Michael Perelman wrote:
Sometime ago, I believe on pen-l, I questioned Brad DeLong's insistence that increasing aggregate income meant that "the people" were doing better, whether in India or China. I had not seen an indication that the BJP was in trouble before the election. India was, by all media accounts, an economic miracle -- even more so than China, but then the United States has always presented India as the anti-China.
I don't see a necessary contradiction between a rapidly growing average income and a political backlash. First, we know that average income is not the best conceivable measure of average well-being (although there's some correlation). Second, distribution matters a lot, in part because of what Sen calls "positional goods" -- namely that people's individual sense of well-being depends not only on the average but also on where they are in the distributions -- plural because they take into account not only how wealth or income is distributed vis-a-vis their relatives, friends, or immediate neighborhood, but also in the larger community. Third, the change in these variables matters a lot -- and so does the speed of change. Fourth, the political cycle matters because people may time their actions to enhance impact. (Note that I'm not saying that we can find a nice function relating political backlash to all of these variables. Obviously, political dynamics is complex.)
Rapid growth under capitalism shakes off all of these variables in complicated ways and leads to surprising dynamics. In Mexico, for instance, the Zapatista rebellion took place in early 1994, not in 1986 or 1987, when the country was at the bottom of its long debt crisis. In 1994, the economy was growing at a brisky pace. Of course, the military readiness of the EZLN was crucial in the decision, but -- that aside -- the Zapatistas timed the uprising to coincide with the implementation of NAFTA because of its symbolism.
Marcos has made remarks where he frames the Zapatista rebellion as a reaction against richer areas of the country trying to pull way ahead of the poorest areas. In an interview given to Cristián Calónico (a UNAM sociologist) in 2001, drawing an analogy between nation and guerrilla, Marcos quotes Ernesto Che Guevara's famous phrase that the guerrilla moves at the pace of its slowest member. This is very telling. IMO, this operates not only for those on the boats that sink, but also for those on the boats the tide rises. It gives a good hint about the way the poorest and the not-so-poor in a community (and a nation is supposed to be a community) feel when some pull ahead without concern for the rest.
I can think of many other examples. For example, the 1968 student movement in Mexico happened after Mexico's per-capita GNP had grown rapidly and with little interruption for 35 years. Consciously or unconsciously, the movement was timed to coincide with the preparations for the Olympic Games in Mexico City, which were meant to showcase Mexico's "economic miracle." The students protested against practices of police arbitrariness and government unaccountability that had been in place for decades -- and people had more or less accepted them as a matter of fact in previous decades because those generations had witnessed the Mexican Revolution (1910-1918). The huge demonstrations led to mass repression. Those who protested, high-school and college students from public high schools, colleges, and universities were being groomed at public expense to thicken Mexico's middle class. This was possible because, at the time, government finances were in good shape thanks to the "economic miracle."
Charles Chaplin wrote in his autobiography that we get easily used to a better life but, by some ratchet effect, the alternative we don't take nicely. Long periods of stagnation make people more accepting of misery, but when the economy grows -- even if only on average -- then suddenly more people are in a position to expand their needs further and demand more.
In a completely different context, I think that the speed with which the anti-war movement grew in the U.S., even prior to the invasion of Iraq, was related, not only to the shock of 9/11 (when people face death, they question themselves more deeply), but also -- to a very significant extent -- to the 1990s boom. The poor in the U.S. benefited from the 1990s boom, particularly in the 1998-2001 period. Higher employment among African-Americans led to a thickening of the so-called "black middle class," etc. IMO, the boom had the unintended effect of making people more demanding about the kind of foreign policy they can or cannot accept. The boom made people more assertive politically. That's one of the reasons why the worse-is-better school has it all wrong.
Julio
_________________________________________________________________ MSN Latino: el sitio MSN para los hispanos en EE.UU. http://latino.msn.com/
