|
CarrKnight posted:I am always afraid of buying this book and leaving it unfinished 2 chapters in. Yeah, I'm tempted to put this up as a book barn book of the month but it's almost certainly too long.
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2014 19:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 01:52 |
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2014 20:17
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2014 05:36
|
|
|
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 |
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2014 13:01
|
|
|
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 |
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2014 17:10
|
|
|
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 |
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2014 17:30
|
|
|
OwlBot 2000 posted:What are the options for capitalism if it continues down this road and democratic reforms like an 80% tax bracket and greater funding for social services are impossible to pass due to capitalist control of politics? I wonder if Piketty assumes current trends can continue and people can bear growing inequality, low employment, low wages and bad public services indefinitely without doing anything. One might argue that most people did exactly that for most of human history, but such ideas were also far from anyone's political horizon until the 19th century. It had never been a realized possibility before then. Counterpoint: North Korea exists. That said, there seem to be two ways out of this trap: 1) A truly massive war destroys enough capital that there's equality for a while. that's what we did in WW1/WW2. Unfortunately, any such war these days would be nuclear and would destroy all human life on the planet. 2) The economic situation gets bad enough, and the left-wing economic theory gets strong enough, that a popular political elements, and business interests who realize equality is in their economic interest, combine to implement partial reforms -- the New Deal model, essentially. This one's achievable but not any time soon.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2014 00:00
|
|
|
OwlBot 2000 posted:
Well, I was phoneposting earlier, but yeah, I'd agree that the "self-interest" was pretty broad. Some realized "wait, we need customers," some realized "wait, the socialists will kill us."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2014 02:16
|
|
|
OwlBot 2000 posted:I agree, Hieronymous Alloy. You could think of it as a carrot and stick approach, but it's likely the only reason they ever took the "stick" seriously was the victory of a socialist revolution just a decade prior. Without some kind of similar revolution somewhere in the world its doubtful they'd be as eager to give in now. The CEOs of today know they'll get $20m bonuses even if they run their company (or country) into the ground, and the shareholders want profit right now, not 20 years from now, so there's not really a strong incentive to worry about overproduction. That's somebody else's problem. Yeah, you're probably right that a credible threat of actual violent socialist revolution is probably necessary, for the same reasons that MLK needed the Black Panthers. Hopefully matters will fall short of actually needing such, especially in the age of "terrorism." It's hard to see how any threat significant enough to make a difference wouldn't also result in a horrible backlash and horrible massacre. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Apr 27, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2014 03:56
|
|
|
For what it's worth at least Piketty is making Fox News freak the gently caress out. I caught some of their coverage of it lately and it was basically full on Marxist Panic. "Best-selling economics book by a French Socialist advocates 80% income tax!"
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2014 13:27
|
|
|
wateroverfire posted:Should we accept uncritically that life will continue to get worse for most people? That life hasn't been getting worse for most people over the long term should be self evident but also shows up in income growth statistics, infant mortality rates, and other quality of life indicators. Wait, wages are rising? Whose wages are these that are magically rising? Are you talking about numbers not adjusted for inflation or something? Middle and lower class wages have been flat or falling for decades now when adjusted for inflation. That's the problem: there have been massive productivity gains and all those gains have gone to the top fractional percent. We're all working smarter and harder and getting less for it than our parents did.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2014 14:44
|
|
|
i am harry posted:This whole problem is further exacerbated by the desire in so many hearts to envision themselves as something other than "commoner". Do not worry about the plight of the average man, for you are something greater; destined for as much wealth and power as all the other chosen ones. I think at this point it's more that most Americans today grew up with a particular vision of the "American Dream" -- house, garage with cars, kids in college, relatively debt-free, quality healthcare, so forth -- that's simply no longer achievable economically for most people. It's not that everyone wants to be an elite, it's that what everyone perceives as "normal" or "average" or "median" has become the sole province of the elite. People aren't raging because they can't afford caviar and jaguars, they're raging because they can't afford educations and health care. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Apr 27, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2014 15:15
|
|
|
ShadowHawk posted:It's a little odd to note that median wages in the west have been stagnant since the seventies without also noting that there was a massive growth in the labor force participation rate since then as more women entered the workforce. There was a 50% growth in the number of people looking for jobs and at the end of the day the jobs were paying about as much as they used to. The flatlining and lack of growth remains even when you're talking about household incomes. It's not just an artifact of the increased labor participation rate. Past that the "well, in the third world incomes have gone up, so inequality isn't a problem!" seems beside the point. The problem with inequality isn't just about providing a sufficiency to the poor; it's also that we should be caring about whether or not the elite rentier class is extracting an unjust share of everyone else's rents. In other words, the problem isn't just that wages are flatlining. It's that the huge productivity gains made over the past few decades aren't going to workers, they're going to rentiers. As was asked above, have you done enough to support your financial leech today? If you don't pay your home mortgage interest payments, how will he afford his next yacht?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2014 21:15
|
|
|
wateroverfire posted:
Well, thing is, most of the posters here actually *are* better-informed that most public pundits and talking heads, and certainly more informed than average for the population, partly because the mass news media in this country is really bad and partly because they're interested in issues and follow them and seek out information on their own about those issues, which puts them far ahead of the average American. Most people generally don't know poo poo about politics or political issues, and that sadly includes most of the people who are paid to pontificate on such things (Friedman, Carlson, Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly, George Will, etc.) With a couple of rare exceptions like Paul Krugman who actually are qualified to pontificate on their fields, most of the public discourse in this country is shockingly awfully bad, incomplete at best and at its worst pugnaciously ignorant. Being a standard deviation or so above the mean in terms of political knowledge -- which most regular posters of this forum probably are, just by virtue of not watching Fox News if nothing else -- probably does mean you're significantly more qualified to discuss and analyze politics than, well, most of the people who get paid to do so on national television. As to business owners . . . hell, I know plenty of small business owners. They're not stupid by any means but all the ones I've met who are successful know their own business really well and . . . not much else, because they don't have time for seeking out information on topics outside their business! So my guess would be that a randomly selected poster here probably is more likely to be knowledgeable about a given political issue than a randomly selected "business owner," just because the people here follow the issues on their own, and most people (including most "business owners") don't. Now if the question were "who is more likely to understand the wheat market, a wheat farmer or a SA forum poster" then yeah the wheat farmer would probably be more likely to have a clue. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Apr 30, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2014 14:55
|
|
|
menino posted:^Yeah I would imagine business owners would be very knowledgeable about their product, their target segment, their industry, and their books. I would not expect a fabric distributor to have a deep understanding about the Libor scandal. Yeah, exactly. And if you wanted the answer to a question about, say, boat building, would you ask a boat hobbyist forum or just a random member of your local chamber of commerce? Presuming you didn't luck out and find the owner of a boat company, you'd just get blank stares from the chamber of commerce members, but the boat hobbyist forum would probably have something intelligent to say. This forum is full of people who follow politics as a hobby, just like a boat building forum is full of boat hobbyists. That doesn't mean we have all the answers or even that everyone here isn't horribly wrong, but it does mean there's a higher level of political knowledge here than there is most places.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2014 15:05
|
|
|
shrike82 posted:Before we slap each others' backs for being erudite, I'd say that there's breadth of knowledge here but no real depth? Well, again, keep in mind I'm just saying we're better than average. The average is still shockingly, embarrassingly bad. But as a point of comparison, during the Trayvon Martin debate, I read several threads here that were hundreds of pages long. There was a lot of idiocy but overall the discussion of what exactly Florida's "Stand your Ground" law contained, what the recent legal changes had been, and how those changes did or didn't actually relate to the case, was far more intelligent and detailed than anything I saw in the media, especially the televised media (which is where most people get their news). There's still plenty of room for horrible ignorance, bias, etc., around here, but we're still above average, if only because the average in question is somewhere south of "profoundly ignorant." shrike82 posted:
Hey, for a lot of us I think it's still on backorder! But yeah, that's a good point. But the other night I had the "privilege" of watching Fox News' coverage of Piketty; it was just fearmongering and ranting about the crazy french socialist who wants an 80% tax on income. Here at least most people in the thread appear to have read reviews written by actual economists, and we have at least some participants who are actively working their way through the actual text. So overall we're above average, especially when you remember the average contains millions of people (many of them "business owners") who are likely still at the "Piketty Who?" stage. To be clear I'm not saying discussion around here is perfect or anything, just that we can occasionally find our own rear end in a top hat if we use both hands and a set of written directions, which puts us far ahead of the general standard. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Apr 30, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2014 15:24
|
|
|
wateroverfire posted:Most posters here have perspectives, one way or another, derived from . . . I think you're concluding a hell of a lot about the other posters here without much evidence for doing so. A lot of the people around here have Marxist or far-left positions because they have been hosed hard by right-wing free-market capitalist ideology. I don't know that much about how things are in Chile, but keep in mind that you're talking to a forum largely full of people who 1) Are likely unemployed, especially if they entered the workforce after 2008, because there is a massive shortage of available jobs especially for younger workers. 2) Do not have access to publicly funded health care and face personal bankruptcy if they have any major medical emergencies. 3) If they choose to go to college or get a higher education, face a lifetime of crippling student loan debt, debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy under American law. (American "millenials" collectively have over a trillion dollars in student loan debt). 4) See solutions for all of these problems repeatedly blocked by a Republican legislature that very recently tried to literally destroy the entire nation's economy rather than let a black President solve a problem for once (i.e., the recent government shutdown crisis, not to mention the repeated Republican flirting with debt default, which would have been an utter disaster for the entire world). It's not like this forum is some sort of Marxist internet honeypot. It's this way because most of the younger people in America have real life experiences that make them very sympathetic to leftist politics.
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2014 16:04
|
|
|
asdf32 posted:Huh? First I don't think you have evidence that people here actually fit your criteria. Lots of posters are from Europe and I seriously doubt most are unemployed. Heh, I wouldn't have made statements like that without at least some evidence. quote:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/29/young-people-socialism_n_1175218.html Similarly, quote:For a whole decade, between 1993 and 2003, nearly half of all young people identified as either Democratic or left-leaning, while 42 percent of the same age group claimed Republicanism as their ideology of choice. But since 2006, that gap has dramatically widened. Fifty-four percent of young people now identify as left-leaning, while only 36 percent — nearly 20 whole percentage points lower — align themselves with Republicans. People don't come to SA because of politics -- we're not a site like Free Republic or KOS that attracts a particular group. It's just that the people who do come here tend to skew young, and in America right now skewing young means skewing hard left.
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2014 16:31
|
|
|
shrike82 posted:In other words, outside of HYP, the average endowment regardless of size performed worse than a passive fund tracking the S&P. Isn't that true of almost all managed funds?
|
|
#
¿
May 3, 2014 13:05
|
|
|
ProfessorCurly posted:So, anyway. I saw the book was out of stock in amazon, does anyone know if it is still being printed/they will have more in at some point? My copy was originally just delayed with an estimated May 2nd shipping date, now it's completely out of stock with no projected date at all. (I don't want to read an ebook edition because charts).
|
|
#
¿
May 3, 2014 15:03
|
|
|
z0glin Warchief posted:I can sympathize with not wanting to read it as an ebook, but I don't really understand why having charts comes into it? Also that sucks I hope it ships soon I don't like reading anything with charts, graphs, or other large images on my kindle. Small screen.
|
|
#
¿
May 3, 2014 15:31
|
|
.
|
wateroverfire posted:Haha. It's an interesting critique but I'll have to reserve detailed comment until my copy of Piketty arrives, whenever that is. I am a little hesitant to sign off on his assertion that payroll tax records are just as good a survey of historical income trends as tax records; if nothing else, payroll tax records would exclude all those people who don't pay payroll taxes, i.e., the unemployed, and all income not in the form of wages, i.e., returns on capital investments. I also have the impression, at least so far, that Piketty's proposal for an 80% top income tax rate is meant as a bit of a stalking horse / overton-window-shifter, rather than an actual immediate policy proposal.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2014 14:29
|
|
|
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 |
|
#
¿
May 29, 2014 19:32
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2014 20:17
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 01:52 |
|
|
theblackw0lf posted:Even if the President was mentioning it, from what I remember it wasn't as discussed as heavily in public discourse until Occupy Occupy changed the discourse dramatically. A week before Occupy the entire public discourse was about DEBT DEBT DEBT. After Occupy suddenly poverty mattered again. It was a massive, fundamental shift in American politics and one that should not be trivialized.
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2014 00:33
|
|