Wealth and income inequality and nuclear war

I may be missing what you're talking about because I don't keep an eye on military stuff. I thought nuclear expansion peaked in the 80s and that also happened to be one of the best decades of wealth creation leading up to the dot com burst (87 crash was no small event either, but still didn't disrupt a long term bull market). I would assume wealth inequality rose during that period, but again, I'm not very informed because I don't pay attention.

I mean a correction like the French Revolution. Not merely a stock market correction.

that falls into the bucket of "unhedgeable risks" (is unhedgeable a word?), and therefore I don't spend anytime preparing for it, thinking about it, nor worrying about it.

I personally don't think it will happen in the next 100 years, I think the holders of nukes (except maybe the nutjobs in Pyongyang) understand the mutually assured destruction deal that we figured out when ICBMs first came about. all of that said it's not outside of the realm of possibility, just not likely in the next 2 generations I don't think.

I don't think it's explicitly a question of nuclear weapons but rather that the standard of living has been brought up so much over the past few centuries that people prefer the status quo to some uprising. Couple that with bans on comparable weapons in public hands ('86 ban on automatic weapons, etc) as compared to the military and there isn't exactly an opportunity for people to rebel like there was. I don't think there is as much of an asymmetrical risk profile nowadays as there was then in regards to upward mobility. Maybe I'm blinded by the elites.

I think you could also argue that 'democratization' played a large hand in preventing wars as has globalization which puts an ever heightening price on even the smallest of conflicts. Nowadays, a tank moves the wrong way in a tiny little country and the market can see saw for a few weeks. I think that eventually we will get a correction due to a global conflict, and maybe the past few decades have made the environment that much more ripe because we aren't used to seeing large scale global conflicts like generations before us have.

I'm looking at this purely from an American perspective. There are far too many variables for me to put into a coherent post while here at work from other perspectives, but look around at the United States. Most people probably can't tell you anything about Afghanistan or Iraq the two major conflicts of the more recent generations. Our parents can tell you about Vietnam but soon no one will have a first hand account of the great wars that really shaped the modern world. That, in and of itself, makes us more vulnerable because of a lack of effect when you hear about an event. Even then, these conflicts don't hit us in the way they did in the past. We see them and hear about them but don't feel them necessarily.

Anyway, I'm not really even sure what I'm talking about or arguing at this point frankly. Is there a specific reason you've tagged nuclear proliferation as the root cause for a lack of corrections or maybe 'resets' would be the better word? I mean I get where you are getting at, but there are a lot of other reasons that could be ascribed to it.

I think this topic is pretty interesting in general (extreme wealth inequality, civil unrest, financial apocalyse, gold and guns, etc). To me, it has little to due with nuclear weapons, but much more with the higher standard of living mentioned by @addinator

It really would take alot of pain for people to start a legitimate rebellion in the US. Lack of food on a dangerously wide scale is the only thing that I believe would truely lead to all out chaos. Something would need to disconnect the supply chain for a prolonged period of time. Loss of electricity for a long period of time could be that catalyst.

If you mean nukes deter domestic revolutions (like the French), that assertion does make sense to me. Income inequality is felt most acutely in urban environments, as the our and rich are cheek to jowl. In a revolutionary scenario, both sides are in an urban environment in close proximity, so large scale indiscriminate weapons like nukes, which also destroy the capital assets of the rich and the state, clearly are against the self interests of both sides. The masses seeking redistribution will rarely amass in one exclusive zone waiting to be nuked.

(Temporary?) distraction through capitalist consumerism combined with mad production and relatively cheap energy are better explanatory factors.

I don't mean nukes deter domestic revolutions. However if you look at the historical data WW1 and WW2 were the two largest equalizers in the last 400 years. With nukes we are really unlikely to see war on that scale ever again.

I believe you're positing two different scenarios. One is if nukes deter large scale global wars such as WW1 & 2, and the other is a social/political revolution such as the French or Russian Revolutions.

I think it absolutely deters large scale global wars because all of the major global military players have nukes and there's a logical assumption that they could be used purposefully or even accidentally (a small faction in Russia decides to launch them rather than the government, for example) if a major conflict occurred. It's why during the Cold War we saw all of the proxy wars/conflicts backed by the US and USSR. The world is much more economically linked today as well so there's almost an economic MAD element out there that prevents it: if the US and China went to war, leaving nukes aside, both economies would collapse. I don't think it's completely out of the realm of possibility to see a large scale war, it's just not likely.

Regarding social revolution, as @"Addinator" and others have stated, and at least in the US and other western countries, the standard of living is pretty damn high compared to revolutionary France and Russia. They were peasants and serfs living in nearly feudal systems with regular famines, the lack of true and fair legal systems and an actual monarchy, not simply a perceived overclass as some in the west claim. One of the biggest problems of the impoverished class in the US is obesity because people eat too many Big Macs. In France there were bread shortages where you could see your family die because of malnourishment. There may be a wide wealth disparity but those not in the top bracket lead pretty decent lives relative to the poor historically or even currently in developing countries. Even when there was protest and the notion of social upheaval with OWS, it was so disorganized that it never was able to become a cohesive movement and in reality, these were young people protesting corporate America and greed while typing away on their iPhones and wearing corporately manufactured and marketed clothes. That's a far cry from dirt poor peasants storming the Bastille in burlap sacks. And we, at least in the west, are fat, content and lazy. Even if the general population became really incited about wealth disparity, government being controlled by a few corporate and union interests and other typically cited elements of discontent, how many people would get off their couches, give up their 2500 SF suburban house with two cars, turn off reality TV and march on the government? As others have stated, it would take really large events such as long term food shortages that hit wide swaths of the population or the cancellation of The Bachelorette to get people off their couches and really make something happen.

Military weaponry has also created such a dichotomy in power that a revolution would be highly unlikely unless factions of the military would join the revolutionaries, which doesn't seem likely because those who hold revolutionary ideals are pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum as military leaders. And I don't think gun control has anything to do with it: you could arm half the citizenry with AK-47's but that's not going to do shit if a squadron of M1 Abrams roll down Main Street or an A-10 unleashes its firepower on revolutionaries. In revolutionary France, even the government only had muskets and cannons.

Of course, we did just experience the Arab Spring which was social revolution across multiple countries in a region, so it's possible, I just don't think it is likely in the western developed world. I do see more of a possibility of a social revolution in China though. The silent pact between the dictatorial government and the population as a whole relies on constant high economic growth rates. If that fails over multiple years I could see something happen there but I'm just hypothesizing and don't have much in the way of facts or experience to back that up.

Technology still can't top numbers. Troops have a conscious as well, albeit some might question how much of a conscious. If the citizens of the USA went up against the military, the people would win. Armies require vast amount of citizen backing. The army doesn't produce its own weaponry, doesn't drill its own oil, doesn't grow its own food. They might have vastly superior firepower in the terms of machinery, however they still buy their ammo. Once their stock piles run out, they will have only one advantage nukes. But like others have said they wouldn't nuke themselves. So that makes that advantage pretty much useless. The astronomical advantage the citizens have in sheer numbers would allow them to sustain massive casualties and still be able to out wait the armed forces. In a game of siege warfare the team with the biggest infrastructure of life supporting necessities always wins.

Am I the only one that thinks that we're giving people a bit more credit than they deserve. I'm not kidding when I say that as long as American Idol is on and the local fast food joint has the lights on, we'll probably be okay. Like has been mentioned, compare the poor during the revolutions that have been mentioned to the poor today (starving to LITERALLY obese, etc etc). I'd actually be interested to see what % of people could even tell you what wealth inequality even IS. IMHO how much of a discombobulated mess OWS was kinda proves this point. Most people there couldn't even tell you what they were fighting for, and an absurdly small amount of people effected by the "issue" even participated in the first place.