Back Into the Future

Science fiction stories so emphasize the technology of some proposed future that we tend to overlook the sameness of the societies they use as backdrops.  Emperors, warlords, crafty aristocrats, plutocratic merchant lords, perfidious or mealy-mouthed senators and their ilk populate the page, with the protagonist usually seeking some high-tech way to restore justice by putting himself in charge.  A galactic legislative body of some type may be present, but it is just a front for the machinations of the small group of villains at the heart of the story. Common people are just there to provide a colorful backdrop; the main characters are disconnected from the ordinary, and form a kind of planetary or galactic royal court.  The tale really constitutes a  high-tech medieval romance set in some galaxy far, far away or in some future dystopia.  But perhaps the sci-fi authors are on to something.

And Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post may have caught a glimpse of it recently in a column about the rising disparity between rich and poor in America.  It’s a good read for the statistics; he lays them out well, but you’ve seen them many times.  The key thing he noted is similar to a phenomenon noted by David Ignatius in a column about the Davos Conference. The very rich are gradually disconnecting from reliance on the economy and rights of any one nation.  They are beginning to form their own floating international society, with less and less personal investment in seeking the good of their original native land.  We’ve seen the smaller-scale prototype of this floating world for years now in the way corporations move from town to town and state to state seeking the best subsidy the local governments will offer.

Now it’s becoming the norm at the international level.   David Rothkopf, in his new book, Power, Inc., describes a war going on between multi-national corporations and traditional nation-states.  In his telling, it is like the prehistoric era when Homo sapiens came along and gradually eliminated the Neanderthals; only this time, the nation-states are the Neanderthals and the corporations are the Homo sapiens. But it’s the nation-states who have a built-in mission to care about the “whole person” of their citizens; the new international corporate society sees only customers and labor supplies.   The very rich are the emperors and merchant princes of the new society, already able to overwhelm all but the largest nations with their sheer economic power. For example, Exxon’s gross annual revenue now exceeds the GDP of Sweden.  We see the results of that each day with headlines such as this morning’s reports about rising oil supplies in America combined with rising prices.

Meyerson’s point was that unregulated capitalism gives rise only to the prosperity of a few, not the prosperity of the many.  One consequence is that in America, the "light on the hill" for democracy and the least regulated of the major capitalist countries, indices of social mobility have now plunged below those for Europe. And the large multi-national corporations, and their elite leadership, are rapidly moving beyond caring about regulation by individual nations; there’s always an unregulated market somewhere else.  International regulation of corporate behavior is drastically needed, but at best it is in its infancy.  Unless international bodies like the G-20 accelerate their oversight, the world of the sci-fi writers already looms.