s authoritative report, State of the World’s Birds 2022, estimates that there are now nearly three billion fewer wild birds in Canada and the U.S. than a few decades ago, and about 600 million fewer in the European Union. Less comprehensive data is available for the global south, but studies in some South American, African and Asian countries have shown similar declines.
Many accounts of bird population decline simply list multiple possible causes for the decline — wind turbines, urbanization, climate change, logging, wildfires, hunting and even domestic cats. The absence of data on which factors are most important has been a convenient excuse for doing nothing to save the birds.
An important study published in the May 15 issue of PNAS — the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — takes that excuse away. Its title clearly states its principal finding: Farmland Practices Are Driving Bird Population Decline across Europe. The study “provides strong evidence of a direct and predominant effect of farmland practices at large continental scales.”
This is by far the most extensive study to date of bird population dynamics. Over fifty ornithologists, zoologists, biologists and ecologists analyzed decades of population data for 170 bird species in over 20,000 sites in 28 European countries, measuring them against four known pressures on bird populations: agricultural intensification, change in forest cover, urbanization and temperature change.
Between 1980 and 2016 European bird populations as a whole fell by a quarter, but the number of farmland birds dropped by more than half. Areas dominated by large farms saw bigger declines than areas where most farms are smaller.
The single biggest cause of bird declines is chemical-intensive farming. Some birds are killed by pesticides or herbicides, but the most important impacts are loss of food, especially insects and other invertebrates that most bird species depend on, and the spread of fertilizer-intensive monocultures that eliminate shelter and nesting areas. Insect-eating populations declined more than any others.
In short, the collapse of farmland bird populations is closely related to the Insect Apocalypse in the Anthropocene, discussed here recently. The mass slaughter of insects is killing masses of birds.
Industrial agriculture is not, of course, the only driver. Loss of habitat resulting from urban growth and deforestation caused declines, in those areas, of 27.8% and 17.7% respectively. Climate change had mixed effects — northern, cold-preferring birds fell 39.7%, and southern, warm-preferring bird species dropped 17.1%. Overall, however, the most important bird killer is large-scale capitalist agriculture.
The study concludes:
“Considering both the overwhelming negative impact of agricultural intensification and the homogenization introduced by temperature and land-use changes, our results suggest that the fate of common European bird populations depends on the rapid implementation of transformative change in European societies, and especially in agricultural reform.”
My radio/TV program and my daily Substack newsletter, Hartmann Report, together are a small business. The only way I can increase my income from that business is by increasing the advertising revenue to the show, getting more people signed up for the newsletter, or both.
Build the business, in other words. Do the hard work every day. Keep my “customers” informed and thus happy: add value through research and share what I learn along the way.
It used to be that way with big business as well — companies grew in value because of good management and continual reinvestment in people, facilities, and product — until Ronald Reagan adopted neoliberalism and rewrote the rules of business.
Southwest Airlines passengers, for example, are today lamenting lost time with loved ones, lost luggage, and lost money spent on hotels, airline reroutes, and rental cars.
They missed weddings and funerals, spending time with family, and some confronted life-threatening situations as luggage-packed medications went missing and dialysis appointments had to be skipped.
All, apparently, so senior executives at Southwest and their morbidly rich investor cronies could get billions richer.
Here’s how it works.
If you’re the CEO of Southwest Airlines, or most any publicly traded corporation, there are two main ways you can increase your own compensation. They are:
1. Build the company: Invest in workers and technology. Open new routes. Provide better service to passengers. Upgrade your planes so people will want to fly with you. Pay your people better to build employee retention.
2. Use company profits to buy back and retire Southwest stock.
According to corporate watchdog Accountable.US, most of the evidence suggests the immediate predecessor to Southwest’s new CEO chose door number two as often as possible.
But how and why does it happen that CEOs and senior executives make a pile of money when they direct their own corporation to buy back its stock out of the marketplace?
And how did this manipulation of stock prices ever get decriminalized after being illegal for a half-century?
Imagine you’re the CEO of Acme Airlines, a company valued at $10 billion. The company has issued a billion shares of stock that are currently trading at $10 a share ($10 x 1 billion shares = $10 billion).
As the CEO, you’re not only paid a salary, you also have the two typical forms of “stock incentives” modern corporations give their senior executives.
The first is “performance compensation,” meaning as the price of the stock goes up you get bonuses and/or an increase in your pay. The second is that you’re partly compensated with stock or stock options (the right to buy stock at a predetermined typically low price).
If you can increase the share price of Acme Airline’s stock, you not only get a big bonus for hitting your “performance” target, but the stock you hold or can buy at a fixed (lower) price also increases in value. You get rich(er)!
But let’s also say that you’re not interested in building Acme as a way of increasing the stock price: that’s a lot of work and takes years. You want big bucks fast.
So, you simply direct your company to go into the marketplace, to the stock exchange where Acme is traded, and buy up, say, a hundred million shares.
The company is still worth $10 billion, the value of all the planes, landing slots, goodwill, corporate buildings, and assets: none of that has changed.
You haven’t added a single customer or paid a single flight attendant, mechanic, gate agent, or pilot an extra penny. You haven’t improved service or widened the seats in the planes to get in new customers. All you’ve done is use $1 billion in company profits to buy a hundred million shares at $10 each and “retire” them.
But now that the company has bought and retired a hundred million shares, instead of there being a billion shares in circulation there are only 900 million, even though the company is still worth just $10 billion.
As a result of your directing Acme to do that “share buyback,” every share that still exists is worth roughly 10% more because there are 10% fewer of them.
Which means the piles of shares you’ve gotten in compensation are now worth 10% more, too. And because the stock price went up, you’ll be getting a nice “performance” bonus at the year’s end.
This used to be a crime called “stock price manipulation” and was one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s and Congress’ early targets when they went after the Wall Street crooks who brought us the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.
Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934 and FDR put Joe Kennedy (JFK’s father) in charge of it; Kennedy ironically told my old friend the late Gloria Swanson that he was chosen because, she told me, FDR had wisecracked that, “It takes a crook to catch a crook.”
Kennedy, knowing how the game worked, outlawed stock buybacks as one of his first official acts.
But in 1982 President Reagan endorsed this very form of corporate corruption as part of his new neoliberal Reaganomics agenda, decriminalizing it for the first time in almost a half-century.
Lest you think it improbable that modern CEOs would do this, as it’s so obviously corrupt and harmful to the company itself, consider this headline from the corporate watchdog group Accountable.US:
“Southwest Cancellation Crisis Follows Execs’ Choice to Reward $5.6B to Shareholders Instead of Investing in Infrastructure”
As their press release lays out:
“Government watchdog Accountable.US called the airline’s cancellation crisis a problem of its own making after slashing its workforce by over 1,400 in 2021 and choosing to spend $5.6 billion on stock buybacks in the 3 years leading up to the pandemic rather than making investments in infrastructure to be better prepared for extreme weather events like this week…”
This Reaganomics neoliberalism scam has made America’s corporate CEOs and stock speculators among the wealthiest people in the world, while keeping down wages and benefits for everybody else. It’s hurt the competitiveness of American business.
It started with Reagan’s putting John Shad— the Vice Chairman of the monster investment house E.F. Hutton — in charge of the SEC, which regulates monster investment houses.
Shad wasted no time in deregulating stock buybacks, instituting in 1982 what’s now known as “Rule 10b-18” that made stock buybacks explicitly legal for the first time since 1934.
Since then, share buybacks have become the most personally profitable business scam CEOs and senior executives can run against their own employees, companies, and communities.
When Reagan and Shad made this change in 1982, the average compensation of CEOs was around 30 times that of their average employee. CEO’s often lived in the same communities as their workers, or in a just slightly more upscale part of town.
Today CEO compensation is between 254 and 1000 times the average employee, depending on the industry, and CEOs live in palatial estates with servants’ quarters, yachts, and private jets; much of that increase in their annual income is the result of their companies’ repeatedly executing stock buybacks over the past 40 years.
Corporate CEOs call this “maximizing shareholder value” and claim it’s how capitalism is supposed to work.
As more and more CEOs got in on the scam since Reagan legalized it in the 1980s, it’s come to account for much of the 40-year explosion in the price of publicly traded stocks.
Investors don’t complain because they’re making out well, too (and 84 percent of all stock in America is owned by the top 10 percent).
It’s also why so much of America’s corporate infrastructure is rotting, from leaking methane from oil rigs to toxic spills from chemical factories to industrial waste being discharged into our environment instead of being cleaned up.
After all, why spend money on improving the company — or even on routine maintenance and safety — when you can personally cash in just as effectively by simply using your company’s revenues to engineer a stock buyback scheme every year?
As William Lazonick wrote for The Hill in 2018:
“Most recently, from 2007 through 2016, stock repurchases by 461 companies listed on the S&P 500 totaled $4 trillion, equal to 54 percent of profits. ... Indeed, top corporate executives are often willing to incur debt, lay off employees, cut wages, sell assets, and eat into cash reserves to ‘maximize shareholder value.’”
You’d think that if a company’s stock was going up in value that would indicate it is doing well and could even pay its employees better.
In fact, the CEOs of companies need cash to do these buybacks, and to get that cash they often lay off workers and even cut back on their main business just to enrich themselves and their senior executives.
As Emily Stewart wrote that same year for Vox:
“The thing is, when companies are investing in stock buybacks and dividends, they’re spending money they could use on something else.
“The Roosevelt Institute in May released a report estimating that Walmart, for example, could boost hourly wages to more than $15 an hour with the $20 billion it was using for a buyback. A separate study from the Roosevelt Institute released in July found that companies spent nearly 60 percent of net profits on buybacks from 2015 to 2017.
“It estimated that with the money allocated to buybacks, companies such as Lowes, CVS, and Home Depot could give each of their workers a raise of at least $18,000 a year [on top of their current income!].
“Harley-Davidson in February announced a nearly $700 million stock buyback plan just days after saying it would close a plant in Kansas City. Wells Fargo is spending $25 billion on buybacks and is at the same time laying off workers in multiple states.”
Share buybacks have replaced growing a business as the main way CEOs jack up their compensation to buy a new mega-yacht or ski chalet in Switzerland. And its just as much of a scam today, and just as destructive to working people and our nation, as it was in 1929 when it helped crash the market.
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been shouting about this from the rooftops for decades. Hillary Clinton brought it up in her 2016 campaign for president, something that no doubt cost her some CEO support.
At the time, Financial Times US National Editor Ed Luce wrote, in an article titled Hillary’s War on Quarterly Capitalism:
“The case for reforming shareholder capitalism is strong. The level of US investment [in actual business activity] is at its lowest since 1947. Last year, according to Goldman Sachs, S&P 500 companies spent more than $500bn on share buybacks. This year it is expected to hit $600bn.”
That was in 2015. Just so far this year:
Macys bought back 28.9% of their shares spending $2 billion they could have otherwise used to expand the business or raise workers’ pay.
Chesapeake Energy bought back 20.6% using $2 billion.
Diamondback Energy spent $4 billion to buy back 17.9 percent of their own shares.
For Morgan Stanley it was 14.8% of shares at a cost to the company of $20 billion.
The entire list — hundreds of billions in share buybacks just this year — is on this Marketbeat site.
When the biggest oil companies in America reported record profits this year, ripping off American drivers with sky-high gas prices, Reuters reported on April 29:
“Exxon earlier this year more than doubled its projected buyback program to $30 billion through 2022 and 2023. Shell said it would buy back $6 billion in shares in the current quarter, while Chevron boosted its annual buyback plans to a range of $10 billion to $15 billion, up from $5 billion to $10 billion.
“Exxon shares rose 4.6% to $96.93. Chevron shares rose almost 9%, closing at $163.78.”
CNBC reports:
“Apple started to pay quarterly dividends and repurchase its shares in March 2012. Since then and through last summer, Apple has spent over $467 billion on buybacks, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, which calls the iPhone maker the ‘poster child’ for share buybacks.”
Facebook, which apparently doesn’t have enough cash to hire people to keep Nazis off their platform, has made its top stockholder, Mark Zuckerberg, the richest millennial in America in part through share buybacks, announcing in their third quarter 2021 earnings report:
“We repurchased $14.37 billion of our Class A common stock in the third quarter and had $7.97 billion remaining on our prior share repurchase authorization as of September 30, 2021. We also announced today a $50 billion increase in our share repurchase authorization.”
Democratic politicians have been working for years to try to end this corrosive practice. Senator Tammy Baldwin wrote in a 2015 letter to the SEC’s chair:
“Stock buybacks use profits to purchase a company’s own stock instead of investing in the worker training, research, or innovation necessary to promote long-term growth. ... In the past, this money went to productive investments in the form of higher wages, research and development, training, or new equipment. Today, cash is being extracted from companies and placed on the sidelines. Buybacks are now undermining the stock market’s role in capital formation.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren noted:
“Buybacks create a sugar high for the corporations. It boosts prices in the short run, but the real way to boost the value of a corporation is to invest in the future, and they are not doing that.”
In 2019, Senators Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer co-authored an article for The New York Times in which they told America:
“Between 2008 and 2017, 466 of the S&P 500 companies spent around $4 trillion on stock buybacks, equal to 53 percent of profits. An additional 40 percent of corporate profits went to dividends. When more than 90 percent of corporate profits go to buybacks and dividends, there is reason to be concerned.
“First, stock buybacks don’t benefit the vast majority of Americans. That’s because large stockholders tend to be wealthier. Nearly 85 percent of all stocks owned by Americans belong to the wealthiest 10 percent of households. Of course, many corporate executives are compensated through stock-based pay. So when a company buys back its stock, boosting its value, the benefits go overwhelmingly to shareholders and executives, not workers.”
Pointing out that share buybacks inflate the wealth of the top 10% of Americans who own most of this nation’s stocks — increasing inequality — while generally screwing the people who work for those companies, they added:
“[W]hen corporations direct resources to buy back shares on this scale, they restrain their capacity to reinvest profits more meaningfully in the company in terms of R&D, equipment, higher wages, paid medical leave, retirement benefits and worker retraining.”
Small businesses like mine and millions of others across this nation can’t engage in this sort of manipulation to seemingly pull money out of thin air. Large businesses shouldn’t be able to, either.
It’s time to declare the 42-year Reagan Revolution’s neoliberal experiment a failure, and outlaw the share buybacks that are one of its most visible markers. Joe Kennedy knew what he was talking about when he criminalized them, even if he was a crook.
A first step toward restoring vitality to America’s business sector and providing much-needed funds to return America to our position as the world’s innovator — with the world’s most prosperous middle class, as we were before Reagan’s introduction of neoliberalism — is to once again outlaw stock buybacks.
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| Source: CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978 |
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| From 2010, measures that reduced local authority spending by about 60% and imposed 40% cuts on many government departments were brought in. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Source: The Guardian |
Jim Callaghan, an underrated UK prime minister, put it best just before the 1979 general election. "You know there are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now a sea-change and it is for Mrs Thatcher."
Give or take a few years, his analysis was spot on. Looking back from the winter of discontent, he knew that the major shift to greater government influence in economic affairs that the Depression and Second World War triggered had run its course. He did not know what would cause it, but he also understood that the Reagan/Thatcher experiment that was turfing him out of power would be time-limited, too.
These sea-changes are never watershed moments, but an accumulation of finally unstoppable forces book-ended by crises. The Depression and global conflict transformed what the public wanted to create in the post-war era; the rolling crises of the Seventies provided the intellectual justification for the new small-state philosophy that followed; and it has taken 12 years from financial crisis to COVID-19 to see the pendulum swing back again to the economic and social order that will most likely dominate the next 30 years.
What might this new order look like? My investment strategy colleagues at Fidelity have just published a paper, The New Economic Order, which predicts three key features of the new world: state intervention, fiscal activism and continued Asian economic strength.
Central banks have been intervening at scale for more than a decade now, but monetary policy is pushing up against the limits of its effectiveness. Governments have little choice but to step into the breach. There are already signs that they will embrace the opportunity and the reversal of liberalisation, deregulation and free markets will accelerate. The response to an explosion of government debt will, therefore, take the form of more red tape and higher taxes, inevitably impinging on shareholder returns in the process. We should expect to refamiliarise ourselves with nationalised public services, state-mandated industrial policies and a more insular view of national security.
The second key feature of the new economic landscape will be a reversal of the now discredited austerity that led to an anaemic recovery from the financial crisis, and its replacement by a more active fiscal approach. This will be most obvious in the US, where a rise in unemployment to levels not seen since the Thirties, will threaten a consumption-driven economic model that requires a virtuous circle of high employment and higher spending. The massive interventions required to soften the blow of lockdown may be dwarfed by the spending required to fuel recovery in the period that follows. Perhaps we will see a rerun of Roosevelt's New Deal, arguably a long-overdue investment in America's crumbling physical infrastructure.
The third characteristic of the post-COVID world is really just a continuation of the pre-Corona trend towards relative Asian strength. The region was first into the crisis and is emerging first too. This first-mover advantage will be boosted by Asia's well-organised, disciplined, we might feel intrusive, technology-driven response to the outbreak. The gap between Asia and the rest of the world may well widen further if more liberal exit strategies in Europe and the US are derailed by second and third waves of infection. Even without this short-term advantage, Asia is likely to lead the economic recovery for deeper structural reasons too: lower debts, better demographics and higher growth rates.
A world of high-spending, interventionist governments probably sounds alarm bells among the beneficiaries of the globalisation and deregulation that characterised the period between Callaghan and the financial crisis. But investors must deal with the world as it is, not as they would like it to be.
All this lies in the future, however. Before we reach this reshaped economic landscape, we must navigate a deep and foggy valley, the contours of which remain unclear. Most likely we will tumble down a steep slope, traversing a long and bumpy journey before we can climb out the other side, some time in 2021. This U-shaped trajectory is our base case, with a probability of perhaps 60 per cent.
Two alternative scenarios see, respectively, a V-shaped recovery in the second half of this year and a much slower, L-shaped pattern in which the sharpest contraction in decades is followed by slow or no recovery for the foreseeable future.
Sharemarkets are pricing in the base case. The higher weighting of the gloomier of the two other outcomes argues against rushing back too quickly into the markets. As Callaghan discovered, it pays to be a realist.
[Tom Stevenson is an investment director at Fidelity International. The views are his own.]
The popular protests that erupted in 2019 and have continued to rumble – from France and Spain in Europe to Hong Kong and India in Asia; from Chile, Colombia and Bolivia in Latin America to Lebanon, Iran and Iraq in the Middle East – have perplexed analysts. Because they have been so far-flung and have lacked an iconic moment like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the common thread hasn’t been obvious. But there is one: rage at being left behind. In each instance, the match may differ, but the kindling has (in most cases) been furnished by the gross inequality produced by global capitalism.
Consider Lebanon. The demonstrations that erupted there in October were triggered by the government’s plan to tax calls made through WhatsApp and other internet services, but they quickly mushroomed into a broader protest against high unemployment, sectarian rule, corruption, and the government’s failure to provide basic services like electricity and sanitation.
According to the World Inequality Database, the top 1% of Lebanon’s population receives about 25% of the nation’s income. Six Lebanese billionaires have a combined personal wealth of about $11bn, according to Forbes. Three of those billionaires are the sons of Rafik Hariri, who made a fortune in construction and twice served as Lebanon’s prime minister before being assassinated in 2005. (A fourth son, Saad Hariri, was prime minister until his recent resignation amid reports that he had given more than $16m to a bikini model he had met while vacationing in the Seychelles.) Protesters maintained that the pampered elite, rather than strapped working people, should foot the bill for the country’s economic problems.
In Chile, an increase in subway fares catalyzed protest. The popular discontent caught many observers by surprise, since Chile has experienced years of steady growth and has a reputation for good governance. In fact Chile, with a per capita income of $15,800, is a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for prosperous nations. Of the OECD’s 36 members, however, Chile has one of the highest levels of inequality. Its economy is dominated by a group of powerful oligarchs, among them its current president, Sebastián Piñera, who is worth an estimated $2.8bn (amassed largely in the credit card business). Despite their country’s wealth, working Chileans have had to grapple with rising utility costs, stagnant wages and paltry pensions. The protests have registered their fury.
In Hong Kong, months of demonstrations have had one overriding goal: resisting China’s encroachments on the city’s autonomy and democratic institutions. That the protests have become so virulent and lasted so long, however, reflects deep exasperation with the region’s sky-high cost of living. By some accounts, Hong Kong is the world’s most unaffordable city, with rents higher than London and New York for apartments half the size. It may also be the world’s most unequal city: its 93 or so billionaires have a combined worth of more than $300bn while nearly one in five residents lives in poverty.
Worldwide, the numbers are stark. As calculated by Oxfam, 26 people have the same amount of wealth as the 3.8 billion people in the world’s bottom half. In the United States, the three richest people have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 160 million.
And the political fallout continues to spread. Not only the current round of street protests but also such recent upheavals as Brexit, Trump, the gilets jaunes in France, and rightwing populist governments in Hungary, Poland and Italy all have roots in the financial crash that was set off by the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and followed by the world’s worst economic contraction since 1929.
In the US alone, the great recession erased about $8tn in household stock-market wealth and $6tn in home value. From 2003 to 2013, inflation-adjusted net wealth for a typical household fell 36%, from $87,992 to $56,335, while the net worth of wealthy households rose by 14%. Workers without college degrees and low-income Americans were especially hard hit.
In a recent New York Times article about Vladimir Putin’s growing worldwide stature, the former Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky sought to explain why Putin turned away from his earlier aspirations to join the western family of nations and toward his current brand of authoritarian nationalism. The “decisive threshold” was the 2008 financial meltdown, Pavlovsky said. Before it, Putin saw America as running the world economy. “Suddenly it turned out: no, they are not running anything.” At that moment “all the old norms vanished” and Russia set about creating its own norms.
Many members of the liberal establishment in America [and elsewhere!] have failed to come to terms with the waning appeal of the free-market model. They dismiss populism as a sort of exogenous disease to be cured by appeals to reason and facts rather than recognize it as a darkly symptomatic response to a system that has failed so spectacularly to meet the basic needs of so many.
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| Source: Green Left |
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| In sharp contrast, only a small proportion of the social housing tenants interviewed said they were lonely. Photo: Wolter Peeters |
Loneliness is increasingly recognised worldwide as a critical social issue and one of the major health hazards of our time. Our research shows older private renters are at high risk of loneliness and anxiety.The great push by neo-liberals has had lethal consequences. The money that used to be provided for "council flats" or "social housing" has been used to give billionaires and corporations tax cuts. The belief that all transactions can be monetised has turned friendship into a financial transaction. Some economists (not me!) implicitly believe that only marketised relationships matter. The consequence of all these forces is to make loneliness and stress normal, now. Neo-liberal capitalism is no longer even delivering rising living standards for the 90%—only the 10% and the 1% are better off despite rising real GDP. And at the same time, the relentless sanctification of selfishness has made our society much more unpleasant. Neo-liberalism is a 40 year experiment which has failed. I don't know what will replace it, but something has to, before the damage is irreparable. And of course, for those who die of loneliness, it is already un-doable.
This is a growing concern as more Australians are renting housing later in life. By contrast, only a small proportion of the social housing tenants we interviewed said they were lonely.
The links between housing arrangements and loneliness could have profound implications for our health. As former US surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy said: “The reduction in life span [for people experiencing loneliness] is similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and it’s greater than the impact on life span of obesity … Look even deeper, and you’ll find loneliness is associated with a greater risk of heart disease, depression, anxiety and dementia.”
Many older private renters have little disposal income, because the cost of housing uses up much of their income. They also live with the constant possibility that they may be asked to vacate their accommodation. Their limited budgets mean they often end up living in a poorly located property. These features, individually or in combination, create fertile ground for anxiety and loneliness.
Their dire financial situation was often an obstacle to social activities. One interviewee told of how she had to choose between food or breaking her isolation by using public transport:
“Well, you sort of think what you can do with $2.50. That’s a loaf of bread type of thing.” – Beverley *
A 72-year-old woman living by herself said she could not afford the outings organised by her church:
“There’s quite an active social club at the church for over-55s but I can’t go to any of those … Sometimes I think it would be nice to go on something that appeals to me, yes. And they might have an afternoon at somebody’s home and you’re asked to bring a plate [of food]. You see, I couldn’t afford to do that.”
Peter, 67 and divorced, had left the workforce prematurely due to ill-health.
“I’ve become very isolated. I used to, before I had the hip operation, I used to play tennis and I loved to play tennis … but I really can’t afford it. I’ve found a few clubs that I could go and play in. I’d like to get back to it, but they say, ‘Ah, the fees are this and you pay it annually,’ and I can’t come up with $150 or $200 or whatever.”
Lack of money and insecure tenure were sources of enormous distress and anxiety, which further discouraged social contact. Brigette (67) was brutally honest:
“You do get depressed and I believe that’s why people suicide … And there have been times when I’ve thought, what is the point to life? I really have thought this can’t go on, you know … I feel sorry for people because it is hard, and once you stay in it’s like crawling out of a slime pit … I have to say, ‘Get up and go out, go up the shops … Pretend you need potatoes or something.’”
Not all of the private renters interviewed experienced loneliness. These interviewees usually had strong family ties or had managed to find affordable and secure accommodation.
In sharp contrast, only a small proportion of the social housing tenants interviewed said they were lonely. Almost all were adamant they did not experience loneliness and felt they had strong social ties. Their affordable rent, security of tenure, long-term residence and having neighbours in a similar position meant they could socialise and were not beset by anxiety.
An 85-year-old long-established social housing tenant’s response to the question about loneliness and isolation was typical:
“I do like it around here. I know where everything is and I know all the people, especially around these units you know. I know everyone and they know me. I like it around here. This is my home, you know. This is a community, I think. Like I know all the people and we’ve become really good friends. I couldn’t think of being anywhere else.” – Kay
Pam, who had been a private renter before being allocated social housing, reflected on how her life had changed:
“Well, it is changed because I’m happier and I think I’m healthier and I have a lot of new friends. I also have a lot more people around me for support if anything does happen. If I get sick and if they don’t see me for a few days someone will come and say, ‘Pam, are you OK?’ In private housing there was nobody.”
The residualisation of social housing meant some tenants were living in what they perceived to be unbearable conditions. However, they generally were able to deal with their situation. Patricia coped with her very challenging neighbours by going to the local community centre:
“No, I hate it [public housing]. I live here [at the community centre] every day. Yes, I’m on the committee here and I do things every day. This is my home, my family. Everybody is friendly with everybody. We have outings and things.”
What the interviews indicate is that the housing tenure of age pensioners often plays a fundamental role in whether they are able to escape the experience of loneliness. Older private renters are far more likely to experience loneliness than their counterparts in social housing and that loneliness can be acute.
* All the names used are pseudonyms.
Alan Morris, Research Professor, University of Technology Sydney and Andrea Verdasco, Research Associate, University of Technology SydneyThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
