Why the World is Burning

What Happens When People and Societies Grow Starved of Capital? This Does.

There’s Paris, burning. There’s Italy, aflame with rage. There’s Britain, committing the greatest act of self-destruction in recent history. There’s America — so many gruesome problems, from mass shootings to middle-class people begging strangers online for healthcare, nobody really knows where to begin.

And there’s the G20 this week. What’s striking about it is that the central problem surging through all the nations above like a riptide of rage, resentment, fear, and fury…isn’t even on the agenda. What’s on the agenda is the opposite of that problem, in fact. The problem is capital. Capital has grown concentrated in the hands of a tiny few, who have earned it in dubious ways, and then hidden it in treasure chests buried around the world. The result is that there is not enough capital in the hands of people and societies — they have grown impoverished of it. I’ll come to that — first let’s understand how all this came to be.

What’s ripping the world apart is that people feel stuck, because they are. Their incomes are not rising in rich countries anymore. In America, that trend began in the 1970s — at the precise moment that segregation ended. In Europe, it began between five and fifteen years ago. And the issue is that…