Prometheus 6

I will, without any hesistation, blame you for skipping this one.

In keeping with the observation made in my notes on part 1, I take this to mean ”Why We Feel No Need or Desire for to Provide Equal Opportunity Anymore.”

First the video

Then my notes.

1. Serious economic problems came to an end within Western societies

   1. Mass unemployment was the impetus for building the social safety net, called “working class radicalism” by Mead

   2. In the 50s and 60s it became clear capitalism could avoid structural breakdown

      • Note this was after post-New Deal conditions were taken as given

      • “Improved government policies and growing wealth had created more than enough jobs”

        • This OBVIOUSLY ignores the conditions in Black communities as fully as the Dred Scott decision ignored the rights of free Blacks. Mead implies there was no need to employ Black folks without directly stating it by simply ignoring our existance.

        • Conservatives seek to undo the very changes that brought about this conviction that capitalism could survive its own excesses. See ECONOMIC ROYALISM WATCH and The New Deal and the Great Depression II for examples.

      • “Capitalism has not solved all its problems. There's growing inequality in earnings an incomes, much of it due to trends in capitalism that are poorly understood.”

        • There was a time physicists thought there was a single problem left to solve...that of black body radiation. Solving that problem caused investigations that lead to quantum mechanics...which forced a recognition of how much of the standard understanding of physics was simply a bunch of assumptions.

          Here Mead promotes another set of errors proceeding from his understanding of the national “Black body” problem

        • “It doesn't arouse the public...like mass unemployment

          • By this statement it's clear Mead doesn't consider Black people to be part of the public

        • More assumptions: Europe has higher unemployment and “everyone recognizes”, i.e., presumptively assumes, it is due to government regulation of the labor market (whereas in the USofA the labor market is subsidized by the government in various ways...specifics are industry dependent).

2. Planned economies fail to compete with capitalism in the production of wealth

   1. Congressional debates over subsidizing failed banks, manufacturing sectors, agriculture, training versus provision of jobs, et. al. show our economy to be planned in detail. That plan, however, is to produce for a few...considerable fewer than the five-to-ten percent of the population Mead said in the first clip are poor...CONSIDERABLY more wealth than would be needed to eliminate that poverty,

3. The cost of the social safety net

   1. Economizing is the source of the wealth of the wealthy, and is the only way they can maintain their wealth.

4. Theologians still worry about the poor, but there “no mass following” for that concern among “politicians, workers and voters.”

   1. Again, Black people and the poor folks they are conflated with are neither “politicians, workers [nor] voters.”

5. We no longer see the “pressure from below” necessary to make all this an active issue

   1. See “concentration of the media”

6. “On the racial front”

   1. Race is presented as an afterthought when it was the central issue in the American economy. More...much more...later

   2. “We've gone as far as we can go. We have formal equality and some degree of preferences, but we can't really go further”

      • See the subtitle above...it's not an inability, it's an unwillingness.