The End of Power
reason.com
reason.com
This article is nothing but pie in the sky fantasy.
The world is getting better for everyone and the point of the article is that the luxuries that come with increased wealth (internet, mobiles, greater political awareness, travel) make old power structures harder and harder to maintain, in almost every facet of society.
It's easy to get lost in the massive problems and doom and gloom facing everyone but if you step back and look at the forest, it's not all that gloomy.
Whether we're talking cartels, the Fed, Congress, oligarchs, big corporations, or good 'ol fashioned free market billionaires. They dictate ultimately whether your phone 'works,' whether you can get on a plane, whether you can use Google or the Internet, or drive a car, or draw power when you plug into an outlet (at least for 99.9% of the population).
None of that has changed one bit, and none of it is going to. You can swap one power broker for another, but what you can never do is remove them. You can start by asking who has the military weapons, who has the control over money standards, who controls taxing authorities - and then you can follow the chart of money / power on down.
The author. The article is about power and it's safe to say that he who controls the majority of the world's assets holds the power (and vice-versa).
This is why smart dictators keep their populations in constant poverty and either war, or war-readiness.
As it turns out, a lot of the "wealth" that is owned by that small percentage you describe is actually just paper wealth, the sort of wealth that goes away the easiest. It's also worth remembering that the world's economy is doubling about every 15 years or so. So the wealth of the elite can easily become a much smaller portion of the whole if they don't keep up.
Citation for that? Wikipedia says that the richest 1% of adults owned 40% of global assets[1], though that figure is from 2000.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#21st_cen...
That said, these sorts of articles do resonate with an idea that's been growing in my head the past few years, that the dominant base & form of power is changing as technology has progressed, and the old power base is ramping up its efforts to fight this trend.
In that vein, a philosophy book that really hit home for me on the nature of power in today's IP-connected world was __Protocol__ - How Control Exists after Decentralization, by Alexander Galloway. Now, this sort of read may not be everyone's thing, and as with most philosophy books in the French tradition (think Deleuze & Guattari) , it often tries too hard.... but it's a provocative way of looking at how Internet protocol architecture and its resulting conflict patterns are starting to bleed into real world politics -- e.g. the control that others have over you by remaining connected vs. the power of being disconnected; "exploits" as the new dominant form of resistance against the power of protocols to control, etc. I'm not doing it justice here, but may be a good read if you're at all interested in postmodern philosophy (other than to laugh at, or justify the first two Matrix movies... which admittedly, is mostly what the discipline is good for).
The Christians effectively toppled (or consumed from within) the Roman empire, starting from an exceptionally small base.
Starting from a small group in each country, Communists took over Russia and China - the world's largest countries by land mass and population - and they did it exceptionally quickly considering.
Other examples: Simon Bolivar, Fidel Castro, the Founding Fathers, Khmer Rouge, Saddam Hussein, 1979 Iranian revolution, the Taliban. And those are just a few examples from the last couple hundred years. History is littered with a gazillion more, small and large, of varying ideologies. None of which needed smart phones or the Internet.
These types of things have always happened throughout history.
All of the "progress" we see in developing nations joins them to the global economy as both consumers and sources of cheap labor. Increasingly, the spoils of this globalization are accruing to a smaller and smaller subset of corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals.
When you look around at recent so-called disruption that potestors and modern "revolutionaries" enact, you realize that none have succeeded in displacing powers that are aligned with the global capitalist agenda. Indeed, those that do succeed have all served the interests of that agenda.
The libertarian fantasy that once we sufficiently undermine governments they will fall and a utopia of individual action free of tyranny will reign is just that - a fantasy. Governments are being weakened by the forces of corporate globalization and the winners aren't the masses. They're a tiny band of corporations and a small wealth elite that controls access to resources via control of those corporations. While overly oppressive government can indeed by a terrible problem, it is often overlooked that an elected government is the only means by which the masses can effectively contain the voracious appetites of giant corporations (which will often act in ways that aren't even in their own long term interests, destroying much of the economy on which they feed).
Free markets when well regulated by a government accountable to the people represent a happy medium, which served us well for an extended period in the 20th century. We seem to have lost that. Instead we're left with crony capitalism and government which acts on behalf of the highest bidder. The worst of both worlds. It is a lot harder to overthrow our corporate overlords in this world of weak governance than to overthrow an oppressive ideological political regime.
In addition to the "The libertarian fantasy that once we sufficiently undermine governments they will fall and a utopia of individual action free of tyranny", all processes that uphold all forms of government around the world are merely an illusion that reinforces the status quo globally.
But then again, things can change whether we want them to or not ;)
The book analyzes and attempts to explain the motives of the various types of personalities that give rise to mass movements; why and how mass movements start, progress and end; and the similarities between them, whether religious, political, radical or reactionary. As examples, the book often refers to Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Christianity, Protestantism, and Islam. Hoffer believes that mass movements are interchangeable, that adherents will often flip from one movement to another, and that the motivations for mass movements are interchangeable; that religious, nationalist and social movements, whether radical or reactionary, tend to attract the same type of followers, behave in the same way and use the same tactics, even when their stated goals or values differ.
I believe the extreme poverty goal used absolute numbers. Percentiles wouldn't make sense to begin with because extreme poverty is largely inherited and as you said could be dwarfed by population growth.
Its just that the numbers are to good to be believed. I may be biased tho.
Anyway, I sure hope the article is 100% correct.
But this is an upward trend going for three decades now, let's hope it continues.