Semantron 2015

Semantron 2015

Editor’s introduction

Neil Croally

Welcome to Semantron 15. So various were this year’s contributions that I felt unable to impose any sort of thematic order (as in earlier editions). Instead, the alphabet rules, and serendipitous pleasure is possible. However, as with earlier editions, most of the contributions come from boys in their last year and are based on their extended essay. In addition there are a number of pieces which were entered for an essay prize. The two essays on relativism (Cullen, Nugent) were entered for last year’s Erasmus essay prize, and the 6 pieces by Messrs. Macklin, Shehzore, Sheriff and Tudor were all prize-winners in our own Gareth Evans Essay Competition for boys in the Middle School. The essays by Kottering and Viswanathan, and one by Sealey, were entered for prizes organized by Oxbridge colleges.

Semantron was founded by Jan Piggott and Richard Scholar.

Contents

1

Economic inequality in the USA SIMON BARROW

6

Why was the aulos the instrument of tragedy? HO TING CHAN

9

Troades’ remarkable agon NEIL CROALLY

18 Do some kinds of disagreements disprove the idea that one side is right and the other wrong? BARNABY CULLEN

20

How well does supersymmetry explain the physics beyond the standard model? MATTHEW FEUER

25

It’s a man’s man’s man’s world: women in the films of Martin Scorsese CHARLIE GODSIFF

28

Can antigravity explain dark matter and dark energy? HARRY GOODHEW

35 Foreign direct investment: to what extent has it driven the slum growth of developing nations? BEN HURD

39

The market for art in the Netherlands in the period 1650-1750 MARCUS KOTTERING

45

Immigrant labour: does it benefit or impoverish the United Kingdom? PRZEMYSLAW MACHOLAK

50

How is Euripides' Alcestis an exceptional figure in Greek tragedy? ARCHIE MacCORMACK

53

Why does fiction like to create worlds set in the future? THEO MACKLIN

56

My new punctuation mark THEO MACKLIN

60 How does Livy explore and subvert Roman morality in his narrative of the rape and suicide of Lucretia? RAFFY MARSHALL

64

Why is Africa poor? ALEX McCAFFREY

68

German art since 1945 MAX NUGENT

72 Do some kinds of disagreements disprove the idea that one side is right and the other wrong? MAX NUGENT

74 To what extent was it a foregone conclusion that the Tsarist autocracy would be

overthrown in 1917? RONAN PATRICK

78

Has the UK ever seen a government committed to socialist ideals? TAIDGH PLEDGER

81

War and medicine GEORGE PORTER

84

The death penalty in a democratic society ALEX RACKOW

87

The classical influence on the framers of the American constitution TOBY REDINGTON

90

Do the languages we speak influence the way we think and perceive the world? JAMIE SCOTT

95 How do their differing conceptions of the 'state of nature' influence the philosophy of government of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau? CHRIS SEALEY

98

Did John Stuart Mill really believe in universal free speech? CHRIS SEALEY

101

Has the internet changed the way we think? ADIL SHEHZORE

104

Contradiction ADAM SHERIFF

106

My new punctuation mark ADAM SHERIFF Quantitative easing CHRISTOPHER STONE

108

112

Private equity CHARLIE SPARKES

119

Re-evaluating Fukuyama’s ‘The end of history?’ EDMUND STUTTER

124

Can western human rights ever be universal in such a diverse world? CHARLIE SWINBURN

128

Three-parent babies JACK TEH

133

Are human rights universal? BEN TUDOR

137 How do their differing conceptions of the 'state of nature' influence the philosophy of government of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau? ANAMAY VISWANATHAN

Economic inequality in the USA

Simon Barrow Inequality in the distribution of income from wages and capital is present in any capitalist society; it is how incentives are structured. The CEO of a company making multiples of what the junior employees make serves to incentivize those people to aspire to his or her position. The fact that there is financial reward for employee’s achievements increases their productivity because it gives them a reason to work hard because they know they will be rewarded for it and turn they contribute to the growth and development of the economy of their respective country. Everybody wins, so the traditional argument goes. The question is this: is there a point where inequality is at such a level that it hinders the economy and society more than it helps it, and has America reached this point? Although there is no way to definitively prove that economic inequality is doing more harm than good because anything written about a less unequal America is all speculation. However, I endeavour to convince you, the reader, that inequality is a problem in America and that it is sufficiently serious to warrant action from the government. I will then propose various policies that the government could undertake and evaluate their respective plausibility and practicality. Firstly I will look at the evolution of inequality in the United State in the post-war years. The two world wars had large effects on the distribution of income and wealth in the USA; they changed the structure of the economy. There was a far greater focus on labour in the post-war years than there is currently and capital did not feature in the economy to the same extent that it does. This may explain why the growth experienced after the wars was more equally distributed. I will look at the period leading up to the wars, immediately after the wars and then the post war-recovery levels. The bottom line of America’s inequality story is that it enjoyed equal growth post-war. All wages rose together and the phrase ‘a rising tide lifts all ships’ seemed to have some truth to it. However, since 1970 wage growth for manufacturing labour has flat-lined while the share of income to the top 1% of earners in the US has increased dramatically. From 1947 to 1972 the share of income going to the top 1% of earners decreased by 29.2%. However, from 1972 to 2012 the share of income going to the top 1% of earners increased by a staggering 119.6% to 17.6% of national income. 1 The equal growth experienced from the 40s to the 70s was no accident. It was the result of policy responses to the great depression of the 1920s. There was federal support for collective bargaining, which led to a large increase in trade union density from 1935 up to a peak in 1945. There was a slight decline from 1945 to 1972 but after 1972 trade union density showed an unwavering downward trend as the share of income going to the top 1% increased dramatically. There were other political innovations in the New Deal such as social security and a minimum wage. Civil rights movements and second-wave feminism provided much greater security for working families while simultaneously reducing discrimination in the work place. The tax system at this time also kept high earners’ incomes from reaching levels previously seen in the 1920s. There was regulation on speculative finance accompanied by many public investments in providing access to higher education, mortgage subsidies for veterans, housing projects and an interstate highway system. These policies still rewarded the creation of capital, but they supported the rest of the population too, giving them the security they needed to be productive members of society. In 1972 the New Deal began to be dismantled. The excuse for this at the time was that it was done out of economic necessity and that the world had become far more competitive so the New Deal and the costs it imposed on businesses were no longer sustainable. There was a rise in conservative

1 http://scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-history-of-american-inequality/index

1

politicians around this time and with them they brought the values and policies that would be the final nail in the New Deal’s coffin. There was no longer support for collective bargaining and unions and there were tax cuts accompanied by cuts in social spending. These policies were all undertaken in order to lower business costs and create a true free market. There was also widespread deregulation and privatization. From this time onward inequality has reached new heights. Amongst the OECD countries America is only less unequal than Mexico, Turkey, and Chile after taxes and transfers by the GINI index 2 measure of inequality. 3 So that is a condensed history of inequality in America. Inequality is on the rise and America is among the most unequal developed countries or, as Thomas Piketty put it, ‘(inequality of labour income in America) is probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world, including societies in which skill disparities were extremely large.’ 4 Now that it has been established that inequality has increased dramatically over the last 40 years and is looking unlikely to decrease without government intervention, it is important to understand the implications of inequality and the problems it causes in order to address these problems directly as well as inequality itself. Sustained inequality can be very discouraging for those in the bottom percentiles of income distribution because their work is rewarded unfairly in comparison to workers in other income percentiles. Production workers’ wages have stagnated for an entire generation while the top earners are enjoying nearly half of all of the country’s growth 5 and paying relatively little tax. Many of the activities that the top earners engage in such as predatory lending and sub-prime mortgage lending are detrimental to the poor but highly profitable for the rich and unsurprisingly inequality got markedly worse in the run up to the 2008 recession. 6 Moreover, as inequality increases to a certain point, consumption begins to decrease because those with the higher incomes tend to save a larger proportion of income while those on lower incomes consume all of their pay. This can cause a large drag in demand. This occurred in America to a varying extent from the 80s onwards, however easing of credit standards, leading to cheaper, more plentiful borrowing, propped up consumption. This created a financial services sector that was trying to capitalize on the desperate demand for credit from consumers and the desperation for short-term speculative returns from those looking to move up the income ladder at any cost, which, to nobody’s surprise, hugely increased debt in the economy. This ‘let them eat credit’ strategy temporarily subdues the symptoms of sustained high levels of inequality but it also creates an economy reliant on credit and vulnerable to external shocks. The extent to which banks were lending enormous amounts of money to private equity companies and then packaging the debt up in complicated financial products containing various kinds of ‘toxic debt’ simply to allow a continuation of the borrowing binge was at least in part helped by the deregulation and easing of credit standards of the 80s onwards. This combination of businesses and consumers borrowing money at unsustainable levels means that when there are shocks to the economy, as in the credit crunch of 2008, not only do the banks collapse but so does consumer spending because the credit that was funding their consumption is no longer available. This may well have been a contributing factor to the depth of the 2008 recession. Perhaps most importantly, inequality endangers democracy. Economic inequality breeds political inequality because those with the money will have the means to make a significant impact on public policy. This leads to a class of America’s wealthiest citizens, scared of a strong government and distribution of income and wealth, using their money to influence politicians into policies that favour them, thus exasperating the initial inequality. As a result government policy caters for a small portion of the population, namely those who can afford preferential treatment. In recent studies, it was found that policies supported by 20% of affluent Americans have about a 20% chance of being adopted, while policies favoured by 80% of affluent Americans are adopted around 50% of the time. Contrastingly, the support or opposition of the poor or middle class has little to no effect on the likelihood of the

2 http://>Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84 Page 85 Page 86 Page 87 Page 88 Page 89 Page 90 Page 91 Page 92 Page 93 Page 94 Page 95 Page 96 Page 97 Page 98 Page 99 Page 100 Page 101 Page 102 Page 103 Page 104 Page 105 Page 106 Page 107 Page 108 Page 109 Page 110 Page 111 Page 112 Page 113 Page 114 Page 115 Page 116 Page 117 Page 118 Page 119 Page 120 Page 121 Page 122 Page 123 Page 124 Page 125 Page 126 Page 127 Page 128 Page 129 Page 130 Page 131 Page 132 Page 133 Page 134 Page 135 Page 136 Page 137 Page 138 Page 139 Page 140 Page 141 Page 142

Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker