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anonumos posted:That is not the alternative. A real alternative is that we spend money where its needed, maintaining existing infrastructure, investing in new infrastructure, and also preserving culturally important landmarks. Right now, we don't really do any of this unless some jerk can make 10 points on it annually. That would be the mystical "middle ground" I was referring to, yes. Unfortunately it will remain a pipe dream as long as private interests have undue influence on public capital expenditures via lobbying or outright graft, a problem particularly prevalent in Canada.
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May 9, 2014 03:02
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anonumos posted:That is not the alternative. A real alternative is that we spend money where its needed, maintaining existing infrastructure, investing in new infrastructure, and also preserving culturally important landmarks. Right now, we don't really do any of this unless some jerk can make 10 points on it annually. The problem is a fully depreciated asset that is still functional and that still makes money has one hell of a return. I've seen businesses purchase assets for scrap, literally purchasing equip that is being sold as scrap and then operating it for decades. Then when the scrap purchased equipment is actually non-functional and cannot be repaired they sell to someone in Thailand or Indonesia, where another couple decades of use will somehow get squeezed out of it. I could get very specific into examples, but I like my job so I can't. Some capital is nominally worth nothing or basically nothing (the value of the scrap metal) and is still very functional as capital, hell it might even have a negative value if the costs of getting rid of it are high. Until it falls apart, where depending on what it is it might kill people. This isn't necessarily a business or a government thing either, both do this. The opposite thing also happens. Some businesses carry what should be scrap equipment on their books at the original cost, when I see that it usually seems like a worse situation actually.
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May 9, 2014 17:15
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Oh cool there's a thread for this book. Here's a panel discussion with Piketty, Krugman, Stiglitz, and a couple other economists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heOVJM2JZxI edit: oh this was mentioned in the OP. Well here's the Youtube link
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May 9, 2014 23:27
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Rime posted:the Canadian hell where we demolish and shoddily rebuild any infrastructure over fifty years old, regardless of cost, and are losing heritage buildings at a horrific pace to be replaced by generic condominium developments. It amazed me when I went to Portland and the court house fence had a sign saying not to lean on it because it was put up in 1820. What the hell are you talking about? Is this a whacky east coast thing? Infrastructure replacements happens when engineers say it's unsafe, which is as it should be. We don't wait nearly as long as the States for things to fail, and again, that is almost certainly a new thing. The condo madness is completely separate from any of this (c.f. Canada Housing Bubble Thread) and the conspicuous lack of heritage buildings is for the most part to be found in cities that just haven't been proper cities for all that long, like Vancouver...
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May 12, 2014 21:48
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I'm talking about things like demolishing the Port Mann when it had years of service life left and replacing it with a shoddily constructed Ego bridge that funneled money into PPP pockets.
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May 12, 2014 21:55
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Looks like the old bridge was just 4 lanes and they kinda squeezed in a 5th? I don't think it's really unreasonable for that to be replaced with a much wider bridge that can fit things like shoulders honestly.
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May 12, 2014 22:01
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Rime posted:I'm talking about things like demolishing the Port Mann when it had years of service life left and replacing it with a shoddily constructed Ego bridge that funneled money into PPP pockets. I put it to you that I hate the Port Mann more than anyone else on earth (except maybe that guy that almost got impaled by ice sheets) , but the bridge that was there absolutely 100% needed replacement before it killed anyone. We also absolutely 100% didn't need to replace it with the widest most expensive bridge in Canada either, but we did have to build something.
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May 12, 2014 22:11
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I've yet to see a convincing engineering report that the bridge required replacement for reasons other than congestion from commuters in the valley. Especially when compared to the Patulo which is so much older that it was made of wood and partially burnt down in '09, but is still standing and being refused the funds to replace it.
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May 12, 2014 22:28
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Congestion is a major fuckin' reason to replace a highway bridge.
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May 12, 2014 22:30
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Why don't you just add new ones? My hometown just keeps adding bridges to launder money or whatever, through I am sure this makes the river worst, I am ignorant on the how much, so this isn't advise or anything. vvv My apologies, I thought they demolished the old one to justify a new one. If it was dangerous, you should defintely replace it. Femur fucked around with this message at 04:11 on May 13, 2014 |
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May 13, 2014 01:10
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Femur posted:Why don't you just add new ones? My hometown just keeps adding bridges to launder money or whatever, through I am sure this makes the river worst, I am ignorant on the how much, so this isn't advise or anything. They did add a new one, then they shut down and demolished the old one because it turned out to be deteriorating too much.
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May 13, 2014 01:50
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You know what, I could have sworn that there were some pretty serious engineering concerns with the old Port Mann (1964) but I can't actually find any evidence of this - soooo am I actually quite wrong? Was the old bridge fine and mostly needed replacement due to congestion? Because I didn't think I could hate that drat bridge any more than I currently do, but there we go... Having said that, nothing about the new Port Mann, colossal waste of money that it is one way or another, is particularly endemic to how Canada deals with infrastructure replacement. It's far more of a BCLP / Kevin Falcon thing than it is a Canada thing.
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May 13, 2014 17:39
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I'm hoping one of you can comment on this: Piketty findings undercut by errors. Hers' the article in HuffingtonPost that led me to the story and it says that the Financial Times is behind a pay wall but the story above opened for me. Are these fatal errors or just the author being a pedantic royalist rear end in a top hat and declaring that since he found something wrong, the whole body of work needs to be ignored. I feel like its the later, given the author's own characterization of the errors he found. I haven't read the book yet; I have it and will read it regardless but, I'd like the opinion of people that have on this breaking news. radical meme fucked around with this message at 21:58 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 21:54
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Here's Vox's take on it.
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May 23, 2014 22:02
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radical meme posted:I'm hoping one of you can comment on this: Piketty findings undercut by errors. It looks like there might be a more detailed analysis of what and where the errors actually are behind they paywall, I dunno. One thing that really irked me about the article: quote:For example, once the FT cleaned up and simplified the data, the European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970. An independent specialist in measuring inequality shared the FT’s concerns. Then show us your chart? Or could you at least be quantitative? Am I supposed to just take FT's claims at face value without them showing me their "fixed" version of Piketty's inequality curve, and maybe label the points on said curve where you though the data was incorrect? I'm guessing FT has a more detailed analysis behind their paywall but that article you linked is piss-poor from an academic standpoint. baw posted:Here's Vox's take on it. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 22:10 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 22:07
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Whew, that's a relief. Future was lookin' pretty bleak there for a minute, but crushing inequality, I can handle.
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May 24, 2014 03:25
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While we are speaking about increasing gini coefficent and asset class manipulation/inflation I felt this was a really good piece of investigative journalism which should be shared. http://www.zerohedge.com/node/488930 For those in the know, the same stop-hunting algo that was pushing the Bitcoin to 1,000.00 was the same stop-trade that Barclays was just found to have engaged in while manipulating the gold fix in London.
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May 27, 2014 05:35
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Nate Silver has a "on the one hand, but on the other hand" style analysis of the controversy.
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May 27, 2014 19:14
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Paper With Lines posted:Nate Silver has a "on the one hand, but on the other hand" style analysis of the controversy. Silver's use of footnotes is one of the more pointed criticisms I've read. This is some commentary by James Hamilton at Econbrowser. tldr - Hamilton believes concerns over data errors are a bit overblown. However, he notes that in Piketty's 2nd law of capitalism B = s/g (the capital/income ratio is equal to the net savings rate divided by the growth rate of the economy) the capital to income ratio grows to infinity as g approaches zero and that that's a really weird result which should make us question whether some of Piketty's assumptions are reasonable with respect to an economy with very low growth.
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May 27, 2014 20:06
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The reaction to Piketty's book is kind of strange to me. Are conservatives and the right actually engaging with it? Like maybe only on a superficial, caricature level; but still actually engaging with a critique of capitalism? Maybe they regard an actual attack on capital as a bit of a breath of fresh air, and prefer it to their decades of battling imaginary enemies and left boogeymen? I thought they strictly agreed to fight only straw men when it came to actual nuts and bolts discussion of these issues.
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May 27, 2014 21:23
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agarjogger posted:The reaction to Piketty's book is kind of strange to me. Are conservatives and the right actually engaging with it? Like maybe only on a superficial, caricature level; but still actually engaging with a critique of capitalism? Maybe they regard an actual attack on capital as a bit of a breath of fresh air, and prefer it to their decades of battling imaginary enemies and left boogeymen? I thought they strictly agreed to fight only straw men when it came to actual nuts and bolts discussion of these issues. What do you think of the criticisms that have been referenced ITT?
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May 27, 2014 21:54
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wateroverfire posted:What do you think of the criticisms that have been referenced ITT? I don't mean the forum conservatives. There are of course criticisms to be had of any work, and I'm glad you are here to make them and I'm sure some of your points are valid. But Foxnation is discussing a French author and his rather dry economic tome, and I don't really get why. They barely ever mention Krugman, one who would be one of their most influential foils, except for McConnell to allude to his fagginess and ask crowds if they'd rather hang out with him or Rush Limbaugh. I'm curious as to how it was decided that the right would defend themselves against this particular affront, when their worldview does not require that they even acknowledge the existence of a world outside capitalism.
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May 27, 2014 22:00
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wateroverfire posted:What do you think of the criticisms that have been referenced ITT? They universally focus on the easy target of either his vague "solutions" or minor and irrelevant inconsistencies in how he determined inequality, while skirting around the fact that his empirical evidence is unshakable. The value in this book isn't in how to fix the problem, or how exactly we got here, it's in the fact that Piketty has performed possibly the largest empirical data collection on the topic ever. The fact that his data unequivocally supports his basic thesis is just the icing on the cake. Pretty much every rebuttal I've read, especially the FT one from yesterday, boils down to "Hah, I discovered this minor issue with a formula, clearly this disproves the entire body of your work and means that everything is fine!" 
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May 27, 2014 22:02
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Rime posted:They universally focus on the easy target of either his vague "solutions" or minor and irrelevant inconsistencies in how he determined inequality, while skirting around the fact that his empirical evidence is unshakable. Which rebuttals do you think are merely quibbles? There are a number in this thread besides the FT article linked because they're serious, and point to flaws in Piketty's work that deserve to be debated. For instance, the one referenced in this post that works through the numbers and suggests the dire projections people are making based on Piketty's work require impossible assumptions. Or the one by Hamilton just a couple of posts ago. Or the critiques that Piketty conflates valuation growth with capital growth and that using the one to instrument for the other causes problems. Or the critiques of the assumption of a stable long term return on capital. Maybe they're all ultimately wrong, and Piketty's data is still interesting if they aren't, but dismissing them out of hand seems pretty shallow. edit: For instance, if a future scenario involves predicting a capital/income ratio that requires a 40%+ percent net long term savings rate to sustain given your assumptions it's probably not a well constructed scenario. That's not a quibble. wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 22:30 on May 27, 2014 |
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May 27, 2014 22:25
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Piketty responds at length: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014TechnicalAppendixResponsetoFT.pdf Summary here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/upshot/thomas-piketty-responds-to-criticism-of-his-data.html?_r=0 Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:35 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 19:32
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Seems pretty compelling to me. Piketty posted:What it find somewhat puzzling in this controversy is the following: (i) the FT journalists evidently did not read carefully the technical research papers and excel files that I have put on-line; (ii) whatever adjustment one makes to correct for differential mortality (and I certainly agree that there are uncertainties left regarding this complex and important issue), it should be clear to everyone that this really has a relatively small impact on the long-run trends in wealth inequality. This looks a little bit like criticism for the sake of criticism.  Also: I'm not really surprised that a newspaper with "finance" in their name is flailing to find anything to throw at the guy who threatens to undermine the basis of that industry.
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May 29, 2014 20:06
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Piketty responds at length: It seems this French academic is just now beginning to realize the nature of the beast he's awoken. Piketty posted:I welcome all criticisms and I am very happy that this book contributes to stimulate a
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May 29, 2014 20:11
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Lancelot posted:Seems pretty compelling to me. Yeah, these kinds of debates follow a pattern. First raise enough chaff that a talking head on Fox can say "well, some people call his numbers into question!" The next step is they'll try to discredit him personally somehow.
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May 29, 2014 20:17
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LOL we have another "climate change" "debate" here, don't we? Maybe we'll innovate our way out of this one too! Someone will probably invent some kind of machine that can bring private capital under public, democratic control.
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May 29, 2014 23:30
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Pope Fabulous XXIV posted:LOL we have another "climate change" "debate" here, don't we? Maybe we'll innovate our way out of this one too! Someone will probably invent some kind of machine that can bring private capital under public, democratic control. there's an app for that.
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May 29, 2014 23:33
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I like what I am seeing in this thread. Theres way too much bullshit outside
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May 29, 2014 23:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, these kinds of debates follow a pattern. First raise enough chaff that a talking head on Fox can say "well, some people call his numbers into question!" The next step is they'll try to discredit him personally somehow. They already have, allegedly he's a woman-beater.
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May 30, 2014 00:27
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Jacobin posted:I like what I am seeing in this thread. It's crazy how income inequality is actually being so widely talked about now, whereas I think back 3-5 years ago and it was hardly in the forefront of anyone's mind and certainly not commonplace in daily conversation. People talk a lot of poo poo about OWS being just an "awareness raising" campaign, but I think this is one of their major triumph and I don't think people would be prepared to do anything about income inequality without their consciousness being raised to that extent. Just recently in a relatively beneign meeting at my ESHQ software company, we were discussing major ESHQ disasters of recent years. The Bangladesh factory collapse came up. The woman leading the meeting trotted out the old saw of "well, the clothes being manufactured there were sold cheaply and if we want better regulations, consumers have to be prepared to pay more." I pointed out out that the executives of Jockey and Wal-Mart and Loblaws could take a hit in their pay if it came down to choosing safer contractors before prices rose. Instead of silencing the room, a sales manager (probably the person who'd be least likely to agree with that commie view) agreed and said the stockholders should pay for that as well. He even made a joke about how "controversial" that position was. It was really weird and refreshing and I don't think the average person would have had that awareness even a few years ago.
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May 30, 2014 16:00
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The difference of paying factory workers 40 bucks a month to sixty or 100 or 200 or 500 would not impart any significant price change to consumers in the West but would be very big change for factory workers. Though the Bangladesh situation is even worse than just 'lovely factory collapses' as the building was against code and was shut down by the government due to safety concerns and regulations. The owner was a local political bigshot though and didnt care and just forced workers back in. That type of cartoonishly evil behavior doesnt really effect the price of your mom jeans at Wal-Mart so saying this is somehow a trade-off that consumers are the one guilty for is a bullshit cop out.
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May 30, 2014 17:04
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peter banana posted:It's crazy how income inequality is actually being so widely talked about now, whereas I think back 3-5 years ago and it was hardly in the forefront of anyone's mind and certainly not commonplace in daily conversation. People talk a lot of poo poo about OWS being just an "awareness raising" campaign, but I think this is one of their major triumph This is loving bullshit because it was part of the 2008 presidential and congressional campaigns in a big way, 3 years before occupy. The only triumph of der OWS was confusing people into thinking they did anything.
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May 30, 2014 23:02
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Nintendo Kid posted:This is loving bullshit because it was part of the 2008 presidential and congressional campaigns in a big way, 3 years before occupy. Not that this is necessarily indicative of anything, but the first big spike of Google searches for "income inequality" in the US corresponds to November 2011, two months after OWS began. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22income+inequality%22&geo=US
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May 30, 2014 23:33
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Nintendo Kid posted:This is loving bullshit because it was part of the 2008 presidential and congressional campaigns in a big way, 3 years before occupy. That's not entirely true, actually. There was a massive spike in attention to the growing income inequality in America, OWS and their bros set up a lot of things to help the extremely poor in some areas, and it pissed off/frightened a lot of powerful and influential people. It also faced a total media blackout and was important enough that the CIA (or FBI, I forget which) deliberately infiltrated it and put forth a gently caress ton of effort putting it down. OWS probably would have been more successful if there wasn't such a strong effort put into shutting it down. It spread like wildfire and got attacked.
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May 30, 2014 23:43
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Nintendo Kid posted:This is loving bullshit because it was part of the 2008 presidential and congressional campaigns in a big way, 3 years before occupy. Hell go back one election further and you'd find John Edwards and his "Two Americas" stump speech.
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May 30, 2014 23:47
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ToxicSlurpee posted:That's not entirely true, actually. There was a massive spike in attention to the growing income inequality in America, OWS and their bros set up a lot of things to help the extremely poor in some areas, and it pissed off/frightened a lot of powerful and influential people. It also faced a total media blackout and was important enough that the CIA (or FBI, I forget which) deliberately infiltrated it and put forth a gently caress ton of effort putting it down. Which highlights exactly why income inequality will remain a growing and unaddressed problem with no end in sight, regardless of how many Piketty's come out of the woodwork.
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May 30, 2014 23:50
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Gee, I wonder if there was some cataclysmic economic event over the past decade that might have gotten people keen on talking about income inequality. If the OWS protestors spent as much time on actual advocacy as they do taking credit for marketing the phrase "income inequality" to the public, the movement would probably still be around.
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May 30, 2014 23:52
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