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Oh that's cute. You linked me Sowell. Now try reading a big boy economist: https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496878948&sr=8-1&keywords=Capital+in+the+Twenty-First+Century
I know the math looks really hard but trust me, it won't be so bad.
>Which situation is better?
The one that doesn't have wildly unrealistic numbers making the comparison irrelevant.
>How is income inequality relevant to the overall health of the economy?
Pick up a book, man. Or read some economic theory that isn't from the editorial pages of the WSJ, FOXNews, or Breitbart.
>Compare the US economy with Europes economy.
Which one? There are 44, all with different fiscal policy.
> why are you in to crypto?
Because bitcoin is sovereign money and so long as it remains decentralized it will resist state monetary control. This mostly has to do with printing money, inflation, etc.
It is not a conflict to believe in bitcoin and also believe in taxation. Taxation is essential for civilized societies to exist.
Thomas Piketty has already proven that taxation and healthy regulation who's purpose is public benefit leads to the most healthy economies. Its corrupt politicians pandering to specialized industries, monopolizing industries and creating bad regulations/laws that favor these special interest groups that fuck society. I encourage you to read the book, he's an economist that worked for over a decade with big data scientists to gather empircal data to back up his proposals. There's a difference been economic theory and economic reality, Piketty engages in the reality part.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X
Not Indian perspective but You should definitely try Piketty's Capital in Twenty-first century.
What I still can't comprehend is that we already know of the negative impact of current capitalism on the human ecosystem -- long and short term.
I know it got a (ridiculous) bad rap for it's length, but the fact more people haven't read Piketty's Capital is criminal. It should be required reading for the US congressional summer camp.
20 pounds new on co.uk for the hardcover version. (Remember that amazon has excellent policies if you somehow get shipped a used version)
Just in case you don't like reading on pdf (I know I don't): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Age-Reason-Thomas-Paine/dp/1515090825/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1471357854&sr=8-4&keywords=age+of+reason 5 pounds
So I think there are a few important distinctions to be made first is illegal immigration vs legal immigration. Obviously legal immigrants enter the country legally and pay all required taxes, follow all the general rules, and most importantly can be counted and documented. Illegal immigrants often do the opposite of these.
The second distinction is immigration versus migrants/refugees. Immigrants are just normal people that move to a different country or location because they believe it will lead them to a better life. Migrants/refugees are people that have been forced out or have fled their country or location because of war/famine/or other hardships. Also they often do not have a specific place in mind to end up, just anywhere that will be better then the war torn country they are from.
I am an American so take that into my biases.
So making these distinction, I would say that I am very much in favor of legal immigration. First because it helps redistribute wealth from the rich to the poorer immigrating class. Essentially because there is a large influx of people that normally start on the poorest tier of society it makes inherited wealth much less influential on the economy. I cannot really do a good job of explaining this in a reddit post, but check out Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century if you want to learn more about immigrants socio-economic effects(really good book BTW).
Second reason, to counter your point about the growth mindset, is that in order to stop the global population from continuing to grow we must improve the quality of life, in particular make the child mortality rate decline, in poorer nations. Here is a really good video that explains this more. So if people are immigrating to a better country they are more likely to have 2 or fewer kids. Sure, I would love to flip a switch and make everyone have 1 child and become satisfied with their standard of living but that is not going to happen ever. Plus it feels wrong to say I get to live a higher quality of life and someone else cannot.
Thirdly, (this is where my biases come in) all 8 of my great grandparent immigrated to america, and 7/8 through Ellis Island. So I feel that it would be morally wrong to deny others an opportunity that has essentially given me the quality of life I have today. Also i think it is also morally wrong to say that I can live a certain way because of where i was born.
I am also in favor of housing migrant/refugees because they are normally fleeing death. Sure it can be a major inconvenience to countries but given the right resources and management it can actually be a great benefit to economies and help the all the current residents move up the economic ladder.
I am against illegal immigration because they are often a drain on the system because they do not pay taxes but still utilize many resources provided to the public. (ie police, fire, schools ect.) Also they make accurate data of demographics hard to obtain thus making it harder to plan. Furthermore, they often work in illegal conditions making less than minimum wage thus lowering the bar for everyone else. However most illegal immigrants immigrate illegally because they are unable to do so legally, whether it is the long waiting list for visas or the lack of required skills (ie H1B visa in the US). I am very much in favor of making these legal immigration processes easier, faster, and less restrictive so that we can actually have immigrants that pay taxes instead of going under the radar. Because let's face it they are going to get in one way or the other. Something similar to Ellis Island would be great. My G-Grandparents just came over on a boat with little to no ID and simply game their name and a few other details so that they could be tracked in the system. They were very much willing to pay taxes and be documented if they could stay and have the potential for a good job. I believe that most illegal immigrants today share that mentality but are forced to become illegal.
This is just my two cents, but what do I know. The Native Americans had a pretty good thing going until a bunch of immigrants fucked it up.
I cannot say that my views on immigration are heavily influenced by my green views but then again I say that about a lot of political issues and many of my friends have argued otherwise.
And talking about Haiti - this article about the millions France owes to your country - as many others, when human trade was forbidden and slaves freed, it's not them who got paid for what they did suffer but-their-masters... Thomas picketty is a renown economist who think France should give back when she has taken sooo much - and the " but they did build road" is BS, they did, to transport easily the stolen mats, not to help the locals. https://www.nouvelobs.com/idees/20220524.OBS58892/thomas-piketty-les-milliards-d-euros-que-la-france-devrait-rembourser-a-haiti.html and here the book https://www.amazon.fr/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X pretty interesting and easy to read. Talks about " What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, "Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again. A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century "reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today." There lol am done, have a good day ^^ !!
>Smaller countries with freer markets have net immigration.
Depends on the country, and we were specifically discussing migration of labor, not general privatization on this specific tangent.
>It was a model for meeting state demand.
In the short term, with no planning for long term because Hitler's long term plan was for Germany to become 'too big to fail'. They rapidly burnt through their warchest and raided resources because it's a poor strategy for the longterm.
It seems you've abandoned trying to equate nazis with socialism, but just in case you still internally believe in that nonesense, I recommend these articles:
"Betting on Hitler: The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany" , by Thomas Ferguson and Hans-Joachim Voth. Goes into detail how Hitler had been the choice of german capital, and jow they were lavishly rewarded for doing so.
http://www2.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/wpol/schumpeter/pdf/Voth.pdf
"Capital in the Twenty-First Century", by Thomas Piketty, which compares the share of national income that went to Capital in US & Germany, from 1929 to 1938.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X
"Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in the 1930s", by Germà Bell, which demonstrates how the third reich went against economic mainstreams in systematically privatizing swathes of publicly owned utilities.
https://coreyrobin.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/bel-2010-nazi-privatizations1.pdf
>LMAO where have I heard this before??
I have attempted to explain how each author has presented a false understanding of Marxian value or the nature of social production. I have given in Marx's own words and my own attempts to explain these concepts. If you are struggling I am happy to try again. Dusty's essay in particular is just mind-boggling in terms of how closely it mirrors Marx and then seems to ascribe to him all of this 'intrinsic axiologist' stuff that is literally contradictory to the Marxist conception of the human species.
>Except there is no real difference in the real world.
Yes there is. Water may have a multitude of use values. It may have a multitude of exchange values in relation to any given object. It may be present in such a material condition as to hold no value whatsoever, it may be present in such a material condition as to be the most valuable thing an individual could possibly want. A man dying of dehydration in the desert does not care for water's utility as a solvent or cleaning agent. A man drowning in the sea is not currently looking for a refreshing spigot to drink from. No one object holds some singular intrinsic or objective use value, this is a socially and subjectively derived phenomena. No one object holds some kind of set exchange ratio with another object outside of a given relational context which ultimately stems back to the material conditions within which the exchange takes place. My knowing how much a bottle of water sells for in central London relative to a bottle of Diet Coke does not tell me how much water I am going to need to turn an area of dirt into mud for the making of bricks. These values are distinct and separate.
>This didn't clarify anything.
Well again, see above. You have an appallingly bad understanding of the Marxian conception of society, which is why you are repeatedly presenting these quite shoddy arguments and then pretending like no one is giving you any kind of answers. The answer lies deeper than you want to look because you have not challenged some very basic presuppositions about our understanding of the material world around us. Like I said, I did not want to address what you said so much as critique the places you are clearly getting these ideas from. If you want to raise where you are struggling to understand or feel I am not making sense, I am more than happy to make another attempt in a more specific and detailed manner.
>We hate Mondays because we don't like working.
Except people will spend hundreds of hours working on whatever hobby satisfies them? Labour is not simply the act of going to work for your employer or engaging in market activity. As per Dusty's essay that you shared to support your position -
>Value-judgements and actions on them do not spring from a vacuum and can not float away and apart from the axiological lattice binding all values as instruments to a standard or ultimate value...It is the constant conditionality of the form of life that gives rise to the need of values and to the need of acting to secure and keep things instrumental to an organism’s preservation.
So when we say forced to work, as the video makes clear, we are talking about being forced to work in a manner in which we are unfree to determine how to allocate our own labour, rather than simply the need to labour in and of itself. In fact the need to labour freely is, again as mentioned in the video, part of Man's intrinsic nature without which we become alienated from both ourself and the society in which we exist. We hate Monday's during the work-week because it signals a resumption in which the majority of our time is spent working in a manner in which we have little to no control over.
>No one is forced to work for a capitalist.
Yes, you are free to go to the woods and build a mud-hut and die of starvation a few months down the line. Well, not really because most land is privately owned, but in principle. The reality is of course that we are social beings and we are talking about social labour. Your ability to engage in social labour under Capitalism without engaging with the market is... not really possible. Hence you are always going to be reliant on some form of Capitalist or Capital in order for your labour to actually meet your basic needs for survival, let alone the needs required to enjoy a social existence.
>Capital also does not concentrate or accumulate into fewer hands.
There's a big door-stopper book published on just this not that long ago. It is worth a read, but it can be a bit exhausting! The accumulation of Capital historically since the 18th century has only been curtailed by an anomalous period of political restraint on the activity of Capital during the mid-20th Century.
>They are not "deprived" of anything to not get paid.
I mean... Yes you are? Time? Freedom to be doing things with that time? The money assuming you have signed a contract judging your labour-time to hold a certain agreed value between yourself and your employer and are not some slave-labouring illegal immigrant?
>Your life is not owned by someone else.
Well, yeah it is. Again back to the last example. Yes theoretically I can go out and make myself a farmstead and live off the wheat I grow. In reality there isn't the public land to be doing that, and realistically you're not going to get those materials to even do that without first exchanging your labour-time for money.
>Bosses are not unaccountable. Bosses do not control more of your life than dictators.
I would have preferred he used Capitalist or Employer over bosses. I chalk it down to English as a second/third language. But where was he incorrect? What dictator on the planet could hope to have 8 to 12 hours a day in the lives of each of their subjects in which they control the minutiae of their actions, dictate when they are free to take breaks for essential biological functions? What do you mean bosses cannot force you to work for free, you've never done unpaid overtime?
>I'm 3 minutes in...
Good to know one side can sit through three long-form essays of absolute trash and come out with 10,000+ words of argument, while t'other feels more knowledgeable despite being unable to sit through 3 minutes of a video before getting too emotional to continue :) If its trash then you can put together the same kind of argument against on a point-by-point basis as I have tried to do and we can discuss onwards from there.
Nope, it is this book:
> established by whom?
Academics. You know, real socioeconomic studies with demonstrated empirical data?
Seriously dude, spend 5 minutes on google and get educated. Don't rely upon people on reddit to feed you everything you need to know. Get motivated and do your homework.
Here's the best starting place -
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X
Yeah, Piketty is "complete shit"!!! If you believe that you're clueless. https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X
Nothings holding you back from reading.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X
Its not something you can summarize on reddit. Read the book and you'll be better educated for it.
It's not like it did receive high praise from top economists. /s
> It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year―and maybe of the decade. Piketty, arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we’re on the way back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent.
(Paul Krugman New York Times 2014-03-23)
> An extraordinary sweep of history backed by remarkably detailed data and analysis… Piketty’s economic analysis and historical proofs are breathtaking.
(Robert B. Reich The Guardian 2014-04-06)
> Piketty’s treatment of inequality is perfectly matched to its moment. Like [Paul] Kennedy a generation ago, Piketty has emerged as a rock star of the policy-intellectual world… But make no mistake, his work richly deserves all the attention it is receiving… Piketty, in collaboration with others, has spent more than a decade mining huge quantities of data spanning centuries and many countries to document, absolutely conclusively, that the share of income and wealth going to those at the very top―the top 1 percent, .1 percent, and .01 percent of the population―has risen sharply over the last generation, marking a return to a pattern that prevailed before World War I… Even if none of Piketty’s theories stands up, the establishment of this fact has transformed political discourse and is a Nobel Prize–worthy contribution. Piketty provides an elegant framework for making sense of a complex reality. His theorizing is bold and simple and hugely important if correct. In every area of thought, progress comes from simple abstract paradigms that guide later thinking, such as Darwin’s idea of evolution, Ricardo’s notion of comparative advantage, or Keynes’s conception of aggregate demand. Whether or not his idea ultimately proves out, Piketty makes a major contribution by putting forth a theory of natural economic evolution under capitalism… Piketty writes in the epic philosophical mode of Keynes, Marx, or Adam Smith… By focusing attention on what has happened to a fortunate few among us, and by opening up for debate issues around the long-run functioning of our market system, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a profoundly important contribution.
(Lawrence H. Summers Democracy 2014-05-01)
> It is easy to overlook the achievement of Thomas Piketty’s new bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, as a work of economic history. Debates about the book have largely focused on inequality. But on any given page, there is data about the total level of private capital and the percentage of income paid out to labor in England from the 1700s onward, something that would have been impossible for early researchers… Capital reflects decades of work in collecting national income data across centuries, countries, and class, done in partnership with academics across the globe. But beyond its remarkably rich and instructive history, the book’s deep and novel understanding of inequality in the economy has drawn well-deserved attention… [Piketty’s] engagement with the rest of the social sciences also distinguishes him from most economists… The book is filled with brilliant moments… The book is an attempt to ground the debate over inequality in strong empirical data, put the question of distribution back into economics, and open the debate not just to the entirety of the social sciences but to people themselves.
(Mike Konczal Boston Review 2014-04-29)
> [A] magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality… The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties… Piketty has written a truly superb book. It’s a work that melds grand historical sweep―when was the last time you heard an economist invoke Jane Austen and Balzac?―with painstaking data analysis… A tour de force of economic modeling, an approach that integrates the analysis of economic growth with that of the distribution of income and wealth. This is a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics… Capital in the Twenty-First Century is, as I hope I’ve made clear, an awesome work. At a time when the concentration of wealth and income in the hands of a few has resurfaced as a central political issue, Piketty doesn’t just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame… Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes it clear that public policy can make an enormous difference, that even if the underlying economic conditions point toward extreme inequality, what Piketty calls ‘a drift toward oligarchy’ can be halted and even reversed if the body politic so chooses… His masterwork… Sometimes it seems as if a substantial part of our political class is actively working to restore Piketty’s patrimonial capitalism. And if you look at the sources of political donations, many of which come from wealthy families, this possibility is a lot less outlandish than it might seem… [A] masterly diagnosis of where we are and where we’re heading… Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an extremely important book on all fronts. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to.
(Paul Krugman New York Review of Books 2014-05-08)
> French economist Thomas Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book. Open-minded readers will surely find themselves unable to ignore the evidence and arguments he has brought to bear… In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy… The result is a work of vast historical scope, grounded in exhaustive fact-based research, and suffused with literary references. It is both normative and political. Piketty rejects theorizing ungrounded in data… The book is built on a 15-year program of empirical research conducted in conjunction with other scholars. Its result is a transformation of what we know about the evolution of income and wealth (which he calls capital) over the past three centuries in leading high-income countries. That makes it an enthralling economic, social and political history.
(Martin Wolf Financial Times 2014-04-15)
And more: http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/
I haven't read it so I don't know if it applies but I've heard good things about Capital in the 21st Century.
To improve their market positions by gaining favorable legislation that is most often in direct opposition to the welfare of the common good.
Try reading this to gain a better understanding of how the world works today.
LOL do you not know how to read? I didn't say "IN 1720s France," I said "SINCE 1720s in France," meaning there's enough data points to go back 3 centuries, making the resulting calculation of 4-5% that much more accurate. Go to r/research and learn something about modern quantitative methods.
EDIT: Source.
>All you are exhibiting is jealously and resentment
Right...I'm totally jealous of your condescending ass.
It's not jealousy to point out that this country is going to shit, assuming it wasn't in a state of shit to begin with. I swear to god, it's like Americans are incapable of acknowledging that people in this country are getting massively screwed over. Why? What is so fucking hard to understand about this shit?
Jesus Christ, we're the only country in the world that has this bullshit attitude about poverty. If you go to Spain or wherever they put the blame where it needs to go, on the corrupt government and dysfunctional system.
But Americans? No no...we're great! They're just starving because they're lazy!
Fuck this whole culture. Optimism is a delusion in this situation. There is fucking nothing to be optimistic about. That's not resentment, that's just paying attention. In 50 years when everyone is either unemployed, or working some shit service industry job while wealth has become more and more concentrated in the hands of a powerful few, you'll see what I mean.
Hell, here's a book about it.
You can tell me to get over myself all you want, but the fact that people who think like you do vote in massive numbers kinda makes it hard for me to not give a shit, which believe me, I would love to be able to do.
Frankly, people can do what they want with their money. But blaming some vague epidemic of "irresponsibility and laziness" is fucking stupid, dehumanizing, and flat out wrong.
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