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shrike82 posted:I don't know. One scenario seems more plausible and less ahistorical than the other (i.e., the rich get away).
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Apr 24, 2014 08:29
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OwlBot 2000 posted:You'd basically need a revolution to institute anything like a 80% wealth tax, and whatever the rich had left would just be used to lobby the tax out of existence within ten years. However good his economic analysis that seems like a politically ignorant answer.
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Apr 24, 2014 11:21
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WSJ review posted:Mr. Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at "$500,000 or $1 million. It was an income rather than wealth tax, my apology.
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Apr 24, 2014 15:58
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Interesting, proportionately that's higher than what the 80% bracket kicked in at back in the 50s (adjusting for inflation).
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Apr 24, 2014 16:01
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Install Windows posted:Interesting, proportionately that's higher than what the 80% bracket kicked in at back in the 50s (adjusting for inflation). Don't worry, it will still be denounced as Bolshevism. 
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Apr 24, 2014 16:24
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So is it on payroll, capital gains, carried interest ...?
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Apr 24, 2014 16:35
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Install Windows posted:Interesting, proportionately that's higher than what the 80% bracket kicked in at back in the 50s (adjusting for inflation). In the UK and in the US, tax rates once approached those levels and decent social services. And then they didn't. Given that we are where we are right now, it doesn't seem like taxation and regulation alone get the job done.
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Apr 24, 2014 16:55
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OwlBot 2000 posted:In the UK and in the US, tax rates once approached those levels and decent social services. And then they didn't. Given that we are where we are right now, it doesn't seem like taxation and regulation alone get the job done. Well they can, if they are not rolled back after people get scared of hippy/black riots and vote for authoritarian shitheels. Another question: were effective rates higher for high earners in the 50-80's? I know that effective rates for the economy as a whole weren't terribly different than they are now, but I've never seen it broken down by income level.
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Apr 24, 2014 17:04
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menino posted:Well they can, if they are not rolled back after people get scared of hippy/black riots and vote for authoritarian shitheels. The highest marginal rate was around 94% in 1944, which kicked in past $200,000 in income. It stayed in the 90% range until the Vietnam War Era tax reductions. I'm not sure what the effective total rate works out to for various incomes in that era, or the extent to which capital gains rates and other end-arounds were used by the wealthy to reduce their tax burdens.
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Apr 24, 2014 17:13
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OwlBot 2000 posted:In the UK and in the US, tax rates once approached those levels and decent social services. And then they didn't. Given that we are where we are right now, it doesn't seem like taxation and regulation alone get the job done. Tax rates didn't "approach" those levels, they legally were those levels for a decent time period.
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Apr 24, 2014 17:20
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And do you see the 1970s move toward privatization, outsourcing/NAFTA, increased lobbying against regulation (especially in banking), and neoliberalism as things that just happened or as a result of capital desperately clawing back every bit of profit they lost to higher wages, social programs and labor rights? If it's the latter just reintroducing higher taxation and welfare spending won't result in any different outcome. I don't want to believe that Piketty thinks we can a.) introduce such a policy in the first place, and b.) maintain it for more than a decade or two. He simply must be smarter than that.
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Apr 24, 2014 20:01
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OwlBot 2000 posted:I don't want to believe that Piketty thinks we can a.) introduce such a policy in the first place, and b.) maintain it for more than a decade or two. He simply must be smarter than that. From what Krugman and Robert Reich have said Piketty thinks his policy proposals are basically impossible.
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Apr 24, 2014 20:17
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That is interesting that he doesn't believe there's a resolution to this problem. So maybe Piketty really is secretly socialist, despite his (probably obligatory) insistence to the contrary?  Because "well, Ceaucescu was bad" seems like a cartoonish reason to support capitalism, all in all.I'm obviously not being serious here. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 20:26
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:From what Krugman and Robert Reich have said Piketty thinks his policy proposals are basically impossible. Oh man, it's pretty funny and sad that policy proposals that would make the rich a little less rich and make everyone else a lot better off are impossible. I guess people enjoy being slaves as long as you can obfuscate their situation to a certain extent.... oh, hey, dancing with the stars is on! Excuse me...
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Apr 24, 2014 20:51
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Dystram posted:Oh man, it's pretty funny and sad that policy proposals that would make the rich a little less rich and make everyone else a lot better off are impossible. I guess people enjoy being slaves as long as you can obfuscate their situation to a certain extent.... oh, hey, dancing with the stars is on! Excuse me... It's less about that, than that idea that capitalist production and relentless accumulation of profit is at odds with and will inevitably undermine and neuter regulation, taxation, and social services, so any changes to the status of the rich are hard to accomplish (who owns congress and the media?) and impossible to preserve. I think Piketty realizes that at some level, which may be the reason he devoted less of his book to his proposed solution (which he doesn't really believe in) and more to making as the argument that we need to start looking at capital vs. labor again in a very serious way. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 20:57
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Thomas J. posted:Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of nineteen years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right. It may be said, that the succeeding generation exercising, in fact, the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law had been expressly limited to nineteen years only. In the first place, this objection admits the right, in proposing an equivalent. But the power of repeal is not an equivalent. It might be, indeed, if every form of government were so perfectly contrived, that the will of the majority could always be obtained, fairly and without impediment. But this is true of no form. The people cannot assemble themselves; their representation is unequal and vicious. Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils, bribery corrupts them, personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents; and other impediments arise, so as to prove to every practical man, that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal. Seems relevant.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:00
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OwlBot 2000 posted:That is interesting that he doesn't believe there's a resolution to this problem. So maybe Piketty really is secretly socialist, despite his (probably obligatory) insistence to the contrary? Picketty is just popularizing really old welfare economics arguments. The second fundamental law of welfare economics is: "out of all possible Pareto-efficient outcomes, one can achieve any particular one by enacting a lump-sum wealth redistribution and then letting the market take over." So theoretically, we can simply tax inheritances (this is a fairly efficient form of taxation as people will always die), redistribute wealth, and we can still achieve the current set of economic outcomes within the capitalist system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics
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Apr 24, 2014 23:40
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What sort of foul magic did Picketty use to get all of these economists to get on board with him? From what I read in this thread already and from his reviews, this is borderline Marxist.
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Apr 25, 2014 00:08
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Job Truniht posted:What sort of foul magic did Picketty use to get all of these economists to get on board with him? From what I read in this thread already and from his reviews, this is borderline Marxist. Breaking news, economists who have not been totally brainwashed by the Chicago school (or driven mad by the impossible geometries of von Mises and now spend their time trying to awaken unspeakable alien gods) are open to economics arguments for all sorts of things! Admittedly, "all of these economists" are not particularly likely to be the ones making government policy, but it's not exactly a homogeneous field.
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Apr 25, 2014 00:21
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Job Truniht posted:What sort of foul magic did Picketty use to get all of these economists to get on board with him? From what I read in this thread already and from his reviews, this is borderline Marxist.
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Apr 25, 2014 00:28
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Nessus posted:Economics is not an exclusively right-wing discipline at all, it's just that the right wing economicists often get bushels of cash and news show spots, while the left wing ones merely end up teaching. No left wing economists go do something else with their lives, the right wing ones that couldn't fully hack it, teach.
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Apr 25, 2014 01:02
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Job Truniht posted:What sort of foul magic did Picketty use to get all of these economists to get on board with him? From what I read in this thread already and from his reviews, this is borderline Marxist. From what I've been able to glean from reviews the argument denounces both Marxism and neo-liberal economics, saying that outright Marxist economics have been disproven by history. Obviously Picketty uses Marx's style and the title is plainly a reference to Marx, but he never actually goes full-Marx that I'm aware of. I don't know where precisely it would fit on the political spectrum to be honest, since parts of it are reminiscent of classical socialism but other parts seem supportive of a more Keynesian "the state has the right to and should intervene to correct the excesses of capitalism but working within capitalism is fine" sort of centrism.
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Apr 25, 2014 03:49
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Job Truniht posted:What sort of foul magic did Picketty use to get all of these economists to get on board with him? From what I read in this thread already and from his reviews, this is borderline Marxist. Data, research, and logical argument? From everything I can tell all these economists are agreeing with him because it looks to all these economists like he's provably correct.
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Apr 25, 2014 05:36
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Raskolnikov38 posted:No left wing economists go do something else with their lives, the right wing ones that couldn't fully hack it, teach. I knew plenty of left wing economists at Arizona State University. One of them is pretty much directly and personally responsible for me discarding all my economics reservations about immigration, for example.
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Apr 25, 2014 06:03
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It is very possible to acknowledge Marxian economics (which this book generally seems to do) while avoiding the solution brought about by Marxism, the move to socialism then communism. However, he said himself that he doesn't even really believe his solution could happen at the same time which sort of leaves a giant question mark as far as solutions go. This sort of undermines his argument against considering Marxism in the first place. Anyway it is probably pretty useful for giving what is ultimately a soft-Marxian analysis to most a liberal audience.
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Apr 25, 2014 08:20
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Ardennes posted:
How is Piketty Marxian? His theories don't seem any more inherently Marxian than things I've seen from relatively mainstream economists like Reich or Krugman (or for that matter Keynes); there doesn't seem to be a labor theory of value here, for example, it doesn't seem like he's talking in terms of dialectics or inevitable crisis, etc. Rather than arguing that the rate of profit will fall over time, he's arguing it generally remains constant over time. I mean I see the influence in that he's titled his work "Capital" and he's analyzing the long term income of capital and labor and the effect of that on society, but I thought for something to be "Marxian" it had be a lot more heterodox than this. Piketty's theories may be influenced by Marxian thought but it looks like his toolbox is pretty much a classical toolbox. Am I wrong in that? Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2014 13:01
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:How is Piketty Marxian? His theories don't seem any more inherently Marxian than things I've seen from relatively mainstream economists like Reich or Krugman (or for that matter Keynes); there doesn't seem to be a labor theory of value here, for example, it doesn't seem like he's talking in terms of dialectics or inevitable crisis, etc. Rather than arguing that the rate of profit will fall over time, he's arguing it generally remains constant over time. Actually the way it sounds (I haven't read it) there there will indeed be a crisis as some point due to a concentration of wealth, obviously isn't purely Marxism (thus the soft) but his basic point that the overt concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands will ultimately cause a basic crisis for society and even if he doesn't believe in a labor theory of value or workers controlling the means of production, it does sound like he acknowledges that the situation will eventually reach some type of tipping point. If you want to say he is using fundamentally liberal tools to reach his conclusion, I wouldn't disagree but I do think he eventually reaches the same general end point on capital itself as part of his analysis. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2014 14:45
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Ratios and Tendency posted:Seems relevant. Yeah this only takes one "America is a theocracy" movement at the right time and you've derailed the whole thing. There's a reason why modern states don't adopt this process.
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Apr 25, 2014 14:49
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Ardennes posted:Actually the way it sounds (I haven't read it) there there will indeed be a crisis as some point due to a concentration of wealth, obviously isn't purely Marxism (thus the soft) but his basic point that the overt concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands will ultimately cause a basic crisis for society and even if he doesn't believe in a labor theory of value or workers controlling the means of production, it does sound like he acknowledges that the situation will eventually reach some type of tipping point. Surely we can't call everyone who thinks capitalist states are heading towards a crisis a Marxist. The reasons matter a lot when making that judgement.
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Apr 25, 2014 16:31
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That's a very good point, because people are always writing books about a coming collapse. Most of the time, it's one particular area of policy that they blame: education, DEBT, "competitiveness" or a bubble in a specific industry. But Piketty identifies the problem as coming from within capitalism itself and that's precisely why it's getting so much attention. He isn't a Marxist, you can tell that from his loose definition of capital, but in one sense he's shifting the discussion in a Marxist direction by opening debate about the properties of the system itself rather than just a few policies.
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Apr 25, 2014 16:44
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asdf32 posted:Surely we can't call everyone who thinks capitalist states are heading towards a crisis a Marxist. The reasons matter a lot when making that judgement. Of course, the reason he says there will be a crisis is ultimately the same as Marx, he just went through a different route. That said, if you come up with similar conclusions to Marx, you have also concede he had a point even if you went through a different route to get there. In addition, it sounds like he talking about a similar process just using different terminology in different ways. Also he simply talks about a particular issue not the far broader construction of political economy Marx did. In addition, he talks about continued return on capital which doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as falling profit from industrial production Marx was talking about. Really, he is talking about the accumulation of surplus-value from capital thus creating more capital. He doesn't talk about how that capital got there in the first place, and he doesn't provide many solutions to it, but he does provide how the accumulation of surplus value will lead to a crisis. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2014 16:49
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OwlBot 2000 posted:That's a very good point, because people are always writing books about a coming collapse. Most of the time, it's one particular area of policy that they blame: education, DEBT, "competitiveness" or a bubble in a specific industry. But Piketty identifies the problem as coming from within capitalism itself and that's precisely why it's getting so much attention. He isn't a Marxist, you can tell that from his loose definition of capital, but in one sense he's shifting the discussion in a Marxist direction by opening debate about the properties of the system itself rather than just a few policies. Wait a second though. Is Piketty actually saying there will be a crisis, or is he just saying "if we don't implement positive social policy, more and more people are going to be progressively worse and worse off for the forseeable future" ? That's the difference I'm trying to get at here. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that in Marxian analysis "crisis" is a fairly specific technical term, it didn't just mean "at this point on the projected timeline, bad stuff happens." I haven't read Piketty directly yet but from all the reviews it sounds like he's not actually projecting that at some point a crisis will occur and capitalism will fundamentally change; rather he thinks things are going to get progressively worse and worse forever, barring a war or other massive wealth-destroying catastrophe, I guess until the entire world has shifted into some sort of North Korea style economic hellhole. In this he seems pretty similar to Keynes actually. Like Keynes, he's pointing out a problem with capitalist free market economies, a problem that will lead to catastrophes, and a problem that requires large scale government action to fix. He may also be pointing out a problem that ultimately requires a war to make the proposed solution politically possible. But I don't see how he's any more "Marxian" than Keynes was. I think you're right in that he seems to basically be reaching similar conclusions to Marxist analysis, in that he's pointing out an inherent social problem within and caused by free market capitalist economies. But it doesn't seem like he's using any tools of Marxian analysis to get there. That matters in a big way -- it means he's credible to the mainstream, for one thing -- but it also means it's not legitimate to say he's a marxian economist. Just because I agree with Rand Paul that the NSA's metadata collection program is unconstitutional doesn't make me a libertarian. Agreeing with the idea that we probably need to cap CEO salaries doesn't make me a communist, either (I see it as necessary to enforce CEO's fiduciary duty to shareholders). Similarly here, Piketty agreeing with the conclusions of Marxians for his own essentially neoclassical reasons doesn't make him a Marxian, either. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2014 17:10
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Wait a second though. Is Piketty actually saying there will be a crisis, or is he just saying "if we don't implement positive social policy, more and more people are going to be progressively worse and worse off for the forseeable future" ? Granted, at what point what is the "bottom" for things getting "worse and worse"? If he is talking about a continual process of erosion, then theoretically if there isn't a solution, it must reach an end point. If he doesn't address it, he implies a crisis. Keynes didn't stretch his timeline out to the horizon though, and I don't think Piketty is simply saying this process is a simple swing in marketplace. Also Keynes wasn't necessarily talking about the concentration of capital as a social problem in a very long term sense. At least from what I know of him. Anyway, I didn't say he was a Marxian economist, but I do think there are some similarities in his analysis to Marxian economies simply through the way he seems to be addressing the issue of surplus capital outside of industrial production and he reaches a conclusion that is in some ways similar. Although his idea of "capital" is more modern than Marx, since it rests mostly of what Marx called "fictions" capital (stocks/bonds) rather than physical industrial capital. That said, actually it sort of is funny about how you talk about the "mainstream" wanting to avoid Marxian thought though and in some ways I guess it was inevitable, that a guy like Piketty had to come along to address the issue without the "baggage" of Marxism. It sort of shows how strong ideology is. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2014 17:23
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Ardennes posted:
Ideology is part of it sure but the other side is that Marxian economics rests on a number of theoretical principles (Labor Theory of Value, etc.) that most professional economists either don't agree with or don't find to be useful concepts. There are real reasons the school is considered heterodox, it's not just the economist's version of hippie bashing. I think you're right though that one of the most interesting things about Piketty's work is that he seems to be reaching very similar conclusions to those of a lot of Marxians, even though he is ( or at least appears from what I've read so far to be) using solely classical/neoclassical/keynesian tools. Everybody gets to be right all along! Marx had the right ideas but didn't prove them the right way, classical economists were using the right tools but didn't develop them far enough until now! Economist Group Hug! Ardennes posted:Granted, at what point what is the "bottom" for things getting "worse and worse"? If he is talking about a continual process of erosion, then theoretically if there isn't a solution, it must reach an end point. If he doesn't address it, he implies a crisis. I'm not sure. I mean, North Korea has existed in a pretty horrible state for generations now. Can a society exist in a state of perpetual crisis? Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2014 17:30
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Economist Group Hug! I don't know about that one, I kind of expect a bitter feud to develop when somebody with a lot of money and stock in avoiding socialism as long as possible funds "studies" that massacre Piketty's work.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:48
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Wait a second though. Is Piketty actually saying there will be a crisis, or is he just saying "if we don't implement positive social policy, more and more people are going to be progressively worse and worse off for the forseeable future" ? Hieronymous Alloy posted:it also means it's not legitimate to say he's a marxian economist. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Just because I agree with Rand Paul that the NSA's metadata collection program is unconstitutional doesn't make me a libertarian. No, but if you agreed with Rand Paul about non-aggression, Honest Currency and flat taxes you might be very close without realizing it.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:52
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Ideology is part of it sure but the other side is that Marxian economics rests on a number of theoretical principles (Labor Theory of Value, etc.) that most professional economists either don't agree with or don't find to be useful concepts. There are real reasons the school is considered heterodox, it's not just the economist's version of hippie bashing. Yeah, Marxist economics is just wrong. Sure, alienation and rent exist, but the labor theory of value is inconsistent and the rate of profit doesn't have to fall. This is why Marxism is still only strong in the humanities/philosophy, and not in economics.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:10
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Raskolnikov38 posted:No left wing economists go do something else with their lives, the right wing ones that couldn't fully hack it, teach. You do realize that the neoliberalism that you guys rail against all the time have being hegemonic for decades right? You can't really say that they are not able to hack it.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:34
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Nessus posted:I don't mean 'a worldwide pogrom against the wealthy explicitly,' I mean this strange idea that they'll just magically teleport to Shanghai or Davos or something if things ever get bad, and live it up as we all burn. It is really common and it does not really seem realistic - if things got that bad anyway, as opposed to slowly eroding as seems likely to be the case. All you actually really need is to get most of the developed world onboard (but that includes tax havens so it might be hard). The reason is because, sure, you could flee to Shanghai or New Delhi. But the corruption there is really bad and that's going to take a big cut, and there is not real gurantee that the government won't decide to expropriate some of your wealth at some point. One of the real paradoxes of the last 25 years or so is that capital have overwhelmingly being heading FROM the developing world to the developed world due to its higher level of institutional development (i.e you know fairly certainly Obama isn't going to pull a Khodorkovsky on your money) despite the fact the rate of return is in theory higher in the developing world.
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Apr 25, 2014 19:15
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Typo posted:You do realize that the neoliberalism that you guys rail against all the time have being hegemonic for decades right? I meant that those that teach economics couldn't get an actual economist job like advising companies, nations, organizations etc.
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Apr 25, 2014 19:25
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