After the Future: Watching Brazil

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The rise and fall of the Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary followed by the rise and fall of the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary.
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Civilization and Its Discontents
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Fear of the Future
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The Coming Discontinuity
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The Meaning of History in 25 Theses
The big picture succinctly summarized.
Reading Charles Taylor's A Secular Age
Long, four part piece that seeks to summarize main themes of Taylor's important 2007 book.
Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism
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Meditation on Steinbeck's 'East of Eden'
Dying Traditions
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Watching Brazil

From "The Social Awakening in Brazil" in the NYT today:

For all of Brazil’s achievements over the past few decades — a stronger economy, democratic elections, more money and attention directed toward the needs of the poor — there is still a huge gap between the promises of Brazil’s ruling leftist politicians and the harsh realities of day-to-day life outside the political and business elite.

The World Bank lists Brazil as the world’s seventh-largest economy, but puts it in the bottom 10 percent on income equality. Its 15-year-olds rank near the bottom in global rankings of reading and math skills. A succession of its top politicians have been implicated in flagrant payoff schemes and other misuse of public funds.

Brazil is interesting, because along with India, China, and Indonesia, it's among the big four emerging economies that will be changing the game in the next century. The situation in Brazil is interesting because everybody was so surprized by it. Protests were triggered by bus fare hikes in Sao Paulo, but they spread throughout the country in ways that no one, including the organizers, expected. Brazil has a center-left government, but seems just as clueless and out of touch as the center-right government in the U.S.

The U.S., too, is among the worst in income inequality. So why aren't we out in the streets? This from an article in the Washington Post in May:

Income inequality in the United States and Latin America — particularly Chile and Mexico — has tended higher than in Europe. This trend continued into 2010. The top five most unequal countries (in descending order) were Chile, Mexico, Turkey, the United States and Israel. Portugal, the European nation with the highest income inequality, was ranked sixth:

Source

Interesting that Turkey is in the top five there, too. Americans aren't out in the streets becase the GDP per capita is around $48K (World Bank rank 16), while in Brazil it's around $12K (rank 56) and Turkey $10K (rank 64), so Americans still have more of a cushion. But the question that will determine whether there is future unrest in the US has more to do with the direction things are going. There are no market mechanisms that will solve growing income inequality, so the longer American elites cling to their Neoliberal ideology, the worse things will get. Something has to give sooner or later.