Severe Wealth Inequality Is Destroying The World's Great Cities

Last weekend we noted in, post about the galloping inequality inherent in urbanization that Richard Florida was warning that "Young, affluent, highly educated people have flowed back to downtown cores in cities like London, New York, San Francisco and Vancouver. Good jobs, better restaurants, higher tax revenues and even high-tech startups have followed. But this dramatic back-to-the-city movement also has its dark side, giving rise to what I call the new urban crisis, which registers itself in increasingly unaffordable housing and a growing divide between rich and poor." Since then, Florida was on NPR with Steve Innskeep (above), discussing his new book, The New Urban Crisis. He explained to the NPR listeners that "the middle-class neighborhoods, those platforms for the American dream, have been decimated" and that blue-collar service workers "are being pushed out of these metropolitan areas entirely." He blames Democratic politicians in the big cities and says flatly that they have "abandoned progressive policies" and he blames how power (and taxes) have flowed to the federal government and away from local governments.

We have to make a commitment to building affordable housing because what's getting built in New York and in Los Angeles and San Francisco and what is causing the backlash is luxury towers and luxury lofts for the wealthy. Number two, we've got to build more transit. We've got to build transit that connects parts of our cities and parts of our communities-- and actually those lagging areas-- that connects them to employment centers near the urban core, which is where the best jobs are being created. But the third thing we have to do that's absolutely critical and that very few people are talking about-- we have nearly 70 million jobs now in the blue-collar service economy-- food preparation, food service, office work, personal care services-- the fastest growing jobs in our country.

So I talk in the book about the need to massively increase the minimum wage to take into account the cost of living. So that minimum wage would be higher in New York and San Francisco than it would be in Buffalo or Pittsburgh, of course. As a country, we really spend time and money making manufacturing jobs good jobs. We increase the wages so that people who work in factories could buy the cars and consumer durables coming off the assembly lines. The only way we're going to build a middle class today is to make sure the service workers-- 70 million strong, more than roughly half of our workforce-- that they have jobs that are middle class jobs. And right now, they're sinking further and further behind.

...I had hoped that our federal government would lead here. But now with the Trump election and Republicans in control of both houses, that's impossible. So I think the default for the United States is this progressive group of cities and mayors and urban leaders and philanthropy. And let's hope progressive businesses-- the tech companies, the knowledge companies, progressive real estate developers-- will get on board with this because we are in such deep trouble with this overblown nation-state and really out of sync with the times. Dysfunctional, imperial presidency-- we see that with Trump in office, but it's been there all along. I really do see cities and local empowerment as probably the only way out of this new urban crisis.

There's an excerpt from his book in the new issue of The Atlantic, The Roots of the New Uran Crisis. In his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, he laid out the basis for urban success-- attracting and retaining talent, not just companies. "The knowledge workers, techies, and artists and other cultural creatives who made up the creative class were locating in places that had lots of high-paying jobs-- or a thick labor market. They also had what I called a thick mating market-- other people to meet and date-- and a vibrant quality of place, with great restaurants and cafés, a music scene, and an abundance of things to do."

In time, my work generated a considerable following among mayors, arts and cultural leaders, urbanists, and even some enlightened real estate developers who were looking for a better way to spur urban development in their communities. But my message also generated a backlash on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Some conservatives questioned the connection I drew between diversity and urban economic growth, countering that it was companies and jobs, not the creative class, that moved the economy forward. Others, mainly on the left, blamed the creative class and me personally for everything from rising rents and gentrification to the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Although some of the more personal attacks stung, this criticism provoked my thinking in ways I could never have anticipated, causing me to reframe my ideas about cities and the forces that act on them.

Slowly but surely, my understanding of cities started to evolve. I realized I had been overly optimistic to believe that cities and the creative class could, by themselves, bring forth a better and more inclusive kind of urbanism. Even before the economic crisis of 2008, the gap between rich and poor was surging in the cities that were experiencing the greatest revivals. As techies, professionals, and the rich flowed back into urban cores, the less advantaged members of the working and service classes, as well as some artists and musicians, were being priced out. In New York’s SoHo, the artistic and creative ferment I had observed as a student was giving way to a new kind of homogeneity of wealthy people, high-end restaurants, and luxury shops.

I entered into a period of rethinking and introspection, of personal and intellectual transformation. I began to see the back-to-the-city movement as something that conferred a disproportionate share of its benefits on a small group of places and people. I found myself confronting the dark side of the urban revival I had once championed and celebrated.

As I pored over the data, I could see that only a limited number of cities and metro areas, maybe a couple of dozen, were really making it in the knowledge economy; many more were failing to keep pace or falling further behind. Tens of millions of Americans remain locked in persistent poverty. And virtually all our cities suffer from growing economic divides. As the middle class and its neighborhoods fade, our geography is splintering into small areas of affluence and concentrated advantage, and much larger areas of poverty and concentrated disadvantage.

It became increasingly clear to me that the same clustering of talent and economic assets generates a lopsided, unequal urbanism in which a relative handful of superstar cities, and a few elite neighborhoods within them, benefit while many other places stagnate or fall behind. Ultimately, the very same force that drives the growth of our cities and economy broadly also generates the divides that separate us and the contradictions that hold us back.

My perspective on cities and urbanism was also deeply affected by what I saw happening in my adopted hometown of Toronto. I had moved there in 2007 to head up a new institute on urban prosperity at the University of Toronto. For me, the city was a bastion of the very best of progressive urbanism. Toronto had as diverse a population as can be found anywhere in North America; a thriving economy that was barely dented by the economic crisis of 2008; safe streets, great public schools, and a cohesive social fabric. Yet, somehow, this progressive, diverse city chose Rob Ford as its mayor.

While his personal foibles and dysfunctions may have endeared him to his Ford Nation of supporters, he was, to me, perhaps the most anti-urban mayor ever to preside over a major city. Once elected, Ford went about tearing down just about everything that urbanists believe make for great cities. He ripped out bike lanes, and developed plans to turn a prime stretch of the city’s downtown lakefront into a garish mall, complete with a giant Ferris wheel.

Ford’s rise was the product of the city’s burgeoning class divide. As Toronto’s once sizable middle class declined and its old middle-class neighborhoods faded, the city was splitting into a small set of affluent, educated areas packed in and around the urban core and along the major subway and transit lines and a much larger expanse of disadvantaged neighborhoods located far from the city center and transit. Ford’s message resonated powerfully with his constituency of working people and new immigrants, who felt that the benefits of the city’s revitalization were being captured by a downtown elite and passing them by.

I came to see this mounting class divide as a ticking time bomb. If a city as progressive, diverse, and prosperous as Toronto could fall prey to such a populist backlash, then it could happen anywhere.

At the time, I said Ford was just the first signal of this brewing backlash: more and worse would follow. It did. In short order came England’s stunning and wholly unexpected decision to leave the European Union with the Brexit. Vehemently opposed by affluent, cosmopolitan London, it was backed by the struggling residents of working-class cities, suburbs, and rural areas who were being left behind by the twin forces of globalization and re-urbanization.

But what came next was even more unanticipated-- and even more frightening: the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the most powerful country on the planet. Trump rose to power by mobilizing anxious, angry voters in the left-behind places of America. Hillary Clinton took the dense, affluent, knowledge- based cities and close-in suburbs that are the epicenters of the new economy, winning the popular vote by a substantial margin. But Trump took everywhere else-- the farther-out exurbs and rural areas-- which provided his decisive victory in the Electoral College. All three-- Trump, Ford, and Brexit—reflect the deepening fault lines of class and location that define and divide us today.

These political cleavages ultimately stem from the far deeper economic and geographic structures of the New Urban Crisis. They are the product of our new age of winner-take-all urbanism, in which the talented and the advantaged cluster and colonize a small, select group of superstar cities, leaving everybody and everywhere else behind. Much more than a crisis of cities, the New Urban Crisis is the central crisis of our time.

The stakes could not be higher. How we come to grips with the New Urban Crisis will determine whether we become more divided and slide backward into economic stagnation, or forge ahead to a new era of more sustainable and inclusive prosperity.

Trump Didn't Cause The Urban Housing Bubble, But His Policies Are Likely To Make It Worse

Last week, urbanologist Richard Florida did a post ostensibly about Vancouver, but completely relevant to all the great cities of the West. As he said, "Young, affluent, highly educated people have flowed back to downtown cores in cities like London, New York, San Francisco and Vancouver. Good jobs, better restaurants, higher tax revenues and even high-tech startups have followed. But this dramatic back-to-the-city movement also has its dark side, giving rise to what I call the new urban crisis, which registers itself in increasingly unaffordable housing and a growing divide between rich and poor.

Rising inequality in Vancouver is driven by the decline in stable, blue-collar, middle-class jobs, which make up just 15 per cent of the region’s jobs. Highly paid professional, knowledge and creative jobs make up 36.5 per cent of jobs, while lower-paid service jobs account for 47 per cent of jobs.

Vancouver is seeing not just the decline of its middle class, but of the neighbourhoods such families called home. Middle-class areas, which made up more than 70 per cent of Vancouver neighbourhoods in 1970, have fallen to less than half by 2005, the last year for which data is available. There are likely far fewer today.

As the educated and affluent flock back to urban cores, a great deal of poverty in cities like Vancouver has shifted to the suburbs. Indeed, these places are morphing into a new kind of “patchwork metropolis,” with small areas of the advantaged concentrated downtown near subway and transit stations or in affluent suburban areas, surrounded by much larger spans of concentrated disadvantaged.

The new urban crisis has engendered a backlash that resulted in the rise of the late mayor Rob Ford in Toronto, the Brexit in Britain and Donald Trump in America.

Friday an OpEd in the NY Times by Oliver Bullough, Offshore Money, Bane of Democracy, looked at the problem from a different perspective. This is something I'm particularly tuned into right now because my best friend, an inner-city public school teacher, is trying to buy a house and keeps finding himself out-bid even in neighborhoods considered "sketchy." Here in L.A. the money buying up local real estate-- and now at every level-- in coming from China. As Bullough points out, "China was the leading investor in real estate in the United States by the end of 2015, with $350 billion in related investments and holdings."

Almost one-third of top-end property purchases in America’s biggest cities are suspect, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the body at the Treasury Department whose task it is to protect the United States from money laundering. The government recently granted FinCEN authority to peek behind the veil of secrecy provided by offshore shell companies, and what the bureau has seen is disturbing: There is a flood of dirty capital pouring into United States real estate, and it isn’t clear who owns it.

...Greedy rulers around the world steal billions from their people, then disguise the money and stash it offshore, usually in the West. The extraction of this much capital cripples the economies of source countries like Afghanistan, Nigeria or Ukraine, and breeds insecurity and violence there. Offshoring is also a problem for host states. If a government doesn’t know who owns the country it runs, how can it know how those owners will behave in a crisis?

...Law enforcement in the United States leads the world in investigating and prosecuting corruption, but the country still lags badly in terms of transparency, despite FinCEN’s new powers. Britain has a freely accessible, central online register of all companies, and anyone who creates a new company has to declare its actual owners. The system is flawed, not least because the information provided is not checked. But it’s a good first step toward ending the abuses enabled by anonymous companies. America should adopt something similar.

The British Parliament is also considering implementing “unexplained wealth orders,” which would force criminals or foreign officials to justify how they came to own luxury goods or expensive real estate. Those who cannot prove they secured the financing legally would see their property confiscated.

These two measures alone can’t be enough to reveal the true owners of the anonymous money that is buying up so much of the West. But they can go a long way toward depriving dictators and thieves of a haven for their dirty cash, while helping officials in democracies regain control over who is buying the countries they were elected to run.

How attractive will the glittering big cities remain if service workers and even middle class blue and white collar workers-- think school teachers, for example-- can't afford to live in them or even in their close-in inner suburbs? What Florida refers to as the "creative class" in his writing-- that helped spark the urban renewal-- are already being squeezed out of affordable housing in many cities en masse. 

Why Can't The Republicans Compete In America's Cities?

A lot has been made about how Hillary and other Democrats have failed to address the needs of rural America and have failed electorally in rural areas. Democratic policy for rural America is actually far better than Republican policy but that isn’t where Democrats have failed. They’ve failed culturally in areas where social conservatism and religionist superstition is still powerful, something that would be hard to avoid while sweeping fear more progressive areas, the big cities. This past cycle, Hillary kicked ass in urban America, while losing in under-populated rural districts— from Maine’s second district to the Dakotas. Wyoming, whose 3 electoral votes were awarded by 174,248 Trump voters had far fewer voters than the city of Detroit, where Hillary beat Trump 95.0-3.1%, but whose votes were meaningless in the electoral college.

Detroit was Trump’s worst-performing city— but not the only one where he was uncompetitive. Trump’s percentage in some of the biggest cities in America, where he failed to score even 20% of the vote:

• Detroit- 3.1%
• Washington- 4.1%
• Seattle- 8.4%
• San Francisco- 9.2%
• Baltimore- 10.5%
• Minnespolis- 11.8%
• Chicago- 12.4%
• Portland (OR)- 12.8%
• Boston- 13.9%
• Cleveland- 14.3%
• New Orleans- 14.7%
• Madison- 15.0%
• Philadelphia- 15.3%
• St. Louis- 15.7%
• Salt Lake City- 16.3%
• Los Angeles- 16.4%
• St. Paul- 16.9%
• NYC- 18.0%
• Milwaukee- 18.4%
• Buffalo- 18.2%
• Denver- 18.9%

You might be able to guess what urban studies expert Richard Florida would say about this and how he would tie it in to his theories about density and the creative class and why progressive politics thrives in areas with high concentrations of technology workers, artists, musicians, gays and lesbians and "high bohemians,” (collectively the creative class), groups with a higher level of economic development and an open, dynamic, personal and professional environment which attracts more creative people, as well as businesses and capital. A couple of weeks ago Florida wrote a piece about how Jane Jacobs, writing decades ago, predicted the rise of Trump… or at least Trumpism. He reminds his readers that Jacobs “was one of the most prescient writers of the 20th century. In the 1960s, when suburbanization and heavy-handed urban renewal programs threatened urban neighborhoods, she published her classic Death and Life of Great American Cities. During the 1970s and 1980s, when policy-makers and economists focused on industrial competitiveness and national economic strategy, she drew attention to the role of cities and clustering in powering innovation and economic growth in her books The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.”

But she may well have saved her best for last.

At a time when pundits and political scientists were celebrating the end of history, pointing to an emerging Democratic majority and extolling the virtues of a flat world of globalization, she ominously predicted a coming age of urban crisis, mass amnesia, and populist backlash in her final work, Dark Age Ahead. Eerily prescient as always, rereading the 2005 book today serves as a survivors’ guide to the Age of Trump.

Jacobs outlines an increasing distrust of politicians and politics, a burgeoning new urban crisis in cities, worsening environmental degradation, entrenched segregation, and an “enlarging gulf between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class” as signals and symptoms of a coming Dark Age.

Nationalism and xenophobia form the core of Jacobs’ Dark Age. “Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural vigor,” as “self-imposed isolation” leads to “a fortress mentality,” she writes.

That mentality transforms logic into myth, Jacobs writes, with a conservatism that “looks backward to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.” (Jacobs borrows that phrase from Karen Armstrong’s Short History of Islam, who points to Ferdinand and Isabella driving Muslims out of Spain in 1492, signaling a turning point for Mesopotamia in the Middle Ages).

Historically speaking, dark ages have come upon us relatively quickly, as “radical jolts” lead to the collapse of once-vital economic political and cultural institutions. Europe’s original Dark Age came about as local governments and city-states were “expunged by imperial decree and were replaced by a centralized military despotism.” Jacobs points to the cities of the Roman Empire, which lost the advantages of subsidiarity—closeness to the people—and fiscal accountability to the imperial treasury before its collapse. In the book, she asks a very big question that stands at the heart of dark ages: “how and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?”

Jacobs finds the answer in the rise of “mass amnesia.” The notion of a widespread, “permanent and profound” society-wide loss of memory, which seemed so strange and out of place when she wrote the book, seems suddenly all too real in a world of Trump and Brexit—a world where every new outrage quickly leads to another, where facts have no meaning.

The Five Pillars of Dark Age Descent

According to Jacobs, our own dark age is taking shape around the erosion of “five key pillars” of society.

The first is the decline of family and community. The same politicians who call families the foundation of society undertake policies that weaken and undermine them. The replacement of extended families with nuclear ones make it impossible for many to cover the cost of housing. Falling birth rates mean a smaller workforce to take care of an aging population.

At the same time, the broader community falls victim to market pressures, materialism, and the hegemony of brands. Jacobs points especially to the automobile as a “destroyer of worlds” that not only wastes energy and promotes sprawl, but skews priorities from public interest to self-interest.

The second is the decline of education, which has been transformed into vocational training. Education becomes an individualistic investment instead of a public good that produces well-rounded citizens. When that happens, jobs and profit become the sole measure of progress and ultimate justification for political choices, at the expense of everything else.

The third is an attack on science, or what she calls false analogies that mask reality. “If a body of inquiry becomes disconnected from the scientific state of mind, that unfortunate segment of knowledge is no longer scientific,” she writes. “It stagnates.” Objectivity and scientific progress are replaced with dogma.

The fourth pillar is the “dumbing down” of taxes. In place of public investments that build cities and societies, taxes and government investment come to be seen as waste. The result is that all sorts of public goods—education, transit, infrastructure and the social safety which contribute to a functioning and cohesive society—start to break down. Jacobs perceptively identifies the looming “new urban crisis” of unaffordable housing, gaping inequality, escalating sprawl, and congestion facing cities as the result of this sort of attack on taxes and public investment.

The fifth and final pillar is the subversion of the “learned professions” such as medicine, law, architecture, engineering and journalism. We cannot possibly learn every facet of the world, so professions are needed to instill trust and maintain common welfare. Doctors, for example, adhere to a Hippocratic Oath. Lawyers have ethical requirements to adhere to. When such professions come under attack and their norms and functions are undermined, Jacobs notes, society falls victim to the whims of “frauds, brutes, and psychopaths.”

What Would Jane Do?

How to break the cycle and combat our own impending Trumpist dark age? On this, Jacobs provides two important insights.

On the one hand, her life’s work shows us that the vitality of the city and its neighborhoods is the ultimate antidote to darkness. Jacobs had her pessimistic side. In Scranton, she saw first-hand the devastating toll of the Great Depression on industries and workers. As a young woman, she saw the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in Europe. During the 1950s, she witnessed the chilling effect of McCarthyism. Robert Moses-style urban renewal reflected the same unbridled top-down power.

For Jacobs, cities and neighborhoods are much more than walkable, mixed-use places, and much more than engines of innovation and economic growth. They are also bulwarks against the forces of darkness—the fonts of social progress, of human civilization, and of democracy itself.

On the other hand, Jacobs implores us to do everything in our power to protect ourselves from the forces of top-down power and mass amnesia that would destroy our communities and the key pillars of human civilization.

One of the last times we spoke, I asked Jacobs where she and her colleagues found the strength to combat Robert Moses and the incredible centralized power he represented. At the time, she had just finished Dark Age Ahead and was absorbed with her tellingly titled but unfinished last book, A Brief Biography of the Human Race. Still, her optimism came through.

For the longest time, she told me, people would avoid their protests. But one day, a few people started picking up their leaflets; soon many more were joining in and ultimately this cast of neighborhood characters won the battle and saved their neighborhood.

If a dark age starts with a radical jolt, it ends with one too.

Maybe Jane got her ideas from Freddy and Sally Mutant and the gang, the San Francisco punk rockers, The Mutants, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. This is one my indie label, 415 Records, released in 1980:

Unforeseen Consequences Of Social And Economic Dysfunction In 2016

Richard Florida writes about social and economic theories in the context of a changing urban environment. He teaches at the University of Toronto and his best known books are The Rise of the Creative Class, Cities and the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class, which make the case that the accellorated economic development in urban areas is attributable to an open, accepting and dynamic environment because of what he calls "high bohemians" or the "creative class"-- artists, musicians, gays, technology nerds. Although some critics dismiss his work as elitist, he's on to something very real, if not always very appetizing.

Yesterday I noticed that Chris Cillizza's Washington Post column, 2016: The Race To The Bottom Election elicited a Twitter Storm from Florida. Cillizza's piece was inspired by a memo from a White House aide, Doug Sosnik, analyzing the context of the 2016 races.

"In this period of profound alienation, with both parties engaging in harsh ideological primaries, the public is likely to view the entire political process as a race to the bottom. They will be inclined to view their choice for president through the prism of which candidate is the least flawed and poses the least threat to their future well-being... The country is undergoing the most significant economic, technological, and demographic changes since the Industrial Revolution. Such change in any one of these areas would test our ability to adapt. But the fact that we are experiencing all of these shifts at the same time has exacerbated Americans’ fears and fundamental distrust of those in power. The public has concluded that our 20th century institutions are incapable of dealing with 21st century challenges."

Cillizza contends that Herr Trumpf's "entire candidacy, in fact, is illustrative of Sosnik's point: The real estate mogul is presenting a sort of dystopian view of America-- things are bad and not getting better-- and casting himself as the lone, last chance the country has to turn itself around. In normal times, that would be the kiss of death. In this race, it has been a rocket that Trump has ridden to the top of the polls."

What caught Florida's attention was this line: "The public has concluded that our 20th century institutions are incapable of dealing with 21st century challenges." Right up his alley! He tweets that "The basic thesis [of Cillizza's story] is that the election is occurring at a time of epochal economic, demographic & social change."

And then his own response:

He points to former crackpot (and crack head) Toronto Mayor Rob Ford as the precursor to Trumpism and asserts that as the profound social and economic changes kick in the "dealignment phase is volatile, unpredictable & dangerous. Odd things (like the rise of Rob Ford) can happen." And Herr Trumpf.

He seems somewhat optimist because "America has always led the world in finding ways to realign its political structures in ways that leverage big economic transformations" but warns that this elect is part of a "test of whether it can do so again" and writes it'll "require a progressive, inclusive vision of a post-industrial knowledge economy where everyone is included & rewarded. To get beyond Trumpism require[s] a vision of a post-industrial society which goes beyond just crass materialism. To my mind, such a progressive agenda turns on the recognition that every single human being is creative. And that developing economic & social structure to harness the full creativity of each is the key to creating real meaning & purpose."

He went on to say that he feels "the party structures block" meaningful participation from those quarters-- think Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Steve Israel, Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen, Steny Hoyer as examples of Democrats in party leadership roles... not exactly revolutionaries. "Some would say," he tweeted, "major investors in both parties have blocked this shift. In doing so, they have opened pandora's box" and acknowledges that "Mainstream media bares some of the blame-- reality TV, focus on 'crazy' people ... Helped create lane for Trump."

Five hours later he was suggesting people read a new article, Rise of the Renters , for The Atlantic, which points out that the "share of U.S. households that rent increased from 36% in 2006 to 41.1% in 2014, that the "share of renters among Millenialls 18-34 yr olds rose 7.6%, from 62.5% to 71.6% [and that] renter share of 26-34 yr olds rose 10.9% and warned ominously about a housing cost squeeze: "rents increased by 22.3% between 2006 to 2014, while average incomes declined by 5.8%. Income devoted to rent by the lowest income households increased from 55.7% in 2006 to a staggering 62.5% in 2014."

Before we get to The Jam, let me end with one little tiny thing, namely that the world's most famous economist-- sorry Krugman-- says Bernie could change the face of the country. That's certainly his intention, of course, but Thomas Piketty is impressed with his rise.

From the 1930s until the 1970s, the US were at the forefront of an ambitious set of policies aiming to reduce social inequalities. Partly to avoid any resemblance with Old Europe, seen then as extremely unequal and contrary to the American democratic spirit, in the inter-war years the country invented a highly progressive income and estate tax and set up levels of fiscal progressiveness never used on our side of the Atlantic. From 1930 to 1980-- for half a century-- the rate for the highest US income (over $1m per year) was on average 82%, with peaks of 91% from the 1940s to 1960s (from Roosevelt to Kennedy), and still as high as 70% during Reagan’s election in 1980.

This policy in no way affected the strong growth of the post-war American economy, doubtless because there is not much point in paying super-managers $10m when $1m will do. The estate tax, which was equally progressive with rates applicable to the largest fortunes in the range of 70% to 80% for decades... [T]he US also set up a federal minimum wage. In the late 1960s it was worth $10 an hour (in 2016 dollars), by far the highest of its time.

All this was carried through almost without unemployment, since both the level of productivity and the education system allowed it. This is also the time when the US finally put an end to the undemocratic legal racial discrimination still in place in the south, and launched new social policies.

All this change sparked a muscular opposition, particularly among the financial elites and the reactionary fringe of the white electorate. Humiliated in Vietnam, 1970s America was further concerned that the losers of the second world war (Germany and Japan in the lead) were catching up at top speed. The US also suffered from the oil crisis, inflation and under-indexation of tax schedules. Surfing the waves of all these frustrations, Reagan was elected in 1980 on a program aiming to restore a mythical capitalism said to have existed in the past.

The culmination of this new program was the tax reform of 1986, which ended half a century of a progressive tax system and lowered the rate applicable to the highest incomes to 28%.

Democrats never truly challenged this choice in the Clinton (1992-2000) and Obama (2008-2016) years, which stabilized the taxation rate at around 40% (two times lower than the average level for the period 1930 to 1980). This triggered an explosion of inequality coupled with incredibly high salaries for those who could get them, as well as a stagnation of revenues for most of America-- all of which was accompanied by low growth (at a level still somewhat higher than Europe, mind you, as the old world was mired in other problems).

Reagan also decided to freeze the federal minimum wage level, which from 1980 was slowly but surely eroded by inflation (little more than $7 an hour in 2016, against nearly $11 in 1969). Again, this new political-ideological regime was barely mitigated by the Clinton and Obama years.

Sanders’ success today shows that much of America is tired of rising inequality and these so-called political changes, and intends to revive both a progressive agenda and the American tradition of egalitarianism. Hillary Clinton, who fought to the left of Barack Obama in 2008 on topics such as health insurance, appears today as if she is defending the status quo, just another heiress of the Reagan-Clinton-Obama political regime.

Sanders makes clear he wants to restore progressive taxation and a higher minimum wage ($15 an hour). To this he adds free healthcare and higher education in a country where inequality in access to education has reached unprecedented heights, highlighting a gulf standing between the lives of most Americans, and the soothing meritocratic speeches pronounced by the winners of the system.

Meanwhile, the Republican party sinks into a hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islam discourse (even though Islam isn’t a great religious force in the country), and a limitless glorification of the fortune amassed by rich white people. The judges appointed under Reagan and Bush have lifted any legal limitation on the influence of private money in politics, which greatly complicates the task of candidates like Sanders.

However, new forms of political mobilization and crowdfunding can prevail and push America into a new political cycle. We are far from gloomy prophecies about the end of history.