“…Risk and Privilege are intertwined in ways that define our lives and the system we inhabit. Privilege boils down to being buffered from risk, and this is scale-invariant, meaning that it works in the same way from the individual to the nation-state: wealth and power serve to insulate us from risk. Those without wealth and power are fully exposed to risk.
(…)
The point here isn’t just the asymmetric distribution–it’s the buffers against risk have been dismantled by government policies favoring those with the least exposure to risk. The percentage of the national output / economic activity that is distributed to wage earners has been declining for decades. The money and the privileges it buys have been diverted to benefit capital.
This is what’s different now: apologists can claim that “the rich have always collected most of the income and owned most of the wealth,” but that’s not the point: the point is the buffers against risk have been dismantled as policy decisions that favored the already-wealthy and already-privileged who already had ample buffers against risk.
For the bottom 80%, the lifestyle you ordered is out of stock. For the top 10%, the serial credit-asset bubbles have fattened their wealth and income. Risk for them is now concentrated in The Everything Bubble: should it pop, their buffers will melt like sand castles in a rising tide of risk…”