Use of the term “privilege” has, I’d argue, actually set back the cultural conversation about privilege. It’s not just that “privilege,” when used as an accusation, silences. It’s also that it’s made cluelessness a greater crime than inequality. These ubiquitous expressions—“check your privilege” or “your privilege is showing”—ask the accused to own up to privilege, not to do anything about it. There may be a vague, implied hope that privilege checking will lead to efforts to remedy some injustice, but the more direct concern is not coming across as entitled, not offending anyone underprivileged who theoretically might be (but almost certainly isn’t) in the room. Thus we’ve arrived at “blessed,”
.. A certain sort of self-deprecating privilege awareness has become, in effect, upper- or upper-middle-class good manners, maybe even a new form of noblesse oblige, reinforcing class divides. When Fortgang’s classmates admonish him to check his privilege, what they’re really doing is socializing him into the culture of the class he’ll enter as a Princeton graduate. Failure to acknowledge privilege is very gauche, maybe even nouveau riche
Supreme Injustice
Stone found no such consistency in votes of the five most conservative justices in the 20 major cases. The pattern of their decisions cannot, he argued, be explained by either of the two major intellectual themes of conservative legal thinking, judicial restraint and originalism.
“Something is motivating them other than a completely neutral detachment. They chose to be activist in certain types of areas, and strike down law when laws disadvantage the wealthy,” Stone said in my telephone conversation with him. The conservative majority takes “an aggressive, muscular approach” in striking down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but then “suddenly becomes very passive in deferring to the legislature in the voter ID case.”
Taking on the Heiristocracy: History shows that growth alone won’t stop vast economic inequality.
After all, as Piketty points out, America is the country that, after World War I, literally invented “confiscatory” taxes—the type of progressive tax that is designed not so much to yield revenue but to “put an end to” large incomes and estates, because they are regarded as “socially unacceptable and economically unproductive.” Even an ardent apostle for capitalism like Fisher felt that the best solution to the early-twentieth-century inequality problem was a steeply progressive tax on the largest estates—with a rate that could climb as high as 100 percent for an estate that was more than three generations old.
Thomas Piketty Is Right Everything you need to know about ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’
Piketty likes to describe the distribution of income and wealth concretely, and not in terms of summary statistics. He looks at the proportions of the total claimed by the top 1 percent (sometimes also the top tenth of the 1 percent), the top 10 percent, the next 40 percent, and the bottom half. (He labels the 40 percent between the top decile and the median as the “middle class.” There is an element of oxymoron in a middle class that lies entirely above the median; but I suppose this usage is no worse than the American habit of describing everyone between the clearly rich and the abjectly poor as being in the middle class.)
.. About 60 percent of the income of the top 1 percent in the United States today is labor income. Only when you get to the top tenth of 1 percent does income from capital start to predominate.
.. The recent surge of extreme inequality at the top of the wage distribution may be primarily an American development. Piketty, who with Emmanuel Saez has made a careful study of high-income tax returns in the United States, attributes this to the rise of what he calls “supermanagers.” The very highest income class consists to a substantial extent of top executives of large corporations, with very rich compensation packages.