I looked at that and said WTF? Where Reagan, the patron saint of trickle down? GHWB? This is the amazing kind of bullshit that the right tells itself.
Lets not forget the fire and police who may collect pensions for twice as long as they worked. I was reading a “retirement” thread on fishing site where a number of guys said they retired in their 40’s!
I think it’s reasonable to be skeptical of an argument which implies that anything about economics is simple, and that those who disagree on economic issues are liars. Issues of free trade and globalization aren’t like evolution and climate change. There isn’t a consensus as to what works and what doesn’t among the people who study these things.
This is true to the extent that data isn’t falsified and ignored and used to claim (as some academics like Paul Krugman have noted) “views differ on shape of planet.”
This is how a devotion to skepticism can become another mode of intellectual failure. Study Econ before dismissing it, and look at the field’s many failures as an opportunity to extend the field rather than replacing it. That’s how science works.
So the failures of free trade require extension of the theory and investigation into the data describing what is being put forward as “free trade”. Cursory examination of the data on “free trade” shows it to be a misnomer describing low-n *oligopolies. “Free markets” is a term used in much the same way, to describe low-n *oligopolies if not outright monopolies.
The misrepresentations are political, cynical, and have nothing to do with anything but greed for the “economists” in the think tank or Koch-funded fellowships.
*Oligopolies, not oligarchies, though the distinction is the position on the causal line, not the nature of what happens.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to speak of technological sophistication as if it “naturally” leads to steadily declining standards of living for all but a few.
Exactly right. The patent oligopolies necessary to make sophisticated tech legal have nothing to do with “natural” wealth inequality. It’s not like the “owners” of IP have any of it in their actual heads. They’re absentee squatters, overcharging and underproducimg.
I wasn’t implying that economics should be replaced or dismissed, only that there is no consensus among economists that the free market or that capitalism have failed most people on the planet. That’s hardly a radical suggestion.
I’m not skeptical of things like “the shape of the planet” or evolution or anthropogenic climate change, specifically because there is a scientific consensus about those issues which simply doesn’t exist when it comes to very broad ideological positions in economics.
If, after a merely “cursory examination,” you’re suggesting that economists who describe the free market as something you don’t think it is are misrepresenting it out of greed, then I’m afraid you’re doing exactly what I was referring to in my initial post. Economics is more complex than that, and economists of all stripes have a variety of very complex (and frequently competing) theories.
References to the Koch bros. as a simple symbol for greed seem very similar to the references to George Soros one hears, not usually from conservative economists, but rather the reflexive, outspoken, ideological opponents of progressive politics. It’s not a useful tactic (like most ad hominem arguments) because it has nothing to do with a constructive interpretation of the relevant facts.
I take it you haven’t read Piketty.
He bitchslaps his Kool-Aid drinking colleagues, with a mighty trove of actual data, exposing them as the pack of propaganda-spewing 1% stooges they’ve been for the past however-many decades. Very little actual serious economics has been done for quite some time, due to the poisoning of the academic well systematically undertaken by scum like the Koch brothers for the last forty to fifty years. You don’t see Soros, or Musk, or anyone on the left with anything like that vast system of think tanks and ‘research institutes’.
Economics may be the ‘dismal science’, but it’s been positively woeful for a long time.
So fuck the consensus of economists - that’s what got us into this mess, allowing those jokers to peddle trickle-down bogus modelling based on spherical cows or some shit. Piketty has shown them up with something that’s become a novelty in the field - empirical data, and a mountain of it at that.
I wasn’t implying that economics should be replaced or dismissed, only that there is no consensus among economists that the free market or that capitalism have failed most people on the planet. That’s hardly a radical suggestion.
I wasn’t making that point, there’s just so much FUD out there about the free market and hands-throwing-up-who-knows-anything-crap that I had to weigh in.
The Kochs fund objectively bad bullshit that makes the world objectively worse. Soros is a guilty philanthropist that hasn’t made the connection between the greed of his heyday and the shit he’s trying to fix. He makes a convenient target. The Kochs have pinned the skulls to their dumb Hugo Boss hats. Fuck them.
I am quite sure number 2 works if you have extremely high taxation like Denmark or Sweden. Previos right wing government in Sweden lowered income taxes and the tax revenue increased due to more economical activity and parts of the black economie turning white.
There are so many things (stated and implied) that are wrong in that post…
Ok, let’s tackle some of the greatest (and most widely shared) misconceptions:
Whatever the country you live in, if there is national pension system, the money going there on your behalf (whatever the accounting scheme) is not supposed to be stockpiled but to be immediately used on the recipients of said system.
Contrary to what you might think, essentially, there’s no real difference between a national and a private system; a trust fund doesn’t stockpile your money, they ‘invest’ it (which may simply mean play around with on the stockmarket, or forex etc.)
The reason there’s no real difference is that if the economy tanks, unemployment ensues which means the source of wealth for the national scheme dries up. However, and that’s the key point, this also means the stockmarket and associated tanks, which means the returns dry up… See a pattern here?
But wait, you can have a situation where the stockmarket grows while there is high unemployment! And here is the rub. When that happens, it means the stockmarkets etc. have completely unmoored themselves from the local economy (or actively destroy it because it’ll get them better returns, think mergers).
That’s your economy. The one your job depends on.
You then get people (pensioneers) who actively wish for things to get worse in their own society (since that’s the consequence of them wanting their pension fund to do good). Essentially, that means that grandma’ is cheering for a manager somewhere to destroy your job.
and, the icing on the cake. Any scheme, be it public or private, will have an overhead. I’ll let anybody willing look up the numbers. However I’ll state and defy anyone to contradict me : any and all private schemes have a bigger overhead than public ones.
Yet Trump is arguing some of the most core neo-liberal positions in that the state can, through the loosening of financial and regulatory binds, create jobs by giving the rich more money and less restriction.
So I don’t see how he’s feeding off of anti neo-liberal sentiment. If anything he’s doing a massive callback to Regan and all those (white middle class) who remember the 80’s fondly.
This was predicted by Vonnegut’s first novel, 1952’s Player Piano. In the world depicted, nearly everyone in the middle class had a doctorate because educational inflation had made that a near-requirement, much as how undergraduate education is today.
I assume it was a dystopia because SF, but in the real world that could be utopian.
When it’s done right, you don’t get a doctorate until after you’ve made a genuine and significant contribution to human knowledge.
Getting that from everybody would be no small thing.
I think he was playing up on the idea that even with an undergraduate education, most people don’t really get one out of a love of learning or knowledge, just as a needed requirement for future employment. While most people in doctoral programs today do have this love of learning, I’m seeing quite a few masters students who clearly are just in it because they see it as a requirement for getting a better job.
A national system can deficit-spend in a crisis. Private pensions get raided and go bankrupt.
I didn’t even think about that one. But thanks for adding weight to my point.
Articles which support the contrary case, that the US tax system is actually quite progressive.
Countries with much more generous social programs than the USA’s tend to pay for them by (a) extending the top tax brackets way down into the middle class and/or (b) sizable VATs or national sales taxes.
A good list because it simply identifies what put everything into motion, which is complex and can bog down articulation of what’s wrong.
The rise of corporate monopolies, the decline of wages, the destruction of local geographies for the sake of “efficiency”, the growth of an inhuman commodity first people last system, the shifting of corporate time to families leisure time, tabloid media, ect.
It’s like a single house fire taking down an entire block of homes. The destruction was bigger than the first home where the fire started, but focusing on every casualty in the path of destruction (racism, income inequality, alienation, environmental damage, nuanced gender issues to name a few) ain’t going to be worth a pile of beans until we connect it to the asshole who decided to start the whole thing by burning his house down for the insurance money.
Considering about 20% of the US makes the median income of Norway or better and there is a higher income “cap” in the US…
Whatever the country you live in, if there is national pension system, the
money going there on your behalf (whatever the accounting scheme) is not
supposed to be stockpiled but to be immediately used on the recipients of
said system.
I have to disagree. Obviously neo-liberalism was extremely successful at what was intended. It was obvious from the start that the intention was wealth redistribution. They just redefined trickle-down to mean flow-up.
Freeman Dyson has no PHD. He thinks it’s a waste of time.He mentions 2 colleagues who went mad or committed suicide pursuing a PHD.
Add to human knowledge?Two friends earned Doctorates -one translating reams of Early French scatology and the other on Elizabethan stage directions!
