French economist Thomas Piketty is raising a ruckus

[JohnnySavage]

Chuckleheads like query and the Vettebigot regard Uncle Miltie as some sort of Oracle.

Friedman's mythical Capitalism Camelot hasn't aged well.

America had a brief "Golden Age" post-WW2 where Europe was rebuilding its manufacturing base and Asia hadn't developed yet, plus there was cheap oil to be had in the Middle East.

Those days are gone.

A bigger impact has been the globalization of banking. Up until the 1970s, labor followed capital. If the lord wanted a new castle, the masons moved to the job site and built it. With the instantaneous transfer of money, factories are now built where the labor is cheapest.

This is why the economic theory of long dead Austrians is no longer valid.

 

[Que]

Bullshit. If you did for whatever retarded reason confiscate everyone's wealth, there is no reason to believe the former rich would be back on top. Some of them would and there are a number of reasons for that but just no.

Whether or not we've increased or decreased of freedoms isn't really up to deabte. We've decreased them in a number of ways and need to in a number of ways. Such is life.

Theres every reason to believe that...do you actually think that the poor were "almost" rich but lifes lottery just pulled the rug out from under them..

It is a FACT that the poor spend more on lottery tickets for example...you think thats going to work out for most of them?

It's hard to quantify against the very rich but the bottom percentile households spend considerably more of their meager cashflow on fragrance, clothing, cars, tvs, phones, alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Than the next portion or earners do.

You can argue they do those things to feel better about their lives and you may have a point...one could also say those choices are what keeps them there.

So, in a distopian world, you dont think say if we wanted to do eddie murphy trading places bet, you would take my bet that those with IQ's over 130 will NOT do better than those with sub-100 IQ's?

Education and professions are meaningless?

You know any poor people who would change their lives if you gave them even 10,000?

 

[Sean Renaud]

Theres every reason to believe that...do you actually think that the poor were "almost" rich but lifes lottery just pulled the rug out from under them..

It is a FACT that the poor spend more on lottery tickets for example...you think thats going to work out for most of them?

It's hard to quantify against the very rich but the bottom percentile households spend considerably more of their meager cashflow on fragrance, clothing, cars, tvs, phones, alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Than the next portion or earners do.

You can argue they do those things to feel better about their lives and you may have a point...one could also say those choices are what keeps them there.

So, in a distopian world, you dont think say if we wanted to do eddie murphy trading places bet, you would take my bet that those with IQ's over 130 will NOT do better than those with sub-100 IQ's?

Education and professions are meaningless?

You know any poor people who would change their lives if you gave them even 10,000?

Do I think the poor were almost rich before life's lottery pulled the rug out from under them? Well aside from the fact that's demonstrably true, no not entirely. But it is the basis for your philosophy.

We could discuss some of the various bad habits of the poor and. . .it might be worthy of discussion but probably not. Not all of them do any of the things you mention but most of them will never even be true middle class.

Eddie Murphy's bed was fictioinal, however you're making the assumption that IQ for starters is a realistic metric (it's not really) but for the argument if it was most people are right around 100. Income doesn't average that way.

Education and professions mean nothing? OF course not. That's why I said you'd have to do a whole lot more than just redistribute the wealth. Because education does matter. But being born in a place that has top notch schools doesn't reflect on your intelligence. It reflects on the wealth of your parents which is largely dependent on their own education stretching back decades if not centuries. Being born to a family that can install you in a company isn't a reflection on your skills.

10k? That's kinda chump change in today's world. It's not enough to get an education, it's not enough to start a business (well it is if you count a business as selling knick knacks out of your trunk.

You're focused entirely on the poor for some reason though. Most rich people are either born that way or marry into the family. The number of men who started off poor and became rich are so low we tell stories about them and treat them like the very nearly legendary heroes that they are. Because they fucking earned that respect. Most of them wouldn't have the skills to start off at the ground level, and I'm not talking "sweep the floors" ground level, I don't think the majority of them would even be any good at middle management level jobs.

If your theory is correct though we should see wealth more evenly distributed globally. If work is more important than luck surely you shouldn't be able to point and say "Hmm the laziest, illegal immigrant to America is wealthier than the hardest workers in Africa and South America." Because it wouldn't be true. But it is true because luck is a huge component.

 

[Que]

wrong. liberty is the biggest component.

China is surpassing us not because the have more resources, human and otherwise...they are not surpassing us because they have added MORE controls and have REDUCED liberty...

No it is because they have removed SOME of the oppression that has been holding their people back and disincentivising work and innovation.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

A bigger impact has been the globalization of banking. Up until the 1970s, labor followed capital. If the lord wanted a new castle, the masons moved to the job site and built it. With the instantaneous transfer of money, factories are now built where the labor is cheapest.

This is why the economic theory of long dead Austrians is no longer valid.

Fallacious line of thought.

The Lord had to move the money to pay them; that it is faster now doesn't change the mechanism one iota.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Fallacious line of thought.

The Lord had to move the money to pay them; that it is faster now doesn't change the mechanism one iota.

The Chief dismisses anything that doesn't agree with his preconceived political positions as "fallacious".

Funny how he never explains why it is "fallacious".

:nods:

 

[Adre]

wrong. liberty is the biggest component.

China is surpassing us not because the have more resources, human and otherwise...they are not surpassing us because they have added MORE controls and have REDUCED liberty...

No it is because they have removed SOME of the oppression that has been holding their people back and disincentivising work and innovation.

China's per capita GDP is not even 20% of ours. How exactly are they surpassing us?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Even that is probably inflated. They lie about everything.

 

[KingOrfeo]

A bigger impact has been the globalization of banking. Up until the 1970s, labor followed capital. If the lord wanted a new castle, the masons moved to the job site and built it. With the instantaneous transfer of money, factories are now built where the labor is cheapest.

This is why the economic theory of long dead Austrians is no longer valid.

It never was, actually, it's pure pseudoscience.

 

[KingOrfeo]

wrong. liberty is the biggest component.

Cite to the relevant economic principle, please.

 

[trysail]

It's standard fare— and the gullible, the credulous and the desperate almost always fall for it.

Professional meddlers, gossips and busybodies employ the age-old Machiavellian levers of envy and jealousy in their quest for power.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
​

-H. L. Mencken
​

​

 

[Sean Renaud]

wrong. liberty is the biggest component.

China is surpassing us not because the have more resources, human and otherwise...they are not surpassing us because they have added MORE controls and have REDUCED liberty...

No it is because they have removed SOME of the oppression that has been holding their people back and disincentivising work and innovation.

Liberty most likely isn't a component at all, let alone the biggest component.

China is making good headway on us but their government is heavily involved in their economy, and in better ways than ours. They were making that headway long before they removed any of the oppression. I assume you have an equally stupid reason for how Russia was so successful following WWII and even today is only a joke if you are holding them up next to America, they are in the top 10 on every list that matters.

If like a lot of people you want to say Europe's a bad example we can't compare. . .well why can you pretty much chart income in the US by if you vote Dem or Republican? Texas is the only anomoly in that case and you can say whatever the fuck you want about Detroit or Chicago. That doesn't change the trend and I'd take being a hasbeen over a neverwas any day of the week anyway and that's pretty much what you get for Redstates. (Well I guess if you want to go back before the civil war thoeugh even then they were slipping behind the North.)

 

[KingOrfeo]

From Salon:

Sunday, May 4, 2014 12:00 PM EDT

The ultimate guide to shutting down conservative anti-Piketty hysteria

"Capital in the 21st Century" has sent conservatives into a rage. Here's how to debunk their favorite attacks

Sean McElwee

Thomas Piketty’s wildly popular new book, “Capital in the 21st Century,” has been subject to more think pieces than the final episode of “Breaking Bad.” Progressives are celebrating the book — and its unexpected popularity — as an important turning point in the fight against global wealth inequality. This, of course, means that conservatives have gone completely ballistic.

Rush Limbaugh, for example, has come out guns a-blazing: “Some French socialist, Marxist, communist economist has published a book, and the left in this country is having orgasms over it,” he exclaimed during a recent broadcast.

When the right drops the C-bomb, the M-bomb and S-bomb all at once, you can be certain a book is having an impact. And “Capital” may well be the “General Theory” of the first half of the 21st century, redefining the way we think about capitalism, democracy and equality.

This, of course, means that the right-wing attacks have only just begun. That in mind, here is a handy guide to navigating the more absurd responses:

Claim: Piketty is a dirty Marxist

There are two Marxes. One, a scholar of capitalism of repute, put forward testable hypotheses, some of which you may accept, some of which you may reject. The other is a conservative boogeyman, the human representation of all they find evil. If they dislike something, it must be Marxist.

James Pethokoukis, a formidable writer, went full hack for his National Review review,

Thanks to Piketty, the Left is now having a “Galaxy Quest” moment. All that stuff their Marxist economics professors taught them about the “inherent contradictions” of capitalism and about history’s being on the side of the planners — all the theories that the apparent victory of market capitalism in the last decades of the 20th century seemed to invalidate — well, it’s all true after all.

How to respond: Most times someone drops the M-Bomb, he is intending to be provocative. With enough effort, you can make almost anything Marxist. While Marxists don’t agree on everything, and the term is very nebulous (Marx once said he wouldn’t describe himself as a Marxist), there are some pretty established rules for determining if someone is, indeed, a Marxist. First, he generally doesn’t write things like,

“Marxist analysis emphasized the falling rate of profit — a historical prediction that turned out to be quite wrong” (“Capital in the 21st Century,” page 52)
“Marx usually adopted a fairly anecdotal and unsystematic approach”. (“Capital in the 21st Century,” page 229)
“Marx evidently wrote in great political fervor, which at times lead him to issue hasty pronouncements from which it is difficult to escape. That is why economic theory needs to be rooted in historical sources …” (“Capital in the 21st Century,” page 10)
“… Marx totally neglected the possibility of durable technological progress and steadily increasing productivity.” (“Capital in the 21st Century,” page 10)

These are not the words of a Marxist, but rather a reasonable scholar, investigating the truth of the claims written by the greatest political economist who ever lived. The fact that Piketty abstains from the vitriol and misrepresentation that typify most writing on Marx are to his credit.

Piketty certainly does argue that capitalism will not inevitably reduce inequality, as economist Simon Kuznets had famously claimed. As to whether capital will accumulate without end, as Marx believed, he is more nuanced.

Piketty argues that capital will accumulate in the hands of the few when growth is slower than the rate of return on capital and dis-accumulate if not (This is the now famous “r>g” formula). As growth slows, companies can replace workers with machines (written by economists as “substitution between capital and labor”), but only if there is a high elasticity of capital to labor (higher elasticity means easier replacement). This means that the share of income going to the owners of capital will rise, and the distribution of that capital will become more unequal.

Piketty does not hold to a labor theory of value, he does not believe that capitalism is founded on the exploitation of the proletariat, and he does not believe the system will inevitably collapse on its own contradictions. But critics who call Piketty a Marxist don’t actually mean, “Piketty subscribes to a collection of propositions generally accepted by Marxists”; they mean it as a verbal grenade. Step over it and move to more substantive criticisms.

Claim: The social safety net has already solved the problem

In order to somewhat compensate workers for voluntary unemployment and the ludicrously low wages that “markets” pay them, modern societies have developed transfer systems, or social safety nets of various levels of robustness, to bolster the incomes of low-wage workers. Some conservatives argue that these transfers have solved the inequality problem.

Scott Winship, the lovable but irksome economist dedicated to upsetting the inequality consensus, writes in Forbes,

Most importantly, in the United States, most public transfer income is omitted from tax returns. That includes not just means-tested programs for poor families and unemployment benefits, but Social Security. Many retirees in the Piketty-Saez data have tiny incomes because their main source of sustenance is rendered invisible in the data.

How to respond: There’s not enough room to give his data claims a full airing. For our purposes, it suffices to say that, while America does have a transfer system, it’s far less robust than that of other developed nations. (See chart below, from Lane Kenworthy.)

http://media.salon.com/2014/05/chart-third-last.jpg

Government revenues are far lower in the U.S. than in other countries, making redistribution more difficult, and thus our safety net is far more frail. (See chart below, from Sean McElwee.)

http://media.salon.com/2014/05/chart-second-last.jpg

Far more interesting is what would happen if conservatives made this their line. After all, if transfers are what is preventing inequality from skyrocketing then the rising share of pre-transfer income accruing to the wealthy capital owners means we need more robust transfer system. Because few, if any, thinkers on the right have argued for a stronger transfer system (and are, in fact, attempting to violate it), they must accept the logical conclusion: Their policies will set off skyrocketing inequality (or, more likely: They don’t give a shit).

Claim: Inequality isn’t a problem because look at consumption!

There are lots of ways to look at inequality. You could look at income inequality by examining how much a person takes home every year from their labor, income from assets and transfers. You could also look at wealth inequality by figuring out how many assets they own, in the form of stocks, bonds, property, and subtract from it their debts. Or you could look at how much they are able to consume.

Some conservative economists argue that an increase in income inequality has not been mirrored by an increase in consumption inequality because the wealthy save or invest their income. Kevin Hassett, a former Romney economic adviser, illustrates this point, arguing:

From 2000 to 2010, consumption has climbed 14% for individuals in the bottom fifth of households, 6% for individuals in the middle fifth, and 14.3% for individuals in the top fifth when we account for changes in U.S. population and the size of households. This despite the dire economy at the end of the decade.

Although he initially made this argument against Piketty in 2012, he has revived it recently in a lecture on the subject.

How to respond: In large part, this is a common trope on the right — the “but they have cellphones!” argument. The empirical literature on this subject is still very much in flux, and there is not a consensus. Some recent studies find that consumption inequality has increased with income inequality. But even if we except the consumption inequality argument, conservatives have some explaining to do. After all, if income inequality has been rising while consumption inequality has stayed the same, where is the spending coming from? Debt. Which means that wealth inequality is increasing, as the rich save more and the poor fall further into debt. Research released this week by Amy Traub of Demos finds that the recent increase in credit card debt hasn’t been driven by profligate spending, but unemployment, children, the declining value of homes and lack of health insurance. Recent research by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman show how the bottom 90 percent simply haven’t been able to save their incomes and thereby build wealth. (See chart below.)

http://media.salon.com/2014/05/chart-last.jpg

Claim: We need lazy rich people

Tyler Cowen is one of the more honest of Piketty’s critics, and there is certainly a lot to like in his review. However, this section is a head-scratcher:

Piketty fears the stasis and sluggishness of the rentier, but what might appear to be static blocks of wealth have done a great deal to boost dynamic productivity. Piketty’s own book was published by the Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press, which received its initial funding in the form of a 1949 bequest from Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr., an architect and art historian who inherited a good deal of money from his father, a vice president of Bankers Trust… consider Piketty’s native France, where the scores of artists who relied on bequests or family support to further their careers included painters such as Corot, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Monet, and Toulouse-Lautrec and writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Verlaine, and Proust, among others.

How to respond: It’s very true that in the past, many artists, writers and thinkers benefited from familial wealth (or rich benefactors). This, however, is not to be celebrated! It means that marginalized people are frequently removed from mainstream discussion. It’s also a dreadful defense of inequality. As theologian Reinhold Niebuhr writes,“The fact that culture requires leisure, is however, hardly a sufficient justification for the maintenance of a leisured class. For every artist which the aristocracy has produced, and for every two patrons of the arts, it has supported a thousand wastrels.”

Poverty and oppression can also create other powerful types of art, from boheim to the blues. More important, there are far better ways to fund the arts than throwing money at rich families and hoping they cook up something nice. For instance, the National Endowment for the Arts has funded arts education, dance, design, folk and traditional arts, literature, local arts agencies, media arts, museums, music, musical theater, opera, theater and visual arts. In the aftermath of the Great Depression the Works Progress Administration had an arm devoted to funding the arts that supported Jackson Pollock, William Gropper, Willem de Kooning, Leon Bibel and Ben Shahn. The CIA has even gotten into the game.

As Niebuhr notes, “An intelligent society will know how to subsidize those who possess peculiar gifts … and will not permit a leisured class to justify itself by producing an occasional creative genius among a multitude of incompetents.” It’s a wonder that conservatives want the wealthy financing art and philosophy — Marx, after all, would have died of penury without the beneficence of the wealthy Engels. Given that his economist friends have been impressed by Piketty’s cultural depth because of his ability to cite Jane Austen, I wouldn’t put much weight on their cultural defense of privilege.

Claim: Piketty is French, and we saved their butts in World War II

This is true. You’ve lost the debate.

Sean McElwee is a writer and researcher of public policy. His writing may be viewed at seanamcelwee.com. Follow him on Twitter at @seanmcelwee.

 

[jeninflorida]

Cite to the relevant economic principle, please.

just imagine if you would leave your mom's basement to explore the world.

hell, you could be Christopher Columbus!

yeah, I know you lack the balls as your kind is a fucking coward

 

[RobDownSouth]

From Salon:

Sunday, May 4, 2014 12:00 PM EDT

The ultimate guide to shutting down conservative anti-Piketty hysteria

"Capital in the 21st Century" has sent conservatives into a rage. Here's how to debunk their favorite attacks ...

It's interesting reading this article and looking at the Chief's earlier diatribes in this thread. One could almost use this as a checklist to document the Chief's butthurt.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Right now, our economic prospects look grim. To classical liberals like myself, future growth is unsustainable in an age dominated by progressive politics. There are two reasons for this: an extensive system of regulation of all key sectors of economy—including labor, real estate, health care, and financial markets—and a combination of progressive income taxes, specialized levies (like the medical device tax), and a heavy estate tax, whose proceeds are used to fund an ever-expanding system of transfer payments.

Today’s unending cycle of regulation, taxation, and transfer payments induces non-stop political competition, which lets strong voting coalitions take from their adversaries in order to enrich their friends. This dynamic leads to crony capitalism that reduces the return to both capital and labor. States like Texas that work hard to resist these various trends do well in comparison to those states like Illinois that yield to political temptation. The solution requires systematic deregulation coupled with flat taxes to induce higher levels of competition that will in turn produce greater economic growth and human satisfaction.

The Piketty Vision

This vision for a just and prosperous society turns out to be a giant mistake—at least under the doomsday predictions of Thomas Piketty’s bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty’s key assumption is that the rate of return on capital will always (except of course in wartime) exceed the rate of growth in the economy, so that the long-term trend necessarily leads to a vast concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny group of rentiers—those investors who reap a return in the form of rents, dividends, and interest payments from capital assets.

Accordingly to Piketty, a French economist, that concentration of wealth in the hands of the few creates the risk “of significant political upheaval. Our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview, or at any rate a meritocratic hope, by which I mean a belief in a society in which inequality is based more on merit and effort than on kinship and rents.” These economic rents, he argues, do not result from some market imperfection, but are instead “the consequence of a ‘pure and perfect’ market for capital, as economists understand it,” so that “each owner of capital, including the least capable of heirs, can obtain the highest possible yield on the most diversified portfolio that can be assembled in the national or global economy.”

...

One of the most striking defects of the Piketty analysis is its flawed understanding of the relationship between social wealth and income inequality. The initial point goes to the question of how ordinary people ought to regard the accumulation of vast stores of wealth by the few, much of which gets passed on by inheritance to other people. For Piketty, their greater wealth leaves (all else being equal) poorer people worse off because of their apparent loss of political influence to the great and mighty.

Not so fast. First, as an economic matter, the increase of the wealth of some without a decline of wealth in others counts as a Pareto improvement, which is in general to be welcomed, even if it increases overall levels of inequality. But to egalitarians like Piketty, the increased wealth inequality is bad in itself, as their objective is to minimize differences in wealth and income, rather than to increase their overall totals. Piketty’s assumptions lead to the conclusion that a world in which the rich average 1,000 and the poor average 10 is less desirable than a world in which the rich average 300 and the poor average 5, given that the absolute and relative differences in wealth are lower in the second state of the world than the first.

...

Unfortunately, the fixation with economic wealth and income also leads Piketty and other egalitarians to overlook many key social trends of enormous importance. Theoretically, measures of wealth are convenient ways to attack the inequality of individual well-being. Though they are relevant to that question, they are far from the only measure of individual well-being. There are all sorts of other indicators that are distinct from income and wealth, including many measures of the length and quality of life. Piketty does note the dramatic increase in life expectancy throughout the developed world in the modern era, but, oddly enough, he does this only to rebut the point that longer life expectancies reduce the danger of inherited wealth.

What he should have done is exactly the opposite. There is no way that overall social gains on matters of life expectancy and health can be concentrated in the top one percent of society. To be sure, it is worth noting that infant mortality has always been inversely correlated with wealth. The children of richer people do better than those of poorer people. But look next at the actual numbers. By one British study, infant mortality ranged in 1901 from 247 per 1,000 live births in the poorest group to 94 per 1,000 in the highest group, the so-called “servant-keeping class.” One hundred years later, those numbers dropped to 3.7 per 1000 for the first group and 8.1 per 1000 for the second.

Looking solely at the mortality ratios, you could conclude that, relatively speaking, things have gotten a bit better for the poor, as their children are about 2.19 times as likely to die as the children of rich people, compared to being 2.63 times as likely to die a century before. Yet this analysis misses the forest by looking at the trees. The actual decline in mortality rates at the bottom was about 240 lives per thousand; for the top, it was 90. The huge increases in both areas, where the poor had the most dramatic gains, is the real story. The egalitarian ratio is a side-show....

Richard A. Epstein

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/177406

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

In Conclusion:

"These figures tell a story that is wholly concealed by Piketty’s income and wealth figures. They show the huge positive influence of technological advances on human welfare. Sadly, his lengthy book is silent about the massive advances in basic science, public health, and medicine that fueled this revolution, creating widespread benefits for the population at large. It is also worth noting that these increases were more dramatic by far in the first decade of the twentieth century than they were in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Neither technology nor politics can explain the difference, but greater regulations and higher tax rates can. The Piketty obsession with income inequality conceals more than it reveals."

Richard A. Epstein

 

[RobDownSouth]

"These figures tell a story that is wholly concealed by Piketty’s income and wealth figures. They show the huge positive influence of technological advances on human welfare. Sadly, his lengthy book is silent about the massive advances in basic science, public health, and medicine that fueled this revolution, creating widespread benefits for the population at large. It is also worth noting that these increases were more dramatic by far in the first decade of the twentieth century than they were in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Neither technology nor politics can explain the difference, but greater regulations and higher tax rates can. The Piketty obsession with income inequality conceals more than it reveals."

Richard A. Epstein

Debunked in claim #2 above.
Keep trying, Chief.

 

[trysail]

"William Shakespeare was born into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a population of between three million and five million— much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to take a continuous, heavy toll. Now the number of living Britons was actually in retreat. The previous decade had seen a fall in population nationally of about 6 percent. In London, as many as a quarter of the citizenry may have perished.

But plague was only the beginning of England's deathly woes. The embattled populace faced constant danger from tuberculosis, measles, rickets, scurvy, two types of smallpox (confluent and hemorrhagic), scrofula, dysentery, and a vast amorphous array of fluxes and fevers— tertian fever, quartian fever, puerperal fever, ship's fever, quotidian fever, spotted fever— as well as 'frenzies,' 'foul evils,' and other peculiar maladies of vague and numerous types. These were, of course, no respecters of rank. Queen Elizabeth herself was nearly carried off by smallpox in 1562, two years before William Shakespeare was born.

Even comparatively minor conditions— a kidney stone, an infected wound, a difficult childbirth— could quickly turn lethal. Almost as dangerous as the ailments were the treatments meted out. Victims were purged with gusto and bled till they fainted— hardly the sort of handling that would help a weakened constitution. In such an age it was a rare child that knew all four of its grandparents.

Many of the exotic-sounding diseases of Shakespeare's time are known to us by other names (their ship's fever is our typhus, for instance), but some were mysteriously specific to the age. One such was the 'English sweat,' which had only recently abated after several murderous outbreaks. It was called the 'scourge without dread' because it was so startlingly swift: Victims often sickened and died on the same day. Fortunately many survived, and gradually the population acquired a collective immunity that drove the disease to extinction by the 1550s. Leprosy, one of the great dreads of the Middle Ages, had likewise mercifully abated in recent years, never to return with vigor. But no sooner had these perils vanished than another virulent fever, called 'the new sickness,' swept through the country, killing tens of thousands in a series of outbreaks between 1556 and 1559. Worse, these coincided with calamitous, starving harvests in 1555 and 1556. It was a literally dreadful age.

Plague, however, remained the darkest scourge. Just under three months after William's birth, the burials section of the parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford bears the ominous words Hic incepit pestis (Here plague begins), beside the name of a boy named Oliver Gunne. The outbreak of 1564 was a vicious one. At least two hundred people died in Stratford, about ten times the normal rate. Even in nonplague years 16 percent of infants perished in England; in this year nearly two thirds did. (One neighbor of the Shakespeare's lost four children.) In a sense William Shakespeare's greatest achievement in life wasn't writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year."


-Bill Bryson
Shakespeare: The World As Stage
New York, 2007.

​

 

[trysail]

"This is why Rocket's moment in history is unique. That soot-blackened locomotive sits squarely at the deflection point where a line describing human productivity (and therefore human welfare) that had been as flat as Kansas for a hundred centuries made a turn like the business end of a hockey stick. Rocket is when humanity finally learned to run twice as fast.

It's still running today. If you examined the years since 1800 in twenty year-increments, and charted every way that human welfare can be expressed in numbers— not just annual per capita GDP, which climbed to more than $6,000 by 2000, but mortality at birth (in fact, mortality at any age); calories consumed; prevalence of disease; average height of adults; percentage of lifetime spent disabled; percentage of population enrolled in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education; illiteracy; and annual hours of leisure time— the chart will show every measure better at the end of the period than it was at the beginning. And the phenomenon isn't restricted to Europe and North America; the same improvements have occurred in every region of the world. A baby born in France in 1800 could expect to live thirty years— twenty-five years less than a baby born in the Republic of the Congo in 2000. The nineteenth century French infant would be at a significant risk of starvation, infectious disease, and violence, and even if he or she were to survive into adulthood, would be far less likely to learn how to read..."
​

-William Rosen
The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
New York, New York 2010.





This is a book that ought to be read by every person who claims to be educated.





​

 

[KingOrfeo]

From Salon:

Saturday, May 10, 2014 06:30 AM EDT

Libertarians’ scary new star: Meet Bryan Caplan, the right’s next “great” philosopher

Ever hear of Bryan Caplan? Here's why he could turn out to be one of the most significant thinkers of our time

Michael Lind

In the last few years, social science has provided documentation for what has long been obvious to informed observers: the degeneration of American and Western democracy into a species of plutocracy. In his bestselling “Capital in the 21st Century,” Thomas Piketty has documented the decline and rise of inequality and the prospect of a return to “patrimonial capitalism,” or political and social domination by possessors of great wealth. At the same time, scholars like Martin Gilens, Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels and Jason Seawright have demonstrated that U.S. public policy tends to reflect the preferences of the rich, even when these contradict the preferences of most Americans.

Some on the libertarian right have responded to this research by welcoming our new plutocratic overlords. Among these is Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University and blogger for EconLog. Even though I disagree with him, Caplan may turn out to be one of the most significant thinkers of our time.

My evidence for this bold claim is a 2012 review by Caplan of a book by Martin Gilens entitled “Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America.” In a follow-up paper, Gilens and co-author Benjamin Page recently provided further evidence that American politicians respond more to the preferences of the rich than to those of most voters when the two sets of preferences conflict.

In his original review of “Affluence and Influence,” entitled “Why Is Democracy Tolerable?” Caplan greeted the findings by Gilens with a sigh of relief. Caplan wrote:

Before I studied public opinion, I often wondered, “Why are democracies’ policies so bad?” After I studied public opinion, I started asking myself the opposite question: “Why aren’t democracies’ policies even worse?” The median American is no Nazi, but he is a moderate national socialist–statist to the core on both economic and social policy.

According to Caplan, Gilens had unwittingly provided the answer to the question of why democracies like the U.S. were more libertarian than one would expect, given the “national socialist” leanings of the American people:

Gilens compiles a massive data set of public opinion surveys and subsequent policy outcomes, and reaches a shocking conclusion: Democracy has a strong tendency to simply supply the policies favored by the rich. When the poor, the middle class, and the rich disagree, American democracy largely ignores the poor and the middle class.

Caplan thinks this is a good thing.

In contrast, I find Gilens’ results not only intellectually satisfying, but hopeful. If his results hold up, we know another important reason why policy is less statist than expected: Democracies listen to the relatively libertarian rich far more than they listen to the absolutely statist non-rich. And since I think that statist policy preferences rest on a long list of empirical and normative mistakes, my sincere reaction is to say, “Thank goodness.” Democracy as we know it is bad enough. Democracy that really listened to all the people would be an authoritarian nightmare.

You might be tempted to dismiss Bryan Caplan as just another Koch-funded libertarian hack. But I think he may well be the next great libertarian philosopher. Caplanism may represent the future of that near-oxymoron, libertarian thought.

For most of its post-1945 history, libertarianism has lacked thinkers of its own, and its intellectual deficit frequently has been filled by government-hating businessmen with third-rate minds like Peter Thiel, the fatuous crackpot who founded PayPal, and the appallingly dumb Leonard Read. For a while it looked as though libertarianism had found its Locke or Marx in the late Robert Nozick, following the 1974 publication of “Anarchy, State and Utopia.” But in the 1980s Nozick repudiated his own work: “The libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate…. There are some things we choose to do together through government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that we do them together in this official fashion [democracy].”

Can Caplan fill the philosophical void left by Nozick’s defection from libertarianism? I think he can. In what follows I will make the case for what might be called Caplanism, recognizing that Caplan himself might not be consistent enough to follow the logic of his own thinking to its conclusions. (Marx claimed he was not a Marxist).

The great contribution of Caplanism to libertarian thought and argument is the observation that democracy, if sufficiently corrupted by the rich, might — just might — be tolerable. Let us call this equivalent of Kant’s Categorical Imperative or the Maximin Principle of John Rawls Caplan’s Tolerability Principle.

That libertarianism is incompatible with democracy is an empirical observation on which libertarians can agree with progressives, centrists and non-libertarian conservatives. After all, in every modern democracy, including the U.S., government tends to account for somewhere between 35 and 50 percent of GDP on such “national socialism” (to use Caplan’s terms) as universal health care, minimum public pensions and public education. As I pointed out some time ago in Salon, there are no libertarian countries.

The honest libertarians do not hold out hope that the voting masses in democracies can be persuaded to adopt libertarianism at some point in the future. Instead, they admit that libertarianism is incompatible with democracy — and propose to jettison democracy for alternatives.

One perennial alternative is the libertarian microstate, which secedes from the statist society all around it to create a tiny libertarian paradise. This vision has repeatedly failed when put to the test. For example, in the 1970s Operation Atlantis, a concrete boat built by a rich fan of Ayn Rand named Werner Stiefel, sank in a hurricane, and the real-estate tycoon Michael Oliver’s Republic of Minerva — some sand dumped on some coral reefs — was invaded and seized by the island state of Tonga in 1972.

Most recently the microstate alternative to nation–state democracy has been promoted by the economist Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri Friedman, who has been boosting “seasteads,” that is, offshore gated communities for the rich and antisocial. Friedman made the anti-democratic nature of his project explicit in a 2009 manifesto for the Cato Institute’s blog:

Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state. It has substantial systemic flaws, which are well-covered elsewhere, and it poses major problems specifically for libertarians… 1) Most people are not by nature libertarians… 2) Democracy is rigged against libertarians.

A supporter of Friedman’s project, Peter Thiel, agreed and added that a major problem with modern democracy is that women and the poor are allowed to vote:

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.

In addition to the libertarian microstate, another alternative for libertarians disgusted with democracy is a dictatorship that protects the rich and their property from the people. In 1927 Ludwig von Mises praised Mussolini:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.

The other founder of libertarian Austrian economics, Friedrich von Hayek, admired the military dictator Augusto Pinochet, a mass murderer who overthrew democracy in Chile and followed the policy prescriptions of the libertarian Chicago School of Economics. Hayek told a Chilean interviewer: “My personal preference leans toward a liberal [i.e., libertarian] dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism [libertarianism].”

Caplan’s Tolerability Principle is an important contribution to the admittedly meager body of libertarian political thought, because it allows libertarians to qualify their rejection of democracy — even as it allows them to continue to favor “libertarian” dictatorships over non-libertarian democracies. If in the spirit of Caplanism we divide regimes into democracies and autocracies, and further divide each category into “tolerable” and “intolerable” versions, then we get four kinds of regimes:

Tolerable democracies, in which public policy responds to the preferences of the rich, rather than the majority;

Tolerable autocracies, in which public policy responds to the preferences of the rich, rather than other groups;

Intolerable democracies, in which public policy reflects the preferences of the majority, rather than the rich;

Intolerable autocracies, in which public policy reflects the preferences of groups other than the rich.

You can see why I think that Caplanism represents a great philosophical breakthrough for the Koch-subsidized intelligentsia of the libertarian right. Caplanism allows libertarians to embrace both Pinochet’s Chile and the United States, without contradiction, on the grounds that in both Pinochet’s Chile and today’s United States the preferences of the rich have trumped those of the majority.

Caplanism also frees libertarian scholars like Caplan himself from being embarrassed about the fact that almost all of them are paid, directly or indirectly, by a handful of angry, arrogant rich guys who fund anti-government propaganda because they think they are overtaxed. Caplanism allows the subsidized libertarian intelligentsia to declare, “Yes, we are indeed spokesmen for plutocracy — and a good thing, too, because a plutocratic democracy is the only kind of democracy worth having!”

For all of these reasons, I believe that Bryan Caplan deserves to be studied as one of the most representative thinkers of our money-dominated era. Our squalid age of plutocratic democracy has found a thinker worthy of it.

 

[jeninflorida]

socialism is for the weak and mentally ill

 

[KingOrfeo]

Now here's an interesting criticism:

Sunday, May 11, 2014 07:00 AM EDT

The problem with Thomas Piketty: “Capital” destroys right-wing lies, but there’s one solution it forgets

After "Capital," we'll never talk income inequality or meritocratic myths the same way. But we must talk unions

Thomas Frank

What makes Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” such a triumph is that it seems to have been written specifically to demolish the great economic shibboleths of our time. The stock market is not an instrument of economic democracy, it seems; nor does every natural-born American get a chance to run (which is to say, to loot) a Fortune 500 company. The gap between the billionaires and the rest of us is not really a matter of talent or education, we learn; nor do the rich really deserve every last penny of their winnings. Yet it seems that those winnings, once won, multiply relentlessly as time passes, in a way that far outstrips wages even in the best years.

The effect of knowing all these things is a healthy one, like when a fever breaks and all those fanciful explanations for things that we had imagined turn out to have been just a dream. The simplest explanations are in fact the true ones, and we owe Piketty thanks for reminding us of this. However, he also has a serious historical blind spot, and it leads even him to wander into the land of make-believe at times, particularly when he is proposing solutions. This is unfortunate, because in reality the simple remedy for inequality has been staring at us all along. We merely need to sober up and look it in the face.

*

I was puzzled at first by the extraordinary success of Piketty’s book; despite his commitment to cant-free prose, it is not an easy read. Besides, most of what Piketty tells us has been told to us before, many times over, in a three-decade long parade of forgotten treatises and sad New York Times stories on downsizing and deindustrialization. But there is something about dispassionate statistical proof, comprehensively brought together, that warms the liberal heart. Virtually the same phenomenon played itself out several decades ago with Kevin Phillips’ “The Politics of Rich and Poor,” another relentless, data-heavy book on inequality that duly mounted the best-seller lists back in 1990.

If the world of letters was as coldly mathematical as the world of capital, we could now say that any debate over inequality is over: There can be no doubt that we are fast approaching a 19th-century-style distribution of wealth. That’s why the overwhelming sensibility of Piketty’s magnum opus is a dark fatalism, a feeling that mankind is groping blindly while in the grip of a determining force far larger than ourselves — namely, Piketty’s now-famous return on capital, growing wealth from generation to generation and always outstripping wages — that has only slackened on rare occasions.

One of the best things about Piketty’s masterwork is his systematic demolition of his own discipline. Academic economics, especially in the United States, has for decades been gripped by a kind of professional pretentiousness that is close to pathological. From time to time its great minds have grown so impressed by their own didactic awesomeness that they celebrate economics as “the imperial science”— “imperial” not merely because economics is the logic of globalization but because its math-driven might is supposedly capable of defeating and colonizing every other branch of the social sciences. Economists, the myth goes, make better historians, better sociologists, better anthropologists than people who are actually trained in those disciplines. One believable but possibly apocryphal tale I heard as a graduate student in the ’90s was that economists at a prestigious Midwestern university had actually taken to wearing white lab coats—because they supposedly were the real scientific deal, unlike their colleagues in all those soft disciplines.

Piketty blasts it all to hell. His fellow economists may have mastered the art of spinning abstract mathematical fantasies, he acknowledges, but they have forgotten that measuring the real world comes first. In the book’s Introduction this man who is now the most famous economist in the world accuses his professional colleagues of a “childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation”; he laughs at “their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.” In a shocking reversal, he calls on the imperial legions of economic pseudo-science to lay down their arms, to “avail ourselves of the methods of historians, sociologists, and political scientists”; the six-hundred-page book that follows, Piketty declares, is to be “as much a work of history as of economics.”

They may be weeping in the gothic halls of your local econ department, but when I read that, I wanted to cheer. As I wrote on Salon several months ago, the growing plutocracy is a subject for all of us; in Piketty’s words, it “is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.”

*

Unfortunately, Piketty’s enthusiasm for disciplines other than economics is more theoretical than anything else. “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” draws overwhelmingly on data, data derived overwhelmingly from France and the UK. Whenever Piketty moves away from numbers and tries to describe life in the United States, things go wrong in a hurry. The worst example first: Piketty tells us that, unlike the French, Americans feel “no nostalgia for the postwar period” because our economy didn’t grow rapidly in those years. In fact, American GDP often grew by 5 and 6 percent in the ’50s and ’60s and Americans have felt intense sweet wistfulness for those days ever since “American Graffiti” came out in 1973. To be fair, Piketty corrects himself several hundred pages on, but then not because he’s looked around and noticed the four decades of ’50s-revival crap Americans have so eagerly consumed, but because of a stray nostalgic remark by his fellow economist Paul Krugman. It’s all moot, I guess, because before long and without any explanation he reverts to his original position of nostalgia denialism.

Piketty’s command of American political history is, quite simply, abysmal. He announces that the U.S. “never became a colonial power,” which would be news to the people of the Philippines, not to mention the Sioux. He describes Herbert Hoover as a “liquidationist” though that was Hoover’s own term for the policies that Hoover rejected. About the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt—ordinarily an important period for students of inequality—Piketty seems to know almost nothing, except that FDR used wage and price controls during World War II. At one point, he comes close to denying the existence of Rooseveltian liberalism altogether, writing that for we benighted Americans “the twentieth century is not synonymous with a great leap forward in social justice.” As for the great right turn of the Eighties, he asserts repeatedly and with virtually no documentary evidence that it happened because America was falling behind Germany and Japan in economic growth—in other words, that the galaxy of nutty anxieties that fuel modern right-wing politics can be easily deduced from a few lines on a graph.

There are numerous other examples in Piketty’s enormous book of this weird blind spot concerning all things American; indeed, you could write an entire review just cataloguing them.

Now, none of these blunders are fatal or even very damaging to Piketty’s main argument about the snowballing nature of wealth, but misunderstanding America so dramatically nevertheless carries a penalty. To write about capital while misapprehending the history and culture of the world’s greatest proponent of capitalism makes the next act in the program—proposing a solution to inequality—nearly impossible. Piketty goes on to suggest remedies that are fanciful in the extreme, even as workable solutions that arise directly from the American experience are all around us.

*

It is useful to recall, when considering what to do about inequality, that an uncomplicated hatred of caste, privilege, and perpetuities runs deep in the American grain. I was reminded of this a few months ago when I pulled from my shelf a forgotten classic on the subject, the 1939 book The Ending of Hereditary American Fortunes by Gustavus Myers, a journalist of the muckraking persuasion. The story begins appropriately enough in 1776, when Thomas Jefferson, then a delegate to the Virginia legislature, began the fight to abolish primogeniture and entail, the archaic laws that maintained enormous landed estates from one generation to the next. As the American revolution proceeded, state after state got on board with Jefferson, leveling our would-be aristocracy in an explosion of straight-up class warfare. Wrote one Jefferson biographer who is quoted by Myers:

“That distinguished class, whose existence as a social caste had been forever destroyed, reviled the destroyer [i.e., Jefferson] from this time forth with reckless animosity; and even to the second and third generation, the descendants of many of these patrician families vindictively cursed the statesman who had placed them on a level with the rest of their countrymen.”

As Gustavus Myers tells the story, there were victories and defeats in America’s long war against inherited privilege, until finally we get to the twentieth century and the estate tax, which make up the final chapters in the journalist’s account. Although it was established in 1916, the tax on inheritance was raised to deliberately confiscatory levels in 1935. The rationale then was as plain as it was in Jefferson’s day: Americans raised that tax because Americans detest aristocracy. “Great accumulations of wealth cannot be justified on the basis of personal and family security,” said President Roosevelt, on the occasion of demanding the massive increase in estate taxes. “In the last analysis such accumulations amount to the perpetuation of great and undesirable concentration of control in a relatively few individuals over the employment and welfare of many, many others.”

Check the IRS website today, however, and you will find that critical moment in tax history explained not as the expression of a leveling social policy but merely as a way to “generate needed funds.” Our contemporary debate over inequality is the same: a bland, technical matter of think tanks and academic conferences and debates among professional economists—just another problem for the experts to solve. It is as though we have completely forgotten the democratic passions that drove our ancestors.

Well, the right certainly hasn’t. Their policies may give us things like perpetual trusts—legal instruments designed to cement the privileges of the plutocracy many generations into the future—but the right’s rhetoric always goes back to sympathetic souls like Jeffersonian family farmers who are supposedly put at risk by the “death taxes” of those grasping government elites.

Thomas Piketty, for his part, understands the danger of restricting the great inequality debate to economists only, and he is also oddly well-informed about the history of the estate tax in the United States. But when he turns his attention to solutions, the best he can do is propose a “global wealth tax” that would probably ring the big-government alarm bell of even the staunchest liberals, and that Piketty himself admits to be a “utopian ideal” that will never happen.

This simply will not do. There are countless other options available to us before we have to turn to some unaccountable international IRS. As Gustavus Myers told us back in 1939, bringing the aristocracy to heel is entirely within our power and our tradition, and American statesmen from Jefferson to FDR (the man on the nickel, the man on the dime) have taken enthusiastic part in the business of leveling. There is nothing utopian about it at all. It is not an opium dream to imagine that Grover Norquist and company might one day be defeated or that the estate tax might be brought back in full Rooseveltian force; both are eminently possible, if only the Democrats would pull their heads out of their butts.

Turning to the problem of income inequality here in the United States, there is an even simpler solution, by which I mean a more realistic solution, a solution that builds on familiar American traditions,that works by empowering average people, that requires few economists or experts, that would involve a minimum of government interference, and that proceeds by expanding democracy and participation rather than by building some kind of distant and unapproachable global tax authority: Allow workers to organize. Let people have a say on the basic issues affecting their lives.

Piketty’s biggest blind spot is that he has virtually nothing to say about labor unions. He starts Chapter 1 of “Capital” with an anecdote about a bloody strike in South Africa and he returns to that same tragic episode at the very end of the book, but in between he addresses the matter almost not at all. Piketty talks a good game about democracy, but like other economists who have made inequality their subject, he prefers solutions that are handed down from the lofty heights of expertise.

The best remedy for inequality, however, is the one that comes up from below. Economists may not think very highly of those hardened people in SEIU t-shirts—some of them smoke too much, some are suspicious of “free trade,” some of them (gasp!) didn’t go to college—but the fact remains that in nearly every particular they represent the obvious and just about the only social force on the ground in America that might bend the inequality curve the other way.

It is not a coincidence that labor’s rise in the 1930s happened at the same time as the One Percent’s fall from grace, nor is it a coincidence that labor’s long decline has been almost a mirror image of the One Percent’s recovery of its nineteenth-century heaven. These things happened the way they did because labor’s most basic function is to turn the bright light of democratic scrutiny on economic power. When labor is strong, our composers write things like “Fanfare for the Common Man” and blue-collar workers buy cars and boats and snowmobiles. When labor is weak, we bow down before “job creators” and McMansions sprout like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

Consider the crazy imbalance in the current capital-labor split, which is the central thread holding together Piketty’s enormous book. Well, having strong unions that are able to negotiate effectively would remedy this situation almost by definition. That’s the idea of unions in the first place.

 

[jeninflorida]

Maybe you flawed obana people need to get off GB and send out your resumes!


Lazy fucking animals

 

[cjh]

Maybe you flawed obana people need to get off GB and send out your resumes!


Lazy fucking animals

That's why Vette has many posts?