An old article that I read in 2007 evoking these figures of the diamond and of the triangle
LE MONDE | 05.05.07 |
The rhombus and the sand glass.
Eric Le Boucher
"If one wants to summarize with his atomic nucleus the debate which is posed in France, one can risk oneself there in the following way: the inequalities grow in the world under the combined effect of universalization ( mondialisation) and technologies. What to do ?
You find that the equality, cement of the social unit, must be preserved at all costs? Vote Royal. You find that egalitarianism is too expensive and that its excesses penalize us ? Vote Sarkozy.
Let us be more precise. Universalization (mondialisation) creates growth. As ever in the human history, of the immense countries could fill their delay of development in an accelerated way. Three billion individuals takes part today in the great play of the production and of the planetary trade against a billion and half twenty years ago. Reverse: this universalization digs the inequalities. Between the countries and within each country. The three billion caused producers is made competition between them on a "total" (global) scale: that weighs on the wages of all, except for most talented, of rarest, which are on the contrary everywhere required because the innovation, therefore the growth, depends more and more on them only.
In the United States, the consequence is limpid: between the upper class and the middle class, the inequalities exploded. From 1966 to 2001, the median income grew of 11%; that of the richest 10% of 58%, that of the richest 1% of 121%, that of the richest 0,1% of 236%, that of the richest 0,01% of 617%.
The large levelling machine that was the Welfare state created after the great crisis of 1929 is broken.
It is not the case in France. Not yet. The inequalities of incomes continue to drop. The richest 10% did not gain 4,8 times more than the poorest 10%, they did not gain any more but 3,5 times in 1984 and 3,2% in 2003 (the State of the inequalities in France, directed by Louis Maurin and Patrick Savidan, 2006, Editions Belin). Idem: poverty continued to move back in France.
Let us illustrate these evolutions by three diagrams. The industrial company type 1900 was a triangle: an acute point (middle-class) and a broad body in bottom (proletariat). Then with the era of the services, come about 1960, the company took the form of a rhombus (diamond as you say Replicant) with a broad body in the medium: the middle class. The social advancement was done automatically with the age for the employee and the diploma for his/her children. The date symbolic system is May 68.
Today, universalization stretches this rhombus in the shape of sand glass.
The middle class is cut into two, a small share of very qualified goes up towards top, a great part is aspired downwards. The debate of this presidential campaign was that of the rhombus against the sand glass.
Should the French rhombus be defended, i.e. a social continuum, guarantees of a possible promotion upwards? One will have recognized the model of Ségolène Royal. Should it on the contrary be considered that egalitarianism makes the bed of lazy and null and that it is time, finally! , to reward at their right price the merit, the effort and the talent, and, corollary, to accept that the inequalities grow? One will have recognized the ambition of Nicolas Sarkozy, including against May 68.
Let us be even more precise. The inequalities of incomes continue to be reduced in France but they do not make it any more that at very low speed and, for tomorrow, it appears difficult to go against the world tide (already in Germany, and even in Sweden, egalitarianism is in question).
If one takes into account the incomes of inheritance, inflated by the rise of the real prices and the Stock Exchange, the curves already had to be reversed. It should especially, as Louis Maurin and Patrick Savidan do it, be stressed that behind the equality of frontage of the French model true "inequalities of conditions" : of housing, education, sex, color of skin and address book.
Ségolène Royal understood perfectly. She wants to attack these concrete inequalities which count more for people than egalitarianism of frontage preached by the traditional left. It is its modernity there. Nicolas Sarkozy adapts, him, of the inequalities. It even wishes them! Because it hopes for of it a profit of growth of the economy as a whole, therefore purchasing power for all. In universalization ( mondialisation), he wants to allure the top, the investors, and one does not catch them with vinegar. But it matches these measurements for the top of the sand glass by others in favour of bottom: the popular class of which it took again the electorate with Jean-Marie Le Pen. By a speech ouvrierist, nationalist and protectionist, it defends the "victims" of the delocalized large-scale industry and promises to them that it will make it return.
To only see there a sort of bushism compassionnel is to forget that it joins again, by doing this, with the tradition gaullist of the compromises with the Communists. To politically bind the top and bottom, it is its force.
Modern or strong, the two candidates have each one a great intrinsic weakness to insert France in the era of the innovating mondialized economy and schumpéterienne. Her, because it conditions the defense of the rhombus to a "social dialogue" with old sensitive to the cold trade unions, slow process, so much of time tested and unfruitful. She risks the opposition to progress (immobilism ?). Him because in a sand glass the richness comes, as sand, from the top, from imagination,from the competition,from the opening. The state control and protectionism date, they were the weapons of defense of the triangle. They are mistaken in figure and time."
Other subject that i will not comment. I am not qualified enough .
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/pol...rudy_giulianis_crass_opportunism_reflect.html
