Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/12/brahmin-left.html
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I think that it is important to point out that “Wealth tends to concentrate over time,” is just the capitalist special case of “Power tends to concentrate over time.” Aristocracies tend to become dominated by their most powerful members. “Communist parties,” tend to be dominated by ever smaller elites and executive councils. Et cetera.
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My hope is that open AI can show the masses what the the actual effect economic policies have and not just the talking point politicians would like them to be.
I only knew there was a book because my news feed was starting to feature the most obtuse rebuttals about how the system is perfectly fair, that wealth inequality is supposedly decreasing if we use this special quotient we made up that magically shows what we want it to show, and Piketty is just fear-mongering to appeal to leftists and people who don’t understand economics.
They might as well have been written by the ancap teenagers on Reddit who like to spew all that “taxation is theft” b.s.
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Is Piketty now getting obscenely rich from his popular books?
“It is also striking, at least to me, that such multi-year, multi-country data were apparently never used by political scientists to study this phenomenon.”
It is not surprising to me. Guess where most funding for economic studies come from?.
There is also the infamous Reinhart-Rogoff error, which led to a false conclusion the wealthy types loved. The data set was quite small, and the error obvious to anyone who actually plotted the data. It took roughly three years before this became public.
I learned the perils of programming in Excel a quarter century before the R&R papers were published.
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left-wing, or social democratic parties have gradually transformed themselves from being the parties of the less-educated and poorer classes to become the parties of the educated and affluent middle and upper-middle classes.
Education (or a brand-name academic certification) is in some ways more important than wealth in this context. In the U.S. you can draw a line between the situation Piketty describes and the college admissions scandal, where one of the wealthy liberal parents who was caught paying bribes to get her dimwit kid into school claimed she did it to give her daughter a “fair shot”. Without a college education the kid might end up another coarse, uncultured GOP-voting shmoe.
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It is part of the “stream up, trickle down” economy.
As wealth is power I don’t see a problem with what you said.
And before anyone asks, you don’t have power just because you thousands of dollars in savings. That is an exclusive 8 digits minimum in an offshore account club.
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Well, wealth is power in our modern capitalist society. The correlation has not always been as strong everywhere. So in the middle ages you have things like sumptuary laws to prevent wealthy merchants from dressing above their station. Or wealthy people being forced to “lend” to the crown. It was fairly common in “communist” countries for the real limitation on access to consumer goods to be access to special stores, rather than the cash to pay for them.
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As long as you don’t see people sporting tattoos inspired by his books, JK Rowlings style, I guess it’s not the case yet.
I can only hope so
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