Getting more from our aristocracy

Downton Abbey, the Jane Austen works, and the riveting collection of historical dramas from all over the world include the keys to our economic and social future. These stories, rooted in the concept of entail, contain the elements of political success. We, most of us, do not even know that such keys exist. Imagine the study of mathematics without the modulus or investigation into biology without knowledge of genetics. The same goes for the study of disease ignorant of the characteristics of bacteria and viruses. Without understanding such core issues, we are left flailing around, buffeted from left and right, ignorant of the source of our problems.

We learned so many lessons in the last century, but we lost sight of the major victory of a previous era, the partial conquest of aristocracy and entail in the eighteenth century. In terms that we may understand, how was Downton Abbey rescued in the late nineteenth century? By a marriage between the daughter of an American industrialist and the scion of a great British family. Why was this necessary? Because the failure to transfer aristocracy and entail to the British colonies and the resurgence of new economic classes in Britain and the colonies from manufacture and trade upset the centuries-old balance of power. As a literary example, Jane Austen's elites were not at risk; as the decades played out, they were.

In our time, wealth is no longer principally derived from the land. On the other hand, that is where much of it ends up. John Kenneth Galbraith declared about a half century ago that principal economic and political power was represented by corporate assets, by the wealth and power of large, entrenched corporations. That opinion was held in question at the time. George Gilder and others, including Peter Drucker, declared that entrepreneurial successes were effective at redistributing and recycling economic and social power. The whole venture capital mystique from the 1970s on grew out of the ashes of Galbraith's declaration to the point that he reversed himself.
With the notable exception of the electronics industry and its novel funding community, we must take another look at Galbraith's 1960s view of the economic arena. Wealth concentration of recent decades has to be viewed in the light of a lack of competition and dramatic concentration in key economic sectors.

I had an interesting conversation with one of my children last week on this point after watching one of the popular "time capsule" movies. Many of the areas when I was a boy that we thought were susceptible to great change are fundamentally the same, though some predicted gadgets such as picture phones have appeared. Ford Corporation's admission of its seventy year old "archive" of potential, but unused innovations attests to this fact. There is no chance that the political and economic elites of our time, from either of the prevalent political parties, will relinquish their holds on these longstanding markets. Whether it be laziness or a preference for manipulation in lieu of risk, their white-fisted grip is fixed on the necks of any that would upset the current economic apple-cart.

Buying up politicians? Nothing could be easier for these people. They have been at it for a long, long time. They can be very subtle. As Fussell has indicated, if the families of great wealth were frightened by the French and American revolutions, they were highly informed by the Great Depression, which taught them the importance of invisibility.

Inheritance is the issue as much as it was in the time of the Downton Abbey tale, which does have its historic roots. This is not the modest inheritance that allows you to provide for the basic needs of your spouse and children. This is inheritance on a scale that transfers the reins of wealth and power from generation to generation in the form of interests in longstanding stores of wealth.

I live in the American West. Most of the people around me could be considered tea party conservatives. They profess a hatred for those labeled as progressives. They call for a return to the past, a message thick with references to the American Revolution and the American Constitution. They quite adamantly believe in American exceptionalism. Nonetheless, when I point out the structural changes brought on by the American political innovators to disallow entail and the aristocracy, they tend to fall silent. It is, ironically, an idea that does not resonate with them. Rather, it is new to them, and they have a professed resentment for new ideas. This is one of the chief complaints they bring forward with regard to their political opposites, the progressives.
Just because the entail issue is new to them, however, it does not mean that the idea itself is new. On the contrary, there is overwhelming evidence of the effects of entail and aristocracy. Britain alone had almost a thousand years of it. Reread the great books of the time. The intelligentsia of Europe was  obsessed with the issues. Even Adam Smith had a few things to tell.

As a result of our ignorance and inattention to the issue, we have a kind of half-baked entail and related aristocracy. We continue to call for social equality in the United States, but we do not search out meaningful ways of resolving our fundamental systems of inequality. Questioning inheritance on almost any level would be a form of political suicide of untold proportions, alienating parties from the political left as well as from the right. It seems we would all like to establish something of an aristocracy of our own. In fact, this can be said to be one of our greatest motivations, particularly when we see the ineffectiveness, the corruption, and the cupidity of our government and its agents. Until government can show to be more reflective of the needs and interests of individuals and of families, voluntarily abdicating power by a family of wealth truly would be suicidal.

Nonetheless, more transparency is clearly needed. Is it possible that we could make a more explicit deal with the families of wealth and power that so clearly are controlling political and economic affairs in our time? We need to dispense with the trappings and the distractions of our current politics and open up a clear and definitive dialog with the "invisible" powers Fussell refers to. They need to purposefully and expertly build new industries to replace the old in energy, in health, and in transportation. These new industries need to use existing science, not subvert it. They need to dismantle the old models -- never an easy task. As in biology, when a healthy organism encounters a cancerous or no longer useful cell or tissue, it kills it in favor of a new replacement. Our bodies constantly do this in order to maintain our health. This needs to be done to the body politic by the elites themselves, even when existing stores of wealth will likewise be ruined. To the elites, we must say, "You have wealth and influence. Use them to build up new, more valid stores of wealth. If it is your wealth, that is OK, as long as we can get along with our lives as we wish to live them."
I might add a little sarcasm here, pointed at the masses of our society that do not really aspire to more in life. Your opiate, your Great Distraction, is none other than cable TV. Perhaps that is a good thing, better than other options. It seems something of a shame, however.

If you look at the last time the fundamental wealth of American elites was seriously in jeopardy -- well, not counting the energy and inflation crises of the 1970s -- that was the combined challenge of the Great Depression and World War II. Tax rates on wealth were substantially higher for the period. I looked this up years ago and have the documentation somewhere. The wealthy families made an unprecedented commitment to preserve the status quo and the structure of our economy by supporting economic reform and the war. We need a similar commitment now. Somehow, for example, we should be able to adjust to inexpensive personal vehicles that create minimal pollution and other substantially improved transportation. We should be able to eliminate the bizarre medical system that is dependent on high levels of chronic disease to sustain itself. The technology and the science exist to resolve such issues and many more.

To follow the Downton Abbey example, the upstairs family needs to get its affairs in order so that the downstairs crew can continue on. Personally, I would like to see something more egalitarian and, well, progressive, but I don't see the will, the commitment, or the understanding of these issues to even begin to imagine something different.