http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4466-7491
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ORCID
Risto Heiskala http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4466-7491
Notes
1. This is probably known, but for the sake of clarity: the Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality, which varies between 0.0 and 1.0. If it is 1.0, one person has all the resources and the rest nothing. If it is 0.0, everybody has the same amount of resources. Currently it is 51.9 in Brazil, 46.9 in China, 45.0 in the US, 30.5 in the EU, and it used to be close 0.20 in all North European welfare states. However, the global neoliberal turn has had its effects even on them and they are now all close to the mean of the EU (the figures are from the CIA World Factbook 2013–14 except in the case of the EU from Eurostat 2017).
2. The curious thing here is, of course, that many features of President Trump’s policy do not actually serve his constituency at all. There are two examples of this: the first one is his tax reform that will increase social inequality more than did Reagan’s already very capital-friendly tax reform which was the launch of the slope of the economic position of the US middle-class; the second one is the global trade war which Trump has started and which will backfire also at home by ruining the very beneficial special position the US has had in the global economic system since World War II (for the former, see Castells, Citation1996 and, for the latter, Varoufakis, Citation2011). This only shows that Tocqueville and Nietzsche were right in their worries about the capability of the common people to form a grounded and responsible political opinion in a democracy (Tocqueville, Citation1835/Citation40; Nietzsche, Citation1886). That again is a major problem with populism in the US and elsewhere but can only be analysed here in passing, as the reader will soon see. However, the above gives us a useful reminder that, in addition to listening what the mouth of a populist such as President Trump says, we should always also watch what their hands do at the same time.
3. The Council of the European Union is a body to which using the voice of the member states is delegated between the meetings of the European Council. It consists in each case of the responsible ministers of the member states of different policy sectors such as education, environment or finance.
4. Currently the former is fragmented to more than one parliamentary group and the latter does not have a representation in a sufficient number of member states to be a serious Europe-wide political force. It is probable that both characteristics will change in the next parliamentary elections in 2019.