The trend to greater inequality is a familiar story, but the author adds some new twists, such as the emergence of a new "clerisy" in the media, academia and the bureaucracy, analogous to the Catholic Church in medieval Europe, whose role is to justify the new order.
It is a bleak scenario but he cites some impressive data to back it up. One point he does not address is the increasingly close relations between the tech/finance oligarchs and the CCP regime in China, which is creating a surveillance state beyond what even Orwell could envisage, intent on becoming the global hegemon with the Western elites in its pockets.
The situation Kotkin describes calls to mind the American social-democratic philosopher Michael Walzer's theory of "complex equality" described in his book Spheres of Justice where he makes the case for thinking of equality in terms of multiple social goods—wealth, political power, technical expertise, and that possession of one such good should not enable dominance of another, such as wealthy being able to buy political power.
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e bemoan autocracies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and China but largely ignore the more subtle authoritarian trend in the West. Don’t expect a crudely effective dictatorship out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: we may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the nosiest of dictatorships.
The new autocracy rises from a relentless economic concentration which has engendered a new and fabulously wealthy elite. Five years ago, around four hundred billionaires owned as much as half of the world’s assets. Today, only one hundred billionaires own that share, and Oxfam reduces that number to a mere twenty-six. In avowedly socialist China, the top one per cent of the population holds about one-third of the country’s wealth, up from 20 per cent two decades ago. Since 1978, China’s Gini coefficient, which measures inequality of wealth distribution, has tripled.
An OECD report issued before the Covid pandemic finds that almost everywhere, the non-rich share of national wealth has declined. These trends can be seen even in social democracies like Sweden and Germany. In the United States, as the conservative economist John Michaelson put it succinctly in 2018, the economic legacy of the last decade is 'excessive corporate consolidation, a massive transfer of wealth to the top one per cent from the middle class.'
The digital economy is similarly dominated by a small group of giant firms. These overlords together exercise control of up to 90 per cent of critical markets such as basic computer operating systems, social media, online search advertising and book sales. No longer satisfied with controlling the pipelines, the tech oligarchy increasing buys up old news outlets and 'curates' the news to its tastes. It increasingly dominates mainstream entertainment too: the pending sale of MGM to Amazon is just the most recent example of its conquest and consolidation of the means of communication.
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Wealth cannot rule on its own. Autocracy needs a proselytising class who can justify the rulers and salve the distressed souls of the lower orders. In medieval times, the Catholic Church served this role, essentially justifying the feudal order as the expression of divine will. Today’s version, a sort of clerisy or intelligentsia, is mostly not religious and consists of people from the upper bureaucracy, academia, and the culture and media industries.