When Too Much Wealth Becomes Cancerous
Growth is fine if everyone grows together, but turns malignant when hyper-concentrated
The age of the trickle-down and the bootstrapping economy has been the defining story of the last generation. In the times after the war, rebuilding and true growth was possible at extraordinary rates. It was the capstone to the industrial revolution that kickstarted prosperity and the population boom. It was around the late 1800s and early 1900s when the population truly went exponential along with everything else. Homes, cars, cities, food, shipments, technology, travel. Everything really, including wealth. With more people, there was a need for more jobs, more productivity, and more wealth concentration. What used to feed a business went from tens or hundreds of thousands of people to suddenly millions, especially when globalism brought trade all over the world. With the internet that number was able to hit the billions.
These numbers are staggeringly high, yet it pales in comparison to the even higher market caps and personal wealth. Trillions of dollars floating around on the stock markets rivaling the GDP of entire nations and even continents. Companies like Facebook/Meta peaked at roughly 3 billion users which is more than China and India combined. Such a level of power concentration has never been achieved in our history, and it might signal a new kind of normal from here on out. But for the first time since their conception Facebook’s daily users started to drop, and along with their market value. With growing influence in China and their own tech revolution and competing virtual spaces, this, too, may be a sign of things to come.
I like to think of the human machinery we call the world economy to be something akin to the human body. At conception, there is nothing but a single cell. Soon it starts to duplicate, splitting into two, then four, then eight. This exponential growth quickly forms into a little embryo. Anatomically speaking, it creates what is a basic human shape. There’s a head, a tail, a tube that will become the spinal cord, an early brain, and the heart starts to beat around 18 days. This is the beginning of the body economy. The little unborn person is taking in nutrients to grow and to form all of its vital parts over time until they have all the basic structures they need when they’re born. For every parent out there, they’re keenly aware that the growth doesn’t stop there. It just continues. (Also humans are born surprisingly early in their development, so much of the growth that other animals do in the the womb, the humans do outside in the world.)
Soon, the little babies become toddlers, into early childhood, preteens, teens, and finally adults. Throughout all of these stages the body is rapidly growing, but none as quickly as adolescence with its growth spurt. If we line this up with global economic development, I think we’ve gotten past all of these stages and are entering early adulthood. If we look at the global population trends, it’s already starting to slow down and even reverse in many developed nations. Most of the next two to four billion people will be in the underdeveloped nations still trying to find their footing. So, what that means is most of the necessary physical growth in numbers has already occurred. It has reached its peak intake of resources and now the rest is wasted, which is clear given the amount of non-compostable waste and food waste that is generated each year.
Like the growth of the body, every piece has grown bit by bit. Different parts of the body fight for resources to grow taller, more muscles, develop through puberty, and so on, but everything still functions together as a working system. Oxygen pulled in from the lungs, nutrients from the digestive tract, are passed around in the bloodstream, while at the same time removing waste and carbon dioxide, cleaning, repairing, sensing, learning, and so forth. But what if, hypothetically, one part of the body starts to grow faster than the rest? It starts to hoard resources by coercing blood vessels to grow around it. It replicates faster than all the other cells around it, and as it grows it steals more and more blood, meaning more and more resources. Eventually, the other cells around it start to falter leading the organ to function improperly. And if this organ is critical to the functioning of the body, then it will eventually kill the body entirely. Even if it isn’t, these greedy cells can split off and travel into the bloodstream and start hoarding resources elsewhere. This is a malignant tumor. And we’re starting to see then form in our economy.
It all starts with greed. When certain parts of society think about their own welfare far and above that of the collective system they’re in, it becomes cancerous. Critical organs do take in more resources than some others. The brain, for example, takes in roughly 25% of glucose that the body provides. But this is all proportional to their utility. The brain is constantly at work make decisions, controlling the heart rate and breathing, it makes decisions, processes things from the outside world to prevent lethal mistakes. If it starts to take in so many resources that are disproportional to what it actually needs, then other parts of the body start to starve. Sounds familiar?
Housing, food prices, education costs are all skyrocketing in comparison to the minimum wage and overall wealth of the middle class. The only class that really grew over the pandemic, for instance, was that of the wealthiest class. It had deep arteries in the overall market and sucked up so much of the resources without considering the impact on the system. If this doesn’t worry you, it should. What happens when the majority of the population constantly struggle or can’t afford basic amenities? They will die, if they were cells. But humans are not simply cells. They will revolt. And the rise in polarization and extremism is pointing directly to that. Tensions are high because they are being starved out, each side thinking they know the answers and have the right to survive over the other. (Maybe this is why the teenage years have so many mood swings?) Meanwhile, the solution to resolve this tension is simple. Redistribute the wealth. Make sure the blood supply reaches everyone with reasonable proportions so that everyone is ensured survival. Yet right now, it feels like the tumor is winning.
When cancerous cells form in the body, they are usually dealt with before they have a chance to grow. The body has evolved to understand that these are formidable threats to the wellbeing of the survival of the whole being. For some reason, human civilization has still yet to figure this out. Sure, it is reasonable for companies, organizations, industries, and governments to take in sizeable shares of the world’s wealth since it, like the organs of the body, provide necessary functions to grow or maintain the population. There needs to be a supply chain, there needs to be energy delivery, there needs to be communications, regulations, and everything in between. This wealth, however, should not exceed certain thresholds since it endangers the population that needs those utilities. Deregulation and unlimited capital growth without proper taxation and control creates the ultimate environment for economic cancers to grow.
For a world so enthralled with the cure for bodily cancer, there is a surprisingly short supply of support when it comes to this other form of equally dangerous cancer. Somehow, the idea of redistribution and fairness to everyone has been considered a weakness under the dogma of limitless growth. But as growth of the population slows, so will the economic growth that fueled the story of capitalism. In order for the world to continue on into adulthood and beyond, it needs to recognize this injustice at a global level.
While it has been slow, the shift in perspective is starting to emerge. With the threat of global disaster, rising costs of climate change is fueling dramatic changes in the way nations are handling energy. The recognition of widespread injustice towards the marginalized, including the poor, is itself spreading across the globe rapidly due to the internet connected world. Ideas like basic income, increased minimum wage, shorter work weeks, work-life balance, proper taxation are all on the rise. Whether these ideas will mature quickly enough is another question, but at least there is hope on the horizon.
The starving parts of the system are starting to realize they aren’t getting enough blood to live, and maybe, just maybe, the greedy tumors are starting to learn they will simply kill themselves along with everyone else if they don’t play along. I’m not sure any part of humanity wants to really see that happen, yet we have to maintain vigilance because cancer is a beast, in whatever form it takes.
