Mechanism of Homelessness 2———Risk Society(Economics & Society)

This is the clearest and most important insight in Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the twenty-first Century”. R is the revenue rate of capital(revenue rate), G(growth rate) is the economic growth rate(the growth rate of wage income). The society is now gradually becoming a “rentier economy”, where the rich gets richer and the poor get poorer. Those who have tens of millions of capital to make investment can earn a profit tate that far exceed the growth rate of the general public’s wages. This is where we are in, the risk society.

In the last 50 years, great changes have taken place in the society people live in. This is happening globally and often as an unintended but inevitable outcome of the progress of industrialisation, extreme satuated of capital accumulation, and the liberalisation of governance that has developed in modernity. New culture and economics in late modernity have developed. For example, nowadays, software and website development requires complete different sets of management than develop bridge and cars with steel and concrete traditionally—–which have accurate plan, work flows, tacks, marks of complete, and also the hirarchical command system.

The explicit term ‘risk society’ was identified by Ulrich Beck (1999). Beck argues that the consequence of the ongoing development of modernisation through global capitalism, within a neoliberal political framework, has created a new ‘phase’ of modernity – a second modernity. The processes of globalisation, individualisation, the gender revolution, underemployment, and the increasing recognition of global, ecological risks that cannot be managed or insured against, has created, and characterise, the conditions of second modernity.

In ‘first’ modernity, society was structured a way that the risks people could be predicted, calculated, and insured against. As the insurances (such as the welfare state, full employment, the nuclear family) fragment and change, a new ontological and social reality emerges, where the outcomes of ongoing modernisation, or individual’s life course, cannot be predicted as it once could have been.

This has had a collective affect on how life in late modernity is experienced – there is nothing people can be sure of knowing. ‘Knowledge’ has become increasingly available to people, but also increasingly undermined and questioned, through the continual development of new or conflicting information, technologies, and communication forms. Constant reinvention and lifelong returns to education are not only possible, but also encouraged over the life course.

Through this process of accelerated modernisation ‘all that is solid’ melts into air and can have profound effects on people’s life in late modernity (Bauman, 2000).

Reference:

Beck, U. (1999) World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press).

Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage

Bauman, Z. (1998) Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Buckingham: Open University Press).