As systemic risks rise, what matters is the thickness of one’s buffers against bad things happening. Those with wealth, power and privilege have sea walls, the rest of us have crumbling sand castles.
Risk and Privilege are intertwined in ways that define our lives and the system we inhabit. Privilege boils down to being buffered from risk, and this is scale-invariant, meaning that it works in the same way from the individual to the nation-state: wealth and power serve to insulate us from risk. Those without wealth and power are fully exposed to risk.
Concrete examples illustrate this dynamic. A rich kid and a poor kid both get busted for possession of Schedule 1 drugs. The rich kid’s parents hire a hot-shot attorney who opts for a trial by judge not a jury, as the judge’s kids go to the same private school as the attorney’s kids and the rich kid.
This defendant shouldn’t have his productive life ruined by a youthful indiscretion, blah blah blah. The rich kid gets probation.
The overwhelmed public defender who has maybe ten minutes for the poor kid’s case tells the poor kid, you’re looking at a maximum of ten years, it’s open and shut, what the prosecutor will accept is a plea bargain where you plead guilty to a lesser charge, they get the conviction and you’ll be out in a year. The poor kid has no choice and takes the plea bargain. Now he’s a felon, on a much different track into adulthood than the rich kid.
Same crime, same process, different outcome.
On the scale of mega-corporations, the same gearing operates. Having a
Risk and Privilege: Buffers Against Bad Things Are Not Shared Equally
