https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-wall-looks-permanent-until-it
"My earliest political memory is watching the Berlin Wall fall. I was six years
old. We watched together on the nightly news—strangers embracing, people
swinging hammers at concrete, everyone laughing. I didn’t know what the wall
was or why it mattered. I remember how happy everyone looked. I remember
thinking that smashing the wall looked like a lot of fun. I wanted a hammer
too.
I’ve spent my career as a political scientist learning why moments like that
almost never happen. And why, sometimes, they do.
On a Saturday afternoon in March 1911, Frances Perkins was having tea near
Washington Square when she heard screams. She ran toward the smoke rising from
the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and arrived in time to watch 146 workers—mostly
young immigrant women—burn to death or leap from ninth-floor windows. The doors
had been locked to prevent theft. The fire escapes collapsed. The city’s
tallest ladders reached only the sixth floor.
She witnessed it all. She later called it “the day the New Deal was born.”
Perkins understood that the fire was a policy outcome. Every death had been
produced by specific legal choices—the absence of fire codes, the
permissibility of locked exits, the treatment of workers as inputs rather than
persons. The horror of that day was not that the system failed. It was that it
was functioning exactly as designed.
I keep a dataset of cross-national comparisons. The OECD—the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development—tracks outcomes across thirty-one wealthy
democracies. These are our peers. On metric after metric, the United States
stands apart from them. American exceptionalism is real, but not in ways worth
celebrating.
Start with work and economic life. Americans work longer hours, pay more
out-of-pocket for college and childcare, lack parental leave, and enjoy less
economic mobility. The share of income going to the top 1 percent is nearly
double the OECD average. American CEOs earn, on average, 354 times as much as
their workers. More workers are trapped in poverty-wage jobs. Collective
bargaining covers fewer workers. And social protections are less generous for
those who fall on hard times, with the government raising less in taxes and
spending more on the military.
The economy is just the beginning."
Via Brad Koehn and Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
