Disaster capitalism

From Harper's Index, October:

• Average grade for US infrastructure given by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2005: D


• Percentage change since 1990 in the average size of an American Master bathroom: +50

This seems to me to typify a trend seen in most of the western countries: a degredation of the commons at a time of rising private affluence. This theme is explored in more depth in the same issue of Harper's, in an article by Naomi Klein: Disaster Capitalism (subscription):

[D]isasters have become the preferred moments for advancing a vision of a ruthlessly divided world, one in which the very idea of a public sphere has no place at all. ... [Katrina] was created and deepened by public infrastructure that was on its last legs; in the years since, the disaster itself has been used as an excuse to finish the job. ... Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pullted together. Today they are moments when we are hurled further apart, when we lurch into a radically segregated future whre some of us will fall off the map and others will ascend to a parallel privatized state, one equipped with well paved highways and skyways, safe bridges, boutique charter schools ....

Importantly, if Ms Klein's thesis is accurate, there's no self-correcting mechanism, as she is well aware:

The disaster-capitalism complex does not deliberately scheme to create the cataclysms on which it fees...but there is plenty of evidence that its component industries work very hard indeed to make sure that current disastrous trends continue unchallenged. Large oil companies have bankrolled the climate-change-denial movement for years....

My impression is that something similar seems to be happening in both the UK and New Zealand. Whether this is a product of right-wing think tanks, ethnic diversity (or rapidly changing ethnic diversity), the welfare state, or the discredited economics of socialist alternatives, I don't know and in a sense it doesn't matter. If there's widely agreed to be a problem, then the Social Policy Bond principle is about motivating people to solve it, rather than channelling resources into identifying its cause.

By its nature, the commons is a difficult thing to define and quantify. For instance, random crimes of violence might rise, but that could deter people from exposing themselves to them; they stay at home or drive everywhere, and crime rates fall. But we can try to get a handle on the non-subjective aspects and we can try to encourage the people who generate solutions. A thriving economy does generate more material wealth, but governments that are beholden to large corporations are unlikely to do a good job of alleviating our social and environmental problems. The sort of questions that a Social Policy Bond regime would stimulate - along the lines of: what do we want as a society? - could go a long way to avoiding the disaster capitalism that Ms Klein writes about.