The Die is Last!

In a recent post, Tim Johnson learnedly portrays the Occupy movement(s) as a rejection of the positive role that gambling and speculation play in society. This appears to be based mostly on a discussion of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

While I do not dispute, Dr. Johnson's appraisal of Graeber's monograph, I beg to disagree with his interpretation of the principles of the Occupy movements. Rather than blaming gambling and speculation and, more generally, the entire financial industry for the economic morass in which developed societies find themselves, these movements protest the barriers to equal opportunities that with time have been erected. Indeed, at the core of the American dream as well as of most other democracies is the belief that if one puts enough efforts and dedication, barring misfortunes, one ought to be able to succeed. I am not knowledgeable of other countries' recent histories, but I can say that the economic policies of the last 30 years (since the onset of trickle down economics) have increasingly burdened the great majority of Americans, and made it increasingly arduous to gain access to opportunities and upward social mobility. Nothing exemplifies this better than the ballooning cost of education and the ensuing student loan crisis. In short the divide between the 1% and the 99% is not just access to ``smart investment'' for smart money, but rather the barriers that make these and many other such opportunities almost surely impossible. Before the Occupy movements, at least in the US the sense that income and wealth and the consequent opportunities were still distributed consistently with the feasibility of the American dream was widespread. This is well exemplified by the study of Norton and Ariely. The Occupy movements radically changed that perception.

Arguably, the most significant parable on the role of randomness in Humanity is the lottery in Plato's myth of Er. The order in which the souls to be reincarnated can select their new lives is random, the choices are their own. A poignant conceit of the blend of chance and choice that beginning at birth takes place in our lives. While much randomness is beyond our control, perhaps as much arises from societal intercourse, and we can call this gambling. I think that most would agree that a society is fair when gambling is a fair game. The point of the Occupy movements is that this is no longer the case, and the practices of the industry of speculation not speculation per se is one of the most egregious examples of such fundamental unfaireness. Wall St. (and the 1%) is the dealer, it's gotten better than even chances, or, to use quantitative finance, the 99%'s gains in this game follow a supermartingale. And how could it be a fair game when gains are privatized and losses are billed to the tax payer?