- Jan 2024
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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- for: elites - secret hotel parties
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- Dec 2023
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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we need to build this this again this bridge and it's obviously not going to be written in the 00:50:41 same style or standard as your kind of deep academic papers if you think this is uh U unnecessary or irrelevant then you end up with is a scientific 00:50:56 Community which talks only to itself in language that nobody else understands and you live the general Republic uh uh prey to a lot of very 00:51:09 unscientific conspiracy theories and mythologies and theories about the world
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for: academic communication to the public - importance, elites - two types, key insight - elites, key insight - science communication
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comment
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key insight
- Elites are necessary in every society
- Historically, people who strongly believe that the current elites aren't necessary or are harmful often become the revolutionaries who become the new elites
- elites need to speak in their own specialist language to each other but there are two kinds of elites
- those who serve society
- those who serve themselves
- often, we have fox in sheep's clothing - elites who serve themselves but disguise themselves in the language of elites who serve others in order to gain access to power ,
- we normally think of wealthy people as elites, but Harari classifies scientists as also a kind of elite
- elites may be necessary but
- We are caught in a double bind, a wicked problem as elites are also the world's greatest per capita energy consumers and their outsized ecological, consumption and energy footprint is now a existential threat to the survival of our species
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references
- Kevin Anderson: A Habitable Earth Can No Longer Afford The Rich – And That Could Mean Me And You
- The role of high-socioeconomic-status people in locking in or rapidly reducing energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions
- Millionaire spending incompatible with 1.5 °C ambitions
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climateuncensored.com climateuncensored.com
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This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate societal aspirations and the narratives around climate change. These extend from well-funded advertising to pseudo-technical solutions, from the financialisation of carbon emissions (and increasingly, nature) to labelling extreme any meaningful narrative that questions inequality and power.
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for: quote - Kevin Anderson, quote - elite positive feedback carbon inequality loop, climate crisis - societal aspirations, elites - societal aspirations, societal aspirations, key insight - societal aspirations
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quote
- This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate
- societal aspirations and
- the narratives around climate change.
- These extend from
- well-funded advertising to
- pseudo-technical solutions,
- and financialisation of carbon emissions (and increasingly, nature) to
- labelling extreme any meaningful narrative that questions inequality and power.
- This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate
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comment
- key insight - societal aspirations
- it is the societal aspiration of the logic of capitalism and the free market that continues to create the next generation of the 1%
- How can the luxury industry NOT BE high carbon intensity? It's an oxymoron. High carbon is baked into the definition of luxury, and it is luxury goods and services which accelerate climate breakdown.
- The elites have a strong feeling of entitlement. They feel they DESERVE to reward themselves with a luxury lifestyle. That aspiration and reward structure multiplied by 80 million (1% of 8 billion) is a major variable driving the climate crisis
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the wealthiest 1% of people on the planet are responsible for double the greenhouse gas emissions of the poorest half
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for: carbon inequality, question - new COP - focused on elites?
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comment
- while COP28 fights over which nations bear what responsibility, from this perspective, there is an entirely different class of people that must be held responsible, not at the nation state level, but at the individual level. Why isn't there a COP where the elites are held responsible?
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question
- Are we making a grave category error in holding the wrong class of people responsible? Should questions of carbon equity concern both high polluting nations AND individuals?
- At the very least, should we formally recognize a parallel set of responsibilities and elevate that recognition to the level of COP conventions to deal with the problem?
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for: climate crisis - elites, Kevin Anderson - elites, carbon emissions - elites, adjacency - elites - carbon inequality - incentives - luxury - capitalism
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title: A Habitable Earth Can No Longer Afford The Rich – And That Could Mean Me And You
- author: Kevin Anderson
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date: Nov. 29, 2023
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comment
- adjacency between
- elites
- capitalism
- free market
- incentives
- double bind
- wicked problem
- inequality
- carbon inequality
- luxury industry
- adjacency statement
- This article was pulled by "The Conversation" for being too controversial
- It addresses the double-bind / wicked problems that we find ourselves in.
- It's not just that the elites that are the highest per capita polluters, but
- it is an indictment of the entire philosophy and worldview of capitalism and the market economy which produces winners and losers and
- the winners reap enormous resource benefits, including being able to afford luxury items as rewards which constitute the largest ecological footprint of all
- while at any one time, there is always a minority of the 1%, who hold the most outsized ecological footprint of all, the logic that produced that 1% also serves as the incentives for the majority of the 99%, who because of the inherent precarity created by capitalism, will fight and struggle to become part of that 1%
- So while one generation of the 1% die off, a new generation is born and created by the incentive structure of scarcity and precarity.
- In this sense, capitalism has its own self-reinforcing, positive feedback loop that keeps the masses of the disenfranchised aspiring to the same high resource and ecological footprint, luxury lifestyle
- Look at the culture industry of sports, entertainment, movies, music, TV, etc. and of business in general. The leaders of these and ALL fields are celebrated as heros and they all reward themselves with an ultra-high carbon intensity, luxury lifestyle.
- Unless we do more than simply demonize the current set of elites, and recognize the root cause and change the incentive structure itself, we will only ever deal with the symptom and not the problem, and continue to generate the next generation of elites
- The luxury lifestyle industry is a important role-player in the self-reinforcing feedback loop
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Tags
- polluter elites
- question - elites accountability
- adjacency - elites - capitalism - carbon inequality - luxury industry
- carbon inequality - category error
- category error - elites vs nations in COP
- climate crisis - societal aspirations
- Kevin Anderson - elites
- carbon emissions - elites
- quote - Kevin Anderson
- climate crisis - elites
- carbon inequality
- quote - elite positive feedback carbon inequality loop
- societal aspirations
- COP for elites
- elites - societal aspirations
- key insight - societal aspirations
- how elites are created by capitalism
Annotators
URL
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for: Kevin Anderson, transition, climate equity, climate justice, climate justice - Kevin Anderson, carbon inequality - Kevin Anderson, life within planetary boundaries, lifestyle within planetary boundaries - elites, climate crisis - Kevin Anderson
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summary
- Kevin offers a picture of what a world within the stable climate planetary boundary would look like for the wealthy of the planet.
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well I'll start with two extremely optimistic points
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for: answer to above question
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answer : two answers
- first, the elite have the majority of
- wealth
- control of setting policies
- control of the media
- and they work really hard at controlling policy and media
- and the people
- hate the system
- generally hate them
- second, social tipping points occur. Something happened in over place, then it spreads to other places
- first, the elite have the majority of
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- Nov 2023
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hat that's going to mean is that a lot of the things um that again that this wealthy say onethird of our society has normalized will have to change the size of our houses 00:12:01 we shouldn't be building really huge houses anymore I would also go further and say if we are really serious about climate change we need to think about the very large properties that we have which there are many of in our society 00:12:12 that need to be divided to make good quality and reasonable sized houses for say three or four families rather than just one family no more second homes and where second homes are in areas where other 00:12:25 people need to live they are no longer allowed to exist so no more second homes
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for: staying within 1.5 Deg C - elites - lifestyle changes - property and building
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example:
- Vancouver, B.C. has artificially inflated property market
- Local Vancouver city government does not want to change bylaws that advantage elites
- Climate change equity issues need to become part of the argument
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reference
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if you look at somewhere like the UK 75% of all our flights are made by just 15% of the population and we know who that 15% are you know they're not the average person or the poor person so we're not talking about 00:12:49 someone who flies occasionally away on holiday we're talking about people who fly really regularly they have their second homes they have their big mansions they have their large cars and this particular group all of those 00:13:02 things will have to change
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for: elites - lifestyle change, great simplification, worldview transition -materially-excessive and wonder-poor to materially- sufficient and wonder-rich, awakening wonder, Deep Humanity, BEing journeys
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comment
- possible way to have more than one home
- a group can co-create and mutually invest in a regenerative timeshare
- an example is to co-invest in a regenerative local community economy based around a regerative agroforestry system which has community owned and supported agriculture with year round Regenerative work and sustainable accommodations
- Deep Humanity BEing journeys can play a role to re-awaken wonder
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Tags
- staying within 1.5 Deg C - elites - lifestyle changes - property and building
- worldview transition - materially- excessive and wonder- poor to materially-sufficient and wonder-rich
- great simplification
- BEing journeys
- Deep Humanity
- regenerative timeshare
- awakening wonder
- elites - lifestyle shift
Annotators
URL
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- Aug 2023
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pluralistic.net pluralistic.net
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- for: W2W, inequality, 1%, oligarch, elites, kleptocrats, civil society - exploitation, TUSN, Transnational Uncivil Society Network
- title: How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth
- author: Peter Rinko
- comment
- This article explores the research work of Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw and Ricard Soares de Oliverira who coauthored the paper
Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism - reference - https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5e5a3052-c693-4991-a7cc-bc2b47134467/download_file?file_format=application%2Fpdf&safe_filename=Cooley_et_al_2023_transnational_uncivil_society.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article
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bonpote.com bonpote.com
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And where the artists take part in a fantasy of overconsumptionThe place where artists play a distinctive role, exactly like high-level sports athletes, is in the propagation of a certain fantasy.
- for: W2W, carbon inequality, carbon footprint - 1%, carbon emissions - 1%, luxury advertising, luxury advertising contracts, carbon emissions - luxury goods
- key insight
- the elites are often the main popularizers, influencers and propagandists of the fantasy of overconsumption
- culture of overconsumption
- such elites have a close tie to the luxury industry via large advertising contracts
- Media posts critical of the carbon air travel emissions of famous DJ named DJ Snake offers a prime example of a common attitude of privilege and self-righteousness found amongst a number of elites
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- Jul 2023
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www.sciencedaily.com www.sciencedaily.com
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One option is to cap the top 20% of energy users while allowing those people who use little energy and have poverty-level incomes to be able to increase their consumption levels and improve their quality of life.
- One energy demand reduction strategy
- Cap the top 20% of energy users
- while allowing those people
- who use little energy and
- have poverty-level incomes
- to be able to
- increase their consumption levels and
- improve their quality of life.
- One energy demand reduction strategy
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- Jun 2023
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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- Documentary on wealth in Germany
- It is good to analyze the attitudes of the elites to understand their motivations and worldviews
- Documentary on wealth in Germany
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- Mar 2023
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www.sciencedirect.com www.sciencedirect.com
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Table 1. Interrelationship of wealth and emissions per capita.
- Table
- Interrelationship of wealth and emissions per capita. //
- It is clear that we have an urgent need
- to bend the curve of emissions of elites
- Table
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- Jan 2023
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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i think climate change is going to put a strong pressure in the sense that you know i think when people see more and more catastrophic climatic events you know i think attitudes toward globalization and attitudes toward inequality in general you know can change very quickly because 00:43:25 you know at some point i think people will not find it funny at all to have all these billionaires you know giving lessons using their private jet doing your space tourism et cetera you know at some point you know i think nobody is going to find this funny at all and there can be a very quick and and fast you know complete change in attitude following this
!- Thomas Piketty : climate change impacts on inequality - climate change extreme events can very quickly cause the public attitudes to the elites to deteriorate very rapidly
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i think the reason your book was praised so much uh in the west is you didn't come up with a threatening political solution uh and uh when they said this was the mark book is the marks for modern time that meant don't read marx read this book and i suspect that after you put all of this enormous good work into the uh statistics that you did on wealth 00:15:30 and income i think the publisher probably said well what are what are your solutions well you just came up with uh the solution that you uh said in the book and that's to tax income and wealth uh this is not a threatening solution because there's no way that you're going to tax wealth as long as you have offshore banking centers to conceal wealth as long as you have what the oil 00:15:54 industry put in place a hundred years ago the flags of convenience pretending to make their uh income abroad the fact is uh the one percent don't really make much income they're ideal if you're a billionaire you want to do what uh half of american corporations do you don't make a penny of taxable income uh that that's uh the whole problem
!- Michael Hudson : critique of Thomas Piketty's books - Hudson comments that Piketty's books were not politically threatening to the elites - Piketty's solution is to tax the elites but this is no threat to the elites because they have wealth concealed in offshore accounts - billionaires strategy: don't make one penny of TAXABLE income
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- Nov 2021
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oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com
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Figure 6: Changing geographic source of emissions of world’s richest 1% 2015–2030
China and India will have the largest growth of elites between 2015 and 2030. Therefore, strategic, culturally appropriate interventions need to be applied to this elite demographic.
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- Sep 2021
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www.lboro.ac.uk www.lboro.ac.uk
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Exploring the consumption practices of the super-rich begins to highlight that they are best described as 'fast subjects' who dwell in what Castells (2000) terms the 'space of flows' rather than the 'space of places'.
Good terminology- space of flows, denoting the necessity of (carbon intensive) travel to move from one place to another. Seen from the 19th century, even the average car-driving citizen of the 20th century is elite. A 100 hp car, which is now almost an average power rating of most internal combustion engines, is the power equivalent to the 19th century analog of maintaining 100 horses.
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there has been a spectacular rise in luxury consumption, with the consumption patterns of the global elite acting as a marker for those further down the income scale. Robert Frank (2000) describes the process as 'luxury fever', as consumption expectations are ratcheted up all the way down the income scale. The global elite are pushing up people's expectations and assumptions. In the US, for example, the average size of house has doubled, in square feet terms, in the past thirty years. In part it is a function of the positional nature of consumption. We consume in order to position ourselves relative to other people. Not only do the global elite raise the upper limit, everyone is thus forced to spend more just to keep up, but they also become the perceived benchmark, Juliet Schor's work, for example, shows that people are no longer keeping up with the people next door, but the people they see on television and magazines (Schor, 1998). In order to keep up with these raised consumption standards people are working harder and longer as well as taking out more debt. The increase in luxury consumption has raised consumption expectations further down the income scale, which in order to be funded has involved increased workloads and increased indebtedness. It is not so much keeping up with the Jones but 'keeping up with the Gates'.
The elites point the way for those in even the lowest income brackets to follow. This crosses cultures as well. Capitalism trumps colonialism as former colonized peoples reserve the right to taste the fruits of capitalism. Hence, hard work, ingenuity and leveraging opportunity to accumulate all the signs and symbols of wealth, joining the colonialist biased elites is seen as having arrived at success, even though it means contributing to the destruction of the planetary commons. The aspirations to wealth must be uniformly deprioritized in order to align our culture in the right direction that will rescue our species from the impact of following this misdirection for the past century.
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- Jul 2021
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Making money didn’t violate the spirit of equality, but an air of superior knowledge did, especially when it cloaked special privileges.
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- Jun 2021
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Meritocracy harms the elite as well. Life for the meritocratic elite is dominated by work. Substantial numbers of elites report that their work interferes with their health, prevents them from forming strong relationships with their children, gets in the way of good relationships with their spouses, and even makes it harder to have a satisfying sex life.
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A Harvard Business Review survey found that 62 percent of high-earning individuals work over 50 hours a week, more than a third work over 60 hours a week, and one in 10 work over 80 hours a week. According to Markovits, elites today work an average of 12 more hours per week than middle-class workers (the equivalent of 1.5 additional workdays).
This may be the case for high-earners, but where do these people sit with respect to the higher elite or "leisure class"?
Are these hard working high-earners a new class of people that has emerged that aren't the previous elite of the mid-1900s?
What effect does the rise of finacialization (versus manufacturing or service sectors) since the 1970's have on this shift? Did these high-earners arise out of a hole in the market to service the elites on the highest rung up to make their wealth grow faster?
There seems to be a hole in this argument with respect to the prior quote:
Fifty, 60, 70 years ago, you could tell how poor somebody was by how hard they worked. Today, that relationship has been completely reversed. Elites work for a living. They work harder than they used to. They work harder in terms of brute hours than the middle class on average, and they get most of their income by working.
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- Feb 2019
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Local file Local file
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This is not the first time that the US “common man” has embraced populism. Who said the following? “What are the real issues that exist today in these United States? It is the trend of pseudointellectual government where a select elite group have written guidelines in bureaus and court decisions… looking down their noses at the average man on the street … the auto workers, … the little businessman…” (quoted in Cowie: http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1919&context=articles) This was George Wallace, in 1972, the year he scored a victory in the Democratic primary in Michigan, due primarily to “working-class” opposition to school busing on the heels of white flight to the suburbs. His “populist” message of “anti-elitism”, “anti-crime” and anti-busing wasn’t openly racist, but that was its content. Dewey Burton, the young male symbol of the 1970s (white) working class followed for years by the US media (as told by Cowie, above) was not a racist in his personal attitudes, but his alienation from ossified New Deal politics within a Fordist economic model that provided “only” high-wage job security (and for fewer and fewer people) manifested itself in a form that is fairly indistinguishable from the suddenly new “revolt” of the white working class in the rust belt in 2016 – and this well before Fordism entered into its terminal crisis later in the 70s.
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