Thoughts on Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century?
Thoughts on Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century?
Ryder Powell
Jacob Ward
Blaming the rich for accumulating capital and taxing it more is only going to leave you with less productivity growth and an ever lower rate of growth of income for the people without capital.
Also capital access is the easiest it's ever been so you can't blame the inaccessibility of it that poorer people don't have it or don't invest in it.
Adrian Reed
It's not "blaming" the rich. It's saying that in a standard capitalist economy, the rate of return on investment is greater than the general rate of growth of the economy, meaning wealth has a systemic tendency to concentrate (so please stop blaming the poor).
Lincoln Lewis
Also I love his other work.
Here's Piketty dividing the French electorate into 4 quadrants. Similar to the left-right/authoritarian-libertarian compass thing, but less stupid:
• Internationalist-Egalitarian (what is erroneously called the "left")
• Internationalist-Inegalitarian (what is erroneously called the "center" [or center-left])
• Nativist-Inegalitarian (what is erroneously called the "center-right")
• Nativist-Egalitarian (what is erroneously called the "right")
He also says that this division occurs pretty much everywhere across the western world, and is very consistent across almost all policy questions.
Kayden Cruz
Dylan Stewart
fucking lolbertarians
Tyler Sanchez
Nathan Ortiz
The only way they can actively gain such power is either through government or by you wilfully agreeing to give them money in exchange for a product.
But there is a case for government intervening if a transaction between an individual and a company harms someone outside of that transaction
Jack Nguyen
It doesn't matter how they gain it. The point is to strip them of it.
Camden Rivera
It's almost as if this is because the stock market returns are higher or are protected by government by a too big to fail policy.
Stripping someone of their capital isn't going to solve anything, it'll only amplify the problem and give a lower return of growth in almost anything from productivity to wages.
Jeremiah Scott
Their capital IS the problem!
Charles Ortiz
>the rate of return on investment is greater than the general rate of growth of the economy
False
Jack Reed
Pikikey is a dunce
Gabriel King
The problem will only be amplified if that capital is being used less productively, which is what will happen if you deincentivize them so much by taking it away
Angel Watson
Oh wow, you just disproved the entire book.
You should write your own dissertation and become very famous and influential.
Joseph Turner
The capital IS the problem.
No one person should be so wealthy to have make-or-break power over the economy, especially when there are others who struggle.
Dominic Nguyen
Just leaving this here
en.wikipedia.org
Brandon James
Left-wing and socdem parties have become parties of the hyper-educated.
Carson Bailey
You're assuming something can even be justified as just or injust. The whole concept of when others have and others don't have and classifying it as unjust is assuming that the result of this system is because of a single entity or person arranging the system and life of all individuals involved in such a way that the outcome is already determined before they start. Which Hayek already proved is not the case by far.
Christopher Gray
Grayson Ward
It doesn't matter if it's "just" or "unjust". Nobody gives a shit about you lolbritarian pilpul.
People should not have vast unaccountable power over others.
Liam Butler
Benjamin Miller
also, ironically, in Hayek's time the relationship was inversed: The more educated you were, the harder you leaned to the right.
Ian Wright
Based dutchbro.
Gabriel Mitchell
It's not libertarian pilpul at all, but merely shedding some light on the demand for redistribution because of the reasoning that it is somehow unjust or unfair, which is not the case.
I get you have a hard-on for people like Chomsky and Pickety because they challenge the status quo but they're mistaken about a few important aspects, and that most of all they value social measures by government very highly since they think it'll be at least some solution, whereas history has shown it doesn't
Capital is taxes relatively high here, and has been increasing for the past few decades. However, our wealth inequality is highest next to the US, yet our income distribution is very equal with a Gini coefficient of only 0.25.
Taxing doesn't work and amplifies the problem usually
Cameron Taylor
It wasn't actually. Your graph also doesn't really provide your claim with any evidence. As the share of people who is now considered highly educated has increased over the years quite dramatically
Julian Turner
It did not shed any "light". It was just lolbritarian pilpul, as most lolbritarian "thought" is. Sidestepping substantive arguments/criticisms to retreat into an abstracted world, beyond any connection to human reality.
Stick your Ayn Rand. At least she was upfront with her ideals, instead of seeping everything through a word salad designed to make dumb people feel smart.
Cameron Morris
Tyler Gonzalez
he's retarded. Even on page six, he doesn't even understand how supply and demand works.
Camden Roberts
So it was still an increasing share over time for votes for the democrats in his time then? Great thanks for confirming my statement
Carson Cooper
and
>implying you give a single shit about wealth concentration
This is the rhetoric trick I hate most about right-libertarians. How they pretend that they agree with your values, only that they somehow disagree with the methods. That they think you are "misguided", and that you will be Hurting The Very People You Are Trying To Help. That the only real way to address socio-economic problem is by doing the opposite of what would seem to alleviate them.
Even the very name, "libertarian", is something they stole from the Left for its positive connotations.
Charles Clark
>Sidestepping substantive arguments/criticisms to retreat into an abstracted world, beyond any connection to human reality.
which is precisely what picketty does. he forcefully tries to assert reality into his unrealistic models, rather than using the models to assist in understanding reality.
the guy doesn't know economics.
Kayden Lewis
All modern economics is that, not just Picketty.
Jackson Jackson
>This is the rhetoric trick...
user, you are so wrapped up with intentions and "feel good" policies, you don't even understand that you should be looking at, not only the intentions of policies, but also
what
they
actually
do.
Nathaniel Brown
it's really not, you're just retarded and haven't picked up a microecon textbook.
but i wouldn't blame you even if you did: most just only focus on the paul samulsonian reductive math, and not on the actual econ.
In general: most people, who have no background in econ, would take an econ course and think all economists do is solve systems of equations - which isn't even true - but even retarded picketty thinks this is econ.
Unfortunately he's also a failure who doesn't understand the mechanics behind simple supply and demand graphs.
Julian Miller
Because usually, most policies don't even have good intentions.
Adam Cruz
>most policies don't even have good intentions.
lol. there you go again, confusing intentions with what policies actually do.
listen, i get it you like to paint a good vs. evil story between the "good" politicians vs the "bad" politicians. this dichotomy doesn't exist.
The reality is not a single politician runs on a campaign of "My policies are morally, rationally bad, vote for me!"
Dominic Jenkins
Alright smarty-pants. Teach me.
Adrian Johnson
First, let me thank you for not hiding your flag; what a mensch.
Second, was this the research which showed that in the US, the laws passed by congress were the ones that benefited big business instead of the will of the majority? That the US was more of an oligarchy instead of a representative democracy?
Michael Gomez
No, that was a different study.
Hunter Sullivan
But plenty of politicians run a campaign of "I'll do what's Good for Business! I'll privatize everything and make life a needlessly complicated living hell for working people, all for those sweet profits and GDP points!"
They never say it so, but that's what they do and what phases like "entrepreneurship" and "choice" and "jobs" usually mean in practice.
Like how the privatized the fucking pension plans in Israel. The end result may be a couple more steps towards economy-wide pareto efficiency (and even that is dubious), but it really fucked most working people who now struggle with an incomprehensible dizzying array of competing pension plans, virtually all of which are designed to fuck you and extract the most out of you while paying out the least (as profiteering businesses are tend to do).
And you know what the punchline is?
The best yields and payouts still come from the old government programs.
All that fucking "competition" and "sophisticated markets" talk for what is, by every possible metric, a worse result for regular citizens. But hey, at least now the lizard people who run all these insurance companies can report record profits.
Austin Hill
>The best yields and payouts still come from the old government programs.
Oh, and you know why this is, right?
Because all the rich people went off to some "exclusive" plans only available to those who earn/own more than than certain threshold, creating a two-tiered system where the poor get to work all their lives and end up with a monthly pension of 300 shekels (=~80$), while rich people enjoy lavish returns and early retirement.
That's what "choice" means.
Anthony Stewart
And as an example of "My policies are morally, rationally bad, vote for me!", check out the fuckfaces who openly proclaim they will raise the retirement age, and even treat it as a badge of honor.
"I am rational, level-headed guy on economic issues, willing to make tough choices. Vote for me and I will fuck everyone, just to avoid inconveniencing my rich buddies!"
Brody Gray
Well I'll give you an example:
most paul samuelsonian texbooks describe a budget set but don't actually tell you what the fuck that budget set actually is.
The budget set is a representation of scarcity.
Scarcity can be literally anything at all that is desired, but limited in resources - sunlight, time, freedom, etc can all be represented as a budget set (but since most people hear budget set, they immediately only think financial constraints).
The slope of the budget set is the opportunity cost - most would just call it what it is; a slope.
Thus, opportunity cost is a relative price - which is the cost of goods and services. The price of something is RELATIVE to what you would have to give up in order to attain an additional unit of that thing.
For example, most idiots think the cost of bread is 4 dollars. When actually the cost is what you could have spent that 4 dollars on INSTEAD of bread.
So when the opportunity cost (the relative price) decreases for a good, then people can afford MORE of that good.
Exploring these effects for both supply and demand gives us the law of supply and the law of demand.
These laws are such that when the price (i.e. relative price) of something goes down, quantity demanded of that thing will increase.
This basic concept is what Picketty fucking failed at: freshman econ. All because he can only think in terms of math.
The best economists only use math as a support. The idea is to take a problem presented in every-day english, translate it into math, then translate the result back into everyday english and see if everything lines up to be the most-likely case to describe what is going on. If you can't translate back and make sense, gotta start over.
When Picketty's argument doesn't fit, instead he goes "no wait! let me just add this friction here, that friction there and now it fits! ta-da!" Thus, he's forcing the thing he is studying into this unrealistic, samulsonian model, rather than model serving what he's studying
Justin Bennett
He doesn't account for rich people becoming poor. The charts of money accruing to the top 1% ignores the fact that the people who comprise that elite group are not fixed and change on a regular basis. If Piketty was right, then the bankers of Ancient Greece and Rome would be in charge today.
For a technical demolition of his work, see NN Taleb.
Levi Rivera
fukken checked and thanks
Camden Gonzalez
Pure superficial and misleading jewshit.