I'm not necessarily deeply impressed by the social movements currently happening, that are going by monikers prefixed with the word "Occupy" – e.g. Occupy Wall Street. Rather than be critical of the lack of a clear program or set of demands, however, I'd rather be critical of the evident lack of clearheaded, genuine, scientific-spirited analysis. This is not just lacking on the left, though. It's just as lacking in anything on the right, of course. If not more so. Apparently no one has a monopoly on muddleheadedness.
Here is an interesting fact I found recently. I saw a pointer to a review of a recent book called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. I read the review and was impresed. At some point, I may work to acquire the book – perhaps I'll see it out on a table at Kyobo Mungo or another Korean bookstore with a good English book section. This happened with another book I recently started, called 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, by Cambridge University heterodox economist (and coincidental Korean) Ha-joon Chang.
The above mentioned review led me to a list on the wikithing about something called the Wealth Gini. Roughly speaking, the wealth Gini is a ranking of countries in the world by the "fairness" (equality) of their relative distribution of weatlh (not GDP or income, which I find less compelling). Saliently, South Korea is fourth from the top (Japan is the top), while the USA is fifth from the bottom (Namibia is the bottom).
What do these facts mean?
Eloquent blogic ranter "Who is IOZ" captures some of my feelings (eloquently, of course) with a recent post entitled Costaguana.
I am really enjoying the United States these days. It has come more and more to resemble the sort of tawdry, ramshackle, sweaty, tumbledown, corrupt Greeneland that it was always destined to be–or that it always was but managed to hide behind a mountain of dollar-menu burger patties and tip-hazard SUVs. Well, it sort of sucks to live in a decrepit police state, but at least it finally feels a little more like a real country: demonstrators, work stoppages, tent cities, felonious oligarchs helicoptering to-and-fro, private security firms, a hapless and yet still terrifying apparatus of state repression. A fat cop on the edge of cardiac arrest swinging a knightstick fruitlessly at a dirty kid. Forever.
Amen.
I remain ever-more-happily self-exiled.