The foregoing discussion has been mainly about processes and forces built into the nature of capitalism and driving it to generate the problems now threatening our very existence. This and the next chapter are concerned with the future to which these trends are leading us.
The first issue taken up is the situation evident in the country that has gone furthest down the capitalist path, the US. It is not a pretty picture, and it is easy to see how its sorry state is directly due to the ascendancy of capitalism. This is where capitalism is taking the rest of us.
Chapter 8 then looks further ahead to our probable longer-term fate, and this is an even more ugly picture. It will be argued that within a few decades we will plunge into a more or less catastrophic global breakdown that will see the capitalist economic system self-destruct, quite possibly causing massive population decline and terminating civilisation.
America is commonly regarded as the greatest country in the world, the richest country, the top country in technology and science, the most powerful country, and the leader of the “free” world. Indeed, America is commonly regarded, at least by Americans, as “exceptional”.
But America is a dreadful place, well described as a failed state. If you don’t think so, consider the following facts and figures. Note that these refer to the situation before Trump’s second term; they are not primarily due to his policies.
Inequality in the US is extreme and increasing fast. One percent of Americans possesses nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. (Street, 2021a.)
The UN Rapporteur on Human Rights Richard Alston (2018) says, “the US’s immense wealth and expertise stand in shocking contrast with the conditions in which vast numbers of its citizens live …” The United States has the highest rate of income inequality among Western countries. It has the highest youth poverty rate in the OECD. Speth (2019) says the number in or near poverty is around one third of Americans. McKinley puts it at almost 50%. (2018.)
The wealth of the top 1% has skyrocketed in recent decades, while the real purchasing power of the wages received by about 90% of the workforce has not increased for forty years. It is “an economy where the richest 1% takes all the gains while the poor and working class haven’t seen a rise in four decades.” (Urie, 2020.) Stiglitz found that in 2015 “the typical American man makes less than he did 45 years ago (after adjusting for inflation)”. (Keating and Bell, 2017.)
Turnbull (2020) reports that the real (inflation-adjusted) wages of workers with a high-school education or less have actually fallen. The top 0.1% of the income distribution captures more than 11% of national income. Between 1990 and 2020, billionaire wealth soared 1,130%, an increase more than 200 times greater than the 5.37% growth of US median wealth. Measured as a percentage of their wealth, the tax obligations of America’s billionaires decreased 79% between 1980 and 2018. (Turnbull, 2020.) Hutchens (2018) says, “Whereas the income share of the top 0.1% has more than quadrupled and that of the top 1% has almost doubled, that of the bottom 90% has declined, and wages at the bottom, adjusted for inflation, are about the same as they were some 60 years ago. In 2023, 42.8 million Americans lived in poverty and 47.4 million lived in households experiencing food insecurity. (Camillweri, 2024.)
Wealth is even less equally distributed, with just three Americans having as much as the bottom 50%. Several estimates put the income of the super-rich at many times that of the lowest 90%. According to Inequality (2018) “a mere 0.1% of US households now own as much wealth as the bottom 90%.” Alston (2018) is one of many pointing out that the $1.5 trillion in tax cuts Trump put through in December 2017 overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality.
The United States experiences on average 5.9 deaths per 1,000 live infant births, compared with an average of 3.9 deaths per 1,000 live births among OECD nations. (Pratt, 2019.) Iceland has just 1.9 deaths per 1,000 live births. The US ranks 33rd out of 36 on this indicator. (Pratt, 2019.) Alston (2019) says the country has the highest infant mortality rates among comparable OECD States.
Various studies find that “the U.S. placed last among 16 high-income, industrialised nations when it comes to deaths that could potentially have been prevented by timely access to effective health care. … As one of the few countries on Earth without a national health care system, health care is a commodity for those who can afford it, not a right as it is almost anyplace else.” (Dolack, 2021.) Jonson (2024) says the US has “the shortest lives and the most avoidable deaths … Meanwhile, insurance giants and pharmaceutical companies are raking in huge profits … the for-profit healthcare system still ranks dead last among peer nations on key metrics.”
American expenditure on health is extremely high, double that in other rich countries. (Pearls and Irritations, 2020.) This is because the medical and pharmaceutical industries have acquired the power to jack up prices and focus on the most lucrative provisioning. Medical insurance schemes to protect all are routinely blocked by these industries and large numbers have no insurance or are in a position where one illness can bankrupt them.
Alston summarises the health situation in the US as follows: “Its citizens live shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies, eradicable tropical diseases are increasingly prevalent … and [it has] the highest obesity levels in the developed world.” Kristof (2020) reports the US as 97th in the world for access to quality health care. The US prevalence of obesity has increased over the past four decades. Of the 31 OECD countries who have data on obesity available, the United States ranks last. (Pratt, 2019.) The Economist (20 June 2020) reported that the US is one of only 13 countries (along with Venezuela and Syria) where the maternal mortality rate increased between 2000 and 2017. (Turnbull, 2020.)
Speth reports the US as having “the highest rates of skipped medical visits and skipped medications due to cost … the highest spending on health care as a percentage of GDP … the highest share of population with mental health and substance abuse disorders and the highest share with depression.”
Life expectancy in the US is declining, from 79 years in 2019 to 76 in 2021. (Wolpe, 2023.) Pratt (2019) reports that the US ranks 28 out of 36 developed countries.
The US has the world’s highest incarceration rate (Alston, 2018). The US has 5% of the world’s population but its prisons now house 25% of the world’s total prison population, four times the world average. Why? Primarily because its society dumps a large proportion of its people into hopelessness and squalor.
Street (2021b) says at least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the US does not. In the US, 85.8% of males and 66.5% of females work more than 40 hours per week. According to the ILO, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.” There is not a federal law requiring paid sick days in the United States. The US remains the only industrialised country in the world that has no legally mandated annual leave.
The US has one of the lowest levels of voter registrations among OECD countries. (Alston, 2018.)
Speth reports that within the developed countries studied, the US has the lowest rank in the United Nations’ Gender Inequality Index, the next-to-last rank in the percentage of women ministers/cabinet members, the second highest wage gap for employed women, the greatest rate of violence against women.
McKinley (2018) says, “violence is endemic: US citizens, who constitute 4 percent of the global population, own 42 percent (357 million) of the world’s guns. In the years 1983-2012, 325,000 were the victims of gun-related violence; police in the US now fatally shoot 1,000 people per year; mass shootings in general occur at the rate of at least once a day. Since the founding of the United States, gun-related deaths within the country outnumber its war deaths by 120,000.” School teachers in some jurisdictions are now being trained to shoot students they judge to be a lethal threat. The rate of death due to police shootings is the highest in the countries researched, the suicide rate is third highest and the homicide rate the highest. (Speth, 2019.)
Kristof (2020) reports the US at number 91 among countries in access to quality basic education. McKinley reports that “the total number of functional illiterates in the country is at least 42 million and could be as high as 60 million. The estimate is that only 15 per cent of the population are fully literate. “According to four-yearly surveys conducted by the National Geographic Education Foundation which go back to at least 1988, the 18-48 cohort of the US population (which necessarily includes university and college students and some graduates) tends also to be not only ignorant, but profoundly ignorant, of both world affairs and those of the United States.” Speth’s review finds that the US has the lowest score in math performance and only middling performance in reading and science.
“Americans now consume 30 percent of the global prescription opioid supply and the annual death toll from misuse is 64,000; nevertheless 50,000 scripts for opioids are written each day … the most recent figures and research reveal that 97.5 million Americans used, or misused prescription drugs under this heading in 2015.” (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2021.) Speth says the Americans are the largest consumers of opioids per capita in developed countries, have the highest drug-death rate, and the highest consumption of anti-depressants per capita.
Speth’s review finds that the US rates lowest on UNICEF’s Index of Well-Being of Children and highest on infant mortality. Street (2021a) says, “The U.S. is the ONLY country in the Americas without a national paid parental leave benefit. The average is over 12 weeks of paid leave anywhere other than Europe and over 20 weeks in Europe.” Eisler (2021) reports that the United States has the highest child poverty rates of any major developed nation and that it invests the least in early childhood education and support for childcare in families.
The United States is also at or near the very bottom in various indices of social cohesion, such as being third from the bottom in trust of others. (Speth, 2019.) The US is the fifth lowest in confidence in national government, and the third lowest in confidence in the courts and judicial system. The seriousness of the racial division in the US needs little comment here. (Speth, 2019.)
The US has the lowest rank on the World Economic Forum’s Environmental Performance Index and is 114th in global “climate and energy” performance, the second highest Ecological Footprint per capita, the greatest per capita meat consumption and the second highest per capita water consumption. It was the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases. (Speth, 2019.)
The US is fifth from the bottom in the 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index, fourth from bottom in protection of fundamental rights, and near the lowest in voter turnout in national elections. (Speth, 2019.) “Democracy” in the US has been replaced by “Donocracy”, with practically no restrictions on funding of elections and political lobbying. House of Representatives electorates are gerrymandered and poor and minority group voters are often excluded from the electoral rolls. The US has slipped to number 21 as a “flawed democracy”. (Democracy Intelligence Unit, 2016.) It noted that public confidence in government has slumped to historic lows in the US. “Of the 26 countries ranked in the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer, the US ranked 18th for trust in NGOs, business, government, and media among the general population. In 2021, it ranked 21st.” (Sheng and Geng, 2021.) Turnbull (2024) reports a study finding that the US was last in faith in honest elections and tied with Italians for the lowest trust in the judicial system.
Consider the extent to which campaign donations are allowed to influence government. Sachs (2021b) says, “Our entire political system is designed to let corporate money speak, through campaign contributions and corporate lobbying.
Speth’s data show that the US is the next-to-lowest contributor to international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of GDP, and has the highest rate of failure to ratify international agreements.
“The US has by far the greatest military expenditure in total and as a % of GDP. In 2017 it spent more than the next seven countries combined. It has the largest international arms sales.” (Speth, 2019.) Since 1776 there have only been 20 years in which America has not been at war. (Carpentier, 2017.) It has over 800 military bases on foreign soil. (China has less than 10.) Over the last 70 years it has invaded another country more than 70 times, supplied money and arms to prop up many dictators, and carried out many coups to get rid of non-compliant regimes. One estimate lists the many millions of deaths the US has caused, not including participation in world wars. (Ignorance is Futile!, 2011. For similar figures see Lucas, 2018.)
In 2020 the US rated 23rd and the UK 20th. (De Neve and Krekel, 2020.)
On overall indices, a recent Social Progress Index (Kristof, 2020) finds that the United States is number 28 and dropping. “… out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011.”
How do we explain all this? How has America come to be in this appalling state of decay? The above figures drive home the fact that the US has been stolen and plundered by the rich. They show what happens when a society is geared to enabling capitalism to rip. The result is that the rich are greatly enriched while at least one third of Americans have been cast into appallingly bad circumstances. The best selling book , Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, by Deaton and Case (2020) details the way the lives of America’s blue-collar workers have been destroyed during the past few decades, causing a huge rise in the numbers of “deaths of despair” from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease since the mid-1990s. These are claiming “hundreds of thousands of lives” every year. Urie (2021) refers to “the degree of social misery that would motivate 350,000-450,000 people per year to not care enough about living to continue doing so.”
This is where capitalism inevitably leads. It is about the rich few constantly accumulating more wealth, enabling them to also gain the power and influence (through the media they own, their legal teams, armies of lobbyists, “philanthropic funding”, think tanks and campaign contributions) to get the laws, the tax relief, the contracts and the subsidies that increase their access to lucrative business opportunities. Governments are under heavy pressure to pass laws that the corporations and banks want. Long ago the Republicans and Democrats became branches of the one party, the business party. Urie (2021) says, “Current political rancour in the U.S. is largely attributable to five decades of the public realm being handed over to ‘capital’ through neoliberalism.”
This can be seen as a constant theme in the history of the last seven thousand years or so, the rise of elites who are never satisfied and seek more and more wealth and thus generate greater and greater inequality, until the resulting deprivation and discontent within the rest of society eventually brings down the whole system. Various analysts see this process as now entering another end stage in the current increasing rejection of democracy and rise of authoritarian populism.
The foregoing chapters have made little reference to Trump, because their concern has been with the nature of the capitalist economic system irrespective of the nature of those in charge of it. The system has forces built into it that lead society in certain directions and generate major problems. To focus on Trump’s behaviour can give the impression that the accelerating problems we have witnessed in the US are due to him rather than to capitalism. Some are, but Trump has facilitated and accelerated the trajectory capitalism takes.
America has been the most enthusiastic adopter of capitalism, enabling strongly pro-business policies to be supported by both the major parties. Long ago wealth and power had come to be held largely by the corporate rich, and they had assumed most influence over congress, especially via their capacity to fund the election campaigns of candidates willing to support them.
Since the late 1970s this situation has increasingly impoverished large numbers of working people while the rich have grown much richer. In that time average wages have hardly increased at all. Social problems have grown alarmingly, such as drug dependence. This has generated immense anger directed at ruling elites, resulting in the massive swing to support of Trump. But the important point is that the impoverishment and inequality have been inevitable products of the capitalist system, more ruthlessly imposed and more unrestrained in the US than in any other country. The outcome there is being approached in other countries with basically capitalist economies. They are experiencing accelerating inequality, diminishing capacity of governments to the meet needs of people or environments and dwindling faith in democracy.