International revolution Now!
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Yes, exactly. Wasn’t he used as one of the “right-place, right-time, perfect opportunity golden child” examples in that Coupland 10,000 hours-to-make-an-expert thesis? IIRC the thesis was something like "By virtue of his social background, school and family, Gates was uniquely fortunate and had a load of sweet-ass chances basically put in front of him on a plate."
Rags to riches!
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I like a good book as well and I too dont really have a use for the lux goods you mentioned but thats besides the point. The fact that Pickety hasnt created wealth for anyone (but himself I guess, book royalties, speaking fees, etc.) as opposed to all the jobs and wealth which have resulted from the existence and ubiquity of MS product.
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How do you define wealth? If Pikkety writes a book that leads to positive social change, that has no value? What about Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut? Jesus? Marx? Does their work have value?
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Lets confine the term to the context used here. Allow me to quote from a relevant article in The New Republic
There is a small ambiguity here. Piketty uses “wealth” and “capital” as interchangeable terms. We know how to calculate the wealth of a person or an institution: you add up the value of all its assets and subtract the total of debts. (The values are market prices or, in their absence, some approximation.) The result is net worth or wealth. In English at least, this is often called a person’s or institution’s capital. But “capital” has another, not quite equivalent, meaning: it is a “factor of production,” an essential input into the production process, in the form of factories, machinery, computers, office buildings, or houses (that produce “housing services”). This meaning can diverge from “wealth.” Trivially, there are assets that have value and are part of wealth but do not produce anything: works of art, hoards of precious metals, and so forth. (Paintings hanging in a living room could be said to produce “aesthetic services,” but those are not generally counted in national income.) More significantly, stock market values, the financial counterpart of corporate productive capital, can fluctuate violently, more violently than national income. In a recession, the wealth-income ratio may fall noticeably, although the stock of productive capital, and even its expected future earning power, may have changed very little or not at all. But as long as we stick to longer-run trends, as Piketty generally does, this difficulty can safely be disregarded.
Clearly I was using the term in its contextual/classical meaning rather than in a cultural sense. To put it bone simple, while Pickety’s work may have enhanced many a dinner table discussion, Gate’s work put food on a lot more tables.
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You’re kind of making my point for me. Capitalism only values things that make money. Yet a lot of things that are important to people don’t make money, and are valued differently. You yourself are diminishing one type of work that you perceive as trivial because it isn’t generating a lot of wealth while elevating another because it generated grotesque wealth for an insignificant number of people.
Nobody is criticizing this. What’s being questioned is the idea that capital should at some point be completely independent of any actual values. It just grows without producing anything.
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Sorry but no. I dont devalue cultural works at all, it would be a bit hypocritical of me as I’ve created/distributed enough of them myself whether it made anyone any money or not.
However this question is entirely besides the point of the original post.
Kind of sounds like devaluing a cultural work. (I could make an argument that if Pikkety’s book led to social changes that reduced inequality, it would put food on a lot of tables too). But maybe you are right, we are getting off topic. Even though really, what we are talking about is kind of what the OP boils down to: what do we value, how do we value it.
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Yes, the rich are often in favor of the poor dying of getting exposure.
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Yeah, but for most people in the US in, say, the 1950s, racism was also just working for a living. If you aren’t at the butt end of it, it’s pretty easy to ignore.
Do they know you can die, frozen, underneath an overpass?
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Maybe so but that still doesnt make one ism the same as the others.
Tax breaks.
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Thanks! I’ve been looking for more anecdotes for my ongoing amateur study of Halo Effect
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If Zombie Apocalypses (Apocalypi?) are truly a useful stand-in for viral outbreaks/health crises, as the CDC would argue I think you’ll find, as in most things in life, the rich tend to fare far better in these cases as well…
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I am happy to concede the point that capitalism is not the same thing as racism.
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I don’t think that’s true. He was a drop out from Harvard and his parents weren’t dirt poor. He came from a relatively privileged background, which gave hm access to connections he could exploit for his benefit.
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Everyone works for their money. Most of them don’t have $90 billion and never will, no matter how many hours they work each week, no matter how much they break their backs to feed their kids, pay their ever spiraling bills, and scrape by, hoping not to end up on the streets because of one illness, one broken down car, one missed payment.
Much of his wealth was not accrued through labor, but through investments, which is Piketty’s point about capital.
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We, as a society, don’t value that… only $$$$ matters. those of us who don’t generate vast quantities of wealth are considered secondary, at best. It’s how we’ve justified the funnelling of wealth from below to above. We make it a moral question, that those in poverty haven’t worked hard enough and are thus responsible for their own condition.
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Gates also took away a lot of jobs and wealth from other people, in case we’ve forgotten about Microsoft’s various anti-competitive practices. Trying to figure out just how much more or less might have been done by other innovators in their absence is a tougher counterfactual than is being assumed here. But that should be beside the point too.
But what exactly is your point? Gates made more money than Piketty, therefore…it isn’t true that r > g? It’s not the case that his entrepreneurship was rewarded so much less than him simply having money is now? Or it stops mattering how wealth concentrates more than any work obtains it? Unless you suppose the value of Piketty’s arguments depends on the contents of his wallet, I really don’t understand your comparison.
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You are correct Mindy. He had access to enough to bootstrap the start of the company and used his mother’s influence to land an early deal with IBM.
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