The M Society

Not Your Cup of Chai:

Since I am kind of convinced it is true, so I will just try to prove it head-on. If it doesn’t work out, a contradiction will be generated, and we could prove it by contradiction.

Here I need to remind myself not to take an example as a proof (e.g. “Cuppa is poor, ergo life is not fair and the society is M-shape.”). Can we take the GDP or average income of a particular country and start from there? Nope, because the income disparities will be canceled out and averaged.

How about this: Some governments will release data on household income, and it is a good starting point. Do note absolute numbers usually mean nothing, we need to note the trend, the nascent trails….

Popularity: 41% [?]

The “M-shaped Society” concept is a hot issue in Taiwan ever since Kenichi Ohmae defined it. I found this article published in National Policy Foundation (NPF) Research Report.

Ohmae’s concept has immediately caught the attention of the general public as well as government policy makers in Taiwan. Many have recently argued whether the income distribution structure has transformed into an M-shaped curve. For instance, consumer prices have escalated over the years, but the wage seems to have stood still. Education expenditures and child bearing costs have particularly surged and become unbearable to many families. Many people have therefore claimed themselves as “near poor” group. Those who have suffered irregular employment or unemployment may even fall into the so-called “new poor” class. On the other side of the island, it has been often reported that housing market in urban area has reached a record of high price, which is far beyond the affordable price for most people in the society. Luxurious goods have well sold at unprecedented price, which is hardly reached by the general public. It seems that a divided society is becoming a catchword for recent Taiwan society.

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Examining the unemployed population by age, we found that those aged 25-29 remained the highest rate of unemployment as compared to other age groups. The majority of those aged 25-29 are university and college graduates, who are conventionally expected to be in the middle-income class. This suggests that if the unemployment rate of high-educated population remains relatively high, the middle-class will be more likely to decline in the near future.

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Unlike in Japan, the earnings of workers in Taiwan did not significantly decrease in recent years. Taiwan seems to deviate from the M-shaped society as Ohmae defined. Although Ohmae focused on the decline of the middle classm, he did not provide any statistical measurement in his well-known book. We thus develop two tentative but handy measures for examining the shift of middle class, and coined them as “the Balance Index” and “the M-ratio” respectively. The former was constructed as a relative measure among different income groups, while the latter was designed as a measure indicating the change of the middle class relative to the overall contribution of people.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

The building of this site (The M Society not Them Society) was inspired by the concept of M-shape Society observed by Kenichi Ohmae, a Japanese business strategist and writer.

What is ‘M-Shape Society‘?

In a well-developed modern society, the distribution of classes is in a ‘normal distribution’ pattern, and the middle class forms the bulk of the society.

However, in the emergence of the ‘M-shape society’, the middle class in the society gradually disappeared. A very few people in this middle class may climb up the ladder and squeeze into the upper class, while the others in the middle class gradually sank to the lower classes.

These people experienced a deterioration in living standard. They may face threat of unemployment, or their average salary are dropping. Gradually, they can only live a way the lower classes live: e.g. take buses instead of driving their own car, cut their budget for meals instead of dining at better restaurants, spend less in consumer goods…

There may be still remarkable progress in economic development, the GNP may still rise, there may still be economic growth, and the national average salary may still rise. However, the wealth increase in this growth may concentrate in the pockets of the very few rich people in the society. The masses indeed cannot benefit from the growth, and their living standard is on the decline.

What was worse, the upward social ladder seems to have disappeared - opportunities and fair competition become fewer and fewer. People in the lower class can no longer climb up the ladder: they cannot earn a high-paid job or have stable employment, even if they have a high level of education. The places in the upper class were reserved by the upper class for their descendants.

This site is to observe whether the riches become richer, the poors become poorer. Is it possible for the rich to become poor, or the poor become rich?

Popularity: 41% [?]