I am reading Capital & Idelogy currently. I find interesting how Piketty challenges the view of property rights. Many think it is something completely natural, sacred. But he shows it is actually ideology. It is not "the nature of things".
As I understand it in the book, property is not, and should not be seen as, a 100% inalienable human right. If it was so, it would be completely fair that slave-owners in Haiti and Santo Domingo were paid to forego slavery, when slavery was abolished. It was seen as a compensation for this new law that reduced the value of their property: slaves. Of course, slaves themselves were not compensated. Since they were the main beneficiaries of this new law, they actually had to pay for it in some cases. This is actually what happened.
In the USA, there were discussions about a similar outcome, but the sheer enormity of the needed compensation made it impossible This was one big reason that lead to the civil war.
This is the kind of weird, morally unacceptable reasoning about property rights that you will run into if you accept property as a all-powerful, unconstestable principle.
I mean, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for saying that there are loads of great alternatives besides choosing between property rights and the tragedy of the commons.
No country has absolute property rights, and in fact many have massive carveouts.
E.g freedom to roam in the Nordic countries is based on the idea that it is unthinkable that we should allow people's access to nature to be monopolised.
>I think we ended up with private property because the alternatives have been tried and they are worse (e.g. tragedy of the commons)
I don't thinl it is all or nothing. Private property is overall a very good idea and principle, and Piketty says that too. But when someone sees property it as inalienable right, at any level, is a problem.
For example, if one person talks about a tax based on wealth, two people can have a healthy disagreement, and discuss how to implement.
But when someone does not event want to consider it... because it would supposedly bring us back to communism dark ages, that is basic ideology in action, not rational thinking.
That's a drastic oversimplification. Most alternatives which have been tried were either both with extrememe ideological prejudice and in wildly different social and technological enviornments.
No country views property rights as inviolable. Eminent domain trumps individual property rights. Property can be seized pursuant to a lien due to debt, non-payment of taxes, criminal activity, etc. We're not operating under some slavish, unyielding notion of property rights.
There's two distinct concepts being confused as one. The first concept is property rights in general. This concept is singular and correlated with the ideas of ownership and territory. This is may be a universal concept and may be a good candidate for designation as a "natural right". The second concept is the classification of what counts as property. This concept is numerous because we have to actually enumerate everything that counts as property.
Slavery is exceptional because it counts people as property. The error is not with the first concept of property but an error of the second kind, an error of misclassification. Owning a farm and working the land is ok. Owning a farm and owning slaves to work the same plot is immoral.
We see this reified during Reconstruction with Sherman's promise of forty acres and a mule. Where former slaves would be compensated by being granted property rights to the land they worked. Property rights were to be their salvation. As we all know that didn't happen. And a century of systematically denying the rights (including property rights) of their descendants (or anyone who looked like them) is the major reason for the disparities between black Americans and other racial groups.
> No country views property rights as inviolable. Eminent domain trumps individual property rights. Property can be seized pursuant to a lien due to debt, non-payment of taxes, criminal activity, etc. We're not operating under some slavish, unyielding notion of property rights.
However, quite a few individuals do seem to view property rights as inviolable, and reject the exceptions you enumerated.
Interestingly, the moment when property was supposedly deemed sacred was the end of the 18th century ("Life, liberty, estate", derived from Locke but was codified in society with the US Constitution and French Revolution). This idea is deeply ingrained in our values, but let's investigate what those founders actually believed.
At the time of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were in agreement about playing down the protection of property. Franklin saw property as a "creature of society"[1]. This is why they changed the language of the Declaration of Independency to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". The last is not meant to be a stand-in for "property" or "estate," it actually derives from a separate clause in the Virginia Declaration of Rights[2]: "life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." Jefferson intentionally dropped the property clause in the Declaration of independence, reflecting how he saw property: not an inalienable right.
Entering into the early US, the majority of fiscal revenue was based off of taxing property (there was no income tax). This aligns with Franklin and Jefferson in basically saying that the state has a claim to the property that is possessed by citizens.
> This is the kind of weird, morally unacceptable reasoning about property rights that you will run into if you accept property as a all-powerful, unconstestable principle.
The average person has no ability to connect past and future. Most people, when tested, struggle to connect yesterday with today. Typical people don't save enough, don't plan and don't risk assess. If society gives an inch on property rights as an all-powerful, uncontestable principle then how exactly are we supposed to give people who plan ahead enough power to influence the flow of society?
For example, we're currently facing what is probably a 1:100 year pandemic. There are specialists out there (actuaries, some entrepreneurs, some doctors) who are comfortable with thinking about 1:100 year pandemics. If property rights were truly unbreachable, those people would quite happily build up a strategic supply of masks, tinned food, etc, etc ready for deployment in a crisis. Their families would make out like bandits once every hundred years; we'd be minting people as wealthy as Croesus. They don't do that. Because it would be stupid to. Because in a crisis, property rights break down a bit and it would be quickly identified that they don't 'need' supplies for 100,000 people and they would be pressured to give up supplies at an economically irrational price.
Nigh unconstestable property rights and the ability to act like a bastard in the short term are critical tools for linking the past and the future. Break that at your peril. I know 95% of people don't care about that link as much as they'd like to; but the 5% who use it are the people who accomplish literally all the infrastructure creation and planning. You won't miss it until it is gone; even then most people don't seem to understand what is happening if the communist failures we see every decade or so are any guide.
> I know 95% of people don't care about that link as much as they'd like to; but the 5% who use it are the people who accomplish literally all the infrastructure creation and planning.
I would contest the position that so few are able to make that link. Perhaps in the abstract they are not, but many people are able to conceptualize that link in concrete terms through their children. If people see a way that they can ensure a better life for their kids, they will often make the necessary choices to bring that about.
To consider your example, in the current crisis, there are plenty of people who did not link anything from past to present, but who do show up in hospitals evry day, help people and save lives. They have a much bigger impact on society than the smart planner who could link past and present, but they see no rewards for it. Property rights do very little for those people. See how first responders of 9/11 got treated as another example.
I am afraid that incentivising property rights to absurd levels such as protecting slave-owners through compensation, or protecting people stock-piling masks does not do much for society, even in the long run.
There are ways to do it in an organised, moderate, law-abiding, rational and fair way though. To me, using words like "communism" is just a red-herring to avoid a rational discussion.
" “the Democratic Party in the United States transitioned over half a century from the workers’ party to the party of the highly educated.” Elites’ distance from working-class interest, he contends, led the Democratic party and its ideological counterparts abroad to accede to a policy program betraying the values of social democracy: regressive taxation, elite domination of higher education systems, and forms of globalization that enabled the wealthy to hide their assets from tax authorities and trade agreements that facilitated outsourcing. "
This is great point. I see this on social media commentary all the time and wonder if educated elites being merely oblivious or totally asshole about working class concerns.
This is painfully true. This is pretty well captured by the completely out of touch sentiments in [0], written by the folks at Crooked Media (generally Democratic establishment people). The wealthy upper middle class sees the coronavirus quarantine as just a chill time to work from home on a laptop and drink wine.
These people are not ignoring the plights of the poorer working class; they are altogether completely blind of it. They know that 3 million people just filed for unemployment, but they only know about it as an abstract statistic. The human cost is entirely lost on them.
That seems like a little bit of a cherry picked article to support your point. Scrolling through the front page of that website the top article is an opinion piece by Joe Biden which writes about the importance of supporting young people and those out of work:
"So we need to make sure that our economic recovery does not come at the expense of those who can least afford it or who are just getting started in life: Hard-working young people in service industries and retail that are being decimated by layoffs; all those who are hustling to make a living in the gig economy, and those who were already struggling to get by before this crisis, who are drowning in credit card debt or student loans, and who now are in even greater need of a lifeline."
When I scroll further down the page I can see a fundraiser for readers to support "people and communities who are more vulnerable and need extra support during this time" including the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Restaurant Workers Community Foundation, and One Fair Wage. Apparently readers and podcast listeners have contributed about $650 000 which at least from an Australian perspective seems non-trivial.
Finally, one of their most recent articles (I'm going through the articles because I'm not going to listen to the podcasts) on the politics of a pandemic titled "How Democrats Should Navigate Pandemic Politics" talks about the importance of directly supporting workers including with "paid-leave provision that’s much bigger than the one the White House watered down in the initial House bill, along with a broad Emergency Unemployment Insurance provision".
I can't reconcile all this stuff with being blind to it. It looks like the founders of this site were in the white house while the medicaid expansion was passed which, at least from an outside perspective, seems to be the most important legislation of the past few decades for the poorer working class.
Even that article you linked to doesn't seem like a damning indictment. If you read it a bit more closely it's at least partially a joke article where the writer talks about the resilience of the human spirit while writing on the walls in lipstick, getting gum in her hair, and napping in the middle of sentences. If it was a manifesto of values I'd agree with you that a lack of focus on unemployed people undergoing hardship would be notable, but it's not. It's just a joke.
> wonder if educated elites being merely oblivious or totally asshole about working class concerns.
I lean to "oblivious" argument. People inherently see things through their own experience.
Back in the 80s I took some classes that tried to break through the bubble (especially funny that it was MIT where I like to joke "if you don't arrive arrogant they'll beat it into you").* This was just before the CMC machine tools arrived so we were working on WWII surplus Bridgeport mills and the like. And we were sent down (literally in the basement of building 35 IIRC) to work on them under the supervision of the folks in blue who were all polite but also unstinting in their criticism (in my case -- I deserved it!). After a few sessions of this, in lecture we were reminded that "you'll be up in the air conditioned design shop sending prints down for these guys to build. They may only have a high education but they are at lest as smart as you guys, often smarter. If you send something stupid to them you'll hear about it". It was a good lesson.
* This is actually an exaggeration: in my experience nice people continued to be nice. But MIT does have quite a few jerks, not all of them intentionally so.
I attended a top-20 US University and many of my classmates and friends had multimillionaire parents & fell into the "oblivious" camp, (like telling me $50k income for an entire family was upper middle class)...
BUT their upbringing, the media they consume, and the reinforcement of beliefs through their social echo chamber makes it insanely hard to change their "obliviousness", to the point where it's not so innocent anymore - more like willful ignorance.
I always assume most are just oblivious, given the fact that the Democratic Party still tries to identify as a worker-first party. That’s rapidly changing with the rise of the modern progressive movement, DSA and the like.
Part of the problem is the two-party system, which essentially ensures that control remains between the Dems and GOP. This is why so many presidential elections wind up being contests of the least-worst option.
It’s also why some positions that should be fairly common are effectively impossible to express. For single payer healthcare, against the death penalty, and anti-abortion? You have no good candidates. Pro union, but also for stronger anti-illegal-immigration measures? Ditto. And so on.
Is it right for Piketty to assert that the Democratic Party was a homogeneous whole in the 60's? What exactly was Daley doing at Chicago in 1968 in the interests of social democracy? You may as well claim that the Democrats transitioned from the party of the South due to unforeseen Goldwater-shaped factors.
The Democratic party has always been an unhappy coalition between capitalists and workers with diametrically opposed material interests. But in the 60s and 70s there was an extremely militant labor movement and the balance of power between those two groups was shifted a lot (although political control was never given up).
this is why i define the middle class as the middle 3 quintiles of wealth rather than some nebulous standard of living, the latter of which can be manipulated more easily for political ends.
it's more obvious then to see that the 20-80% middle class standard of living has unambigously become more stressed, debt-laden, fearful, and immobile over the last 50 years, while the 1% has become much freer in all dimensions.
we need to bring that back into balance (which is not perfectly equal distributions by the way).
We just had a great illustration of that effect in Germany:
Friedrich Merz, a politician of Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, but purged by her years ago, is trying to become next party chief and chancellor.
He is a board member of Blackrock. A lobbyist, and a successful business lawyer. He owns private airplanes.
Yet, in a much laughed about interview, he claimed to belong to the "upper middle class".
If you can't live off the interest generated by your assets, and need to work to eat and keep a roof over your head, you're either working class or part of the middle class. The VP pulling in half a million is assuredly in the upper middle class, even if they make more money than 99% of people.
In a capitalist society, class is determined by ownership of, and your relationship to, capital.
An anecdote, but, most of my closest friends definitely believe they are poor; most of their friends that I've met also believe they're poor. I honestly haven't met too many people that believe they're "lower" middle class.
Conversely, except in SV, everyone I know that pulls over $300k thinks they're rich.
I've witnessed two modes at work here. One is elites deciding that since their sympathies are in the right places, they must know what the concerns of the working class are. Since they're better educated, they're also clearly best equipped to address those concerns!
The other is highly educated people feeling economically unprivileged and concluding that this now means they are the working class and what's in their interests is what's in the interests of the working class.
Both are misguided. The former leads to patronizing policy, the latter selfish. The best example I can think of for the latter is student loan forgiveness - lots of educational elites have student loans, comparatively little of the working class does.
> The other is highly educated people feeling economically unprivileged and concluding that this now means they are the working class
Well said. I cringe a little whenever I hear a complaint like "we're the first generation who won't be as well off as our parents", usually from educated young adults who've never known what it's like to have your utilities shut off, or not know where your next week of meals is coming from.
I don't mean to trivialize issues like health care costs, student debt, or general economic anxiety; those problems are real, and go far beyond finger-wagging admonitions to "stop wasting money on lattes and experiences". But there's absolutely a conflation by many young college graduates that because they face uphill economic challenges (relative to their middle-class norms), that they must be in the same category as the hand-to-mouth working class. To the extent that creates political solidarity, great; but quite often, it belies selfishness and entitlement, with no awareness of, or gratitude for, much better they have it than the majority of the planet.
(Full disclosure: I have a bit of a grudge against twenty-somethings at the moment, for talking a big game, and then failing to show up to the primaries this year.)
This happened because, while the Republican Party represents the same old interests, the increase in inequality forced a change in the Democratic Party. The bills were being paid by progressive elites, with high salaries and linked to big corporations. Low-wage earners, increasingly losing their jobs to other countries, felt as having lost their influence in the party.
Open borders are only in favour by a scant few individuals, and is in no way a standard position of the left. This idea is a lie told by right-wing propagandists.
Open borders is anti-capitalist because it allows labor to move with the same liberty as capital, so it can help reduce the ability of capitalists to find deals. Without other policies it is atomizing and ineffective, but there is a good moral argument for it in that invisible lines shouldn't hamper freedom of movement for people. Nations are fake.
The socialist left is against free trade and outsourcing. Period. We are internationalist and support trade with countries that will raise their labor conditions to parity. We also support anti-capitalist struggles abroad.
Krugman liked Piketty's previous book (Captail-21C), but concluded this one needed some more editing:
> The bottom line: I really wanted to like “Capital and Ideology,” but have to acknowledge that it’s something of a letdown. There are interesting ideas and analyses scattered through the book, but they get lost in the sheer volume of dubiously related material. In the end, I’m not even sure what the book’s message is. That can’t be a good thing.
I once went to a talk by Nassim Nicholas Taleb after the publication of his "Skin in the Game". He said the way to make a book last is to stuff it full of ideas, stories, and wander around. A focused book doesn't last. Take it as you will.
Krugman also claimed in the same article that Capital in the 20th century was not fully read by most "Like A Brief History of Time".
He is right that Piketty's first book is probably just worth it for the introduction and most non-economists never read the rest, but if he cant get through A Brief History of Time then he's got other problems. Hawking made that book very readable and accessible!
But I still think any account of the woeful separation between the Democratic Party and the common people which ignores the rise of the pro-life movement has to be incomplete. Piketty thus misrepresents those who are concerned about the prevalence of destructive beliefs among the working class:
>“The problem” with the story of a bottom-up defection “is not just that it depends on the notion that the disadvantaged classes are by their very essence permanently racist...”
But racism, while extant, is not the most significant ideological issue that separates the elites from the working class, nor can it reasonably explain their disagreements with Democrat policy -- current anti-racist policy is laughably weak, and elites are not consistently anti-racist. That award must certainly go to religion, not racism.
That an elite who bemoans the disconnection between the elites and the working class could write a book about ideology which largely ignores the predominant ideology among the working class in Western countries is painfully ironic. Ignore this correlation at your peril:
One could argue, of course, that the pro-life movement has been cultivated and manipulated for the benefit of capital. But it would be better to actually write the argument. Such a key step should not be left as an exercise to the reader.
It has always been hard to reconcile the rhetoric that labels the “Democrats” as “elites” who are against the “working class” or “under class”. Especially as the grandson of sharecroppers and “maids” and a relative of many other Black folk who would, in terms of wealth and household income, be in the “underclass”.
As an exercise, started reading the French edition — I guess even poor Black folk can be “elites”
I was watching a documentary[1] about Sweden's shift away from social democracy in the 70's/80's time-frame that Piketty talks about.
From the way it sounds, the program of social democracy nearly destroyed the country. I would take Piketty's nostalgia for those times with a grain of salt.
I have a theory that lessons learned by humanity are quickly forgotten after a few generations and thus we are condemned to trying the same old ideas (with slight tweaks) again until the current generation figures out they don't work.
Conversely, sometimes constraints and situations are different enough that "failed" ideas might succeed under the new constraints. The world is not a static place, and the environments in which many lessons were learned may not be relevant anymore.
This documentary from the first 4 minutes looks very low effort. You can gather any number of “experts” on any given topic to give you any form of a story you’d like to tell...
Also the “social democracy” you talk about is still there. University education is still free. Social democratic programs have not been completely destroyed.
>This documentary from the first 4 minutes looks very low effort.
Don't know exactly what you mean by that, but OK.
> You can gather any number of “experts” on any given topic to give you any form of a story you’d like to tell...
Trivially true. Are the arguments sound? Are the basic facts correct? Those are the questions that matter.
> Also the “social democracy” you talk about is still there.
Arguable, but in any case certainly not to the degree it was in the 70's. Why?
> University education is still free. Social democratic programs have not been completely destroyed.
And yet the documentary claims that there is still a very high-level of student debt in Sweden. Not because of the education, but in order to subsist while going to college.
> We the Internet TV isn't your average comedy news show: we're equal-opportunity offenders with new videos every week on current events, politics, and culture. You might call us a safe space for satire. Or you might call us something else in the comments section. We make fun of everyone—especially you—so don't say we didn't warn you!
Tl;dw documentary, but that's not a very common interpretation. That was the time when the nordic countries built their succesful system that's in place today and is widely held in high regard.
There can be too much of everything and there was too much of "social democracy" in the 70s. Author Astrid Lindgren had to pay more than 100 % tax and wrote the "childrens story" / opinion piece "Pomperipossa in Monismania"
> Tl;dw documentary, but that's not a very common interpretation.
Perhaps, but something still has to explain why the nordic countries are considerably less socialist than they were in the 70's.
> That was the time when the nordic countries built their succesful system that's in place today and is widely held in high regard.
The argument in the documentary is that the wealth and success was built prior to the period of social democracy, and that abandoning the system was the necessary step to avoid collapse.
Continuing with wikipedia:
Sweden is a competitive and highly liberalized, open market economy. The vast majority of Swedish enterprises are privately owned and market-oriented, combined with a strong welfare state involving transfer payments involving up to three-fifths of GDP.[27][28] In 2014 the percent of national wealth owned by the government was 24%.[29]
So again this is not the Soviet type of socialism(which I've lived through) but strong welfare state is definitely part of Sweden.
If anyone enjoys reading about income inequality, I also recommend Joseph Stiglitz' book called "The Price of Inequality". He speaks of inequality more from an American perspective and he's one of the thought leaders I personally like to hear from.
I am a staunch Capitalist and I'd like to see another great era of America ingenuity and invention. I think the path to solve inequality comes from creating wealth and solving big global issues in energy, health and transportation.
Although I haven't read Captial and Ideology, Piketty seems to be situated in a weird place, as I gathered by his previous book. He isn't critical of capitalism as such[0] - as economists like Sen, Roemer, Kliman and Veneziani are, but on the other hand he is aware of the transparent ideological forces which shape the way we view the economy and capital. The content of this book, between social, historical and economic axes seems closer to Marx than Samuelson - and it's refreshing in a climate that seems to take the concepts under investigation for granted. I look forward to reading it.
> Piketty seems to be situated in a weird place, as I gathered by his previous book. He isn't critical of capitalism as such[0] - as economists like Sen, Roemer, Kliman and Veneziani are, but on the other hand he is aware of the transparent ideological forces which shape the way we view the economy and capital.
That weird place is simply social democracy. It seems to be unpopular because it is essentially the "centrism" of the capitalism/socialism debate, and everyone hates centrists these days.
I think that's an overly generous characterization of social democracy - it only dodges the critique from right-libertarians concerning property, taxes and the role of government, and it dodges the critique from left-libertarians on capital, alienation and social domination.
It's much easier (and more historically accurate) to see social democracy, socialism and capitalism on the same axis, and not to think that social democracy transcends all hitherto established political and economic thought by The Right Choice as if by default.
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As I understand it in the book, property is not, and should not be seen as, a 100% inalienable human right. If it was so, it would be completely fair that slave-owners in Haiti and Santo Domingo were paid to forego slavery, when slavery was abolished. It was seen as a compensation for this new law that reduced the value of their property: slaves. Of course, slaves themselves were not compensated. Since they were the main beneficiaries of this new law, they actually had to pay for it in some cases. This is actually what happened.
In the USA, there were discussions about a similar outcome, but the sheer enormity of the needed compensation made it impossible This was one big reason that lead to the civil war.
This is the kind of weird, morally unacceptable reasoning about property rights that you will run into if you accept property as a all-powerful, unconstestable principle.
I think we ended up with private property because the alternatives have been tried and they are worse (e.g. tragedy of the commons).
https://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/OstromSJ...
E.g freedom to roam in the Nordic countries is based on the idea that it is unthinkable that we should allow people's access to nature to be monopolised.
I don't thinl it is all or nothing. Private property is overall a very good idea and principle, and Piketty says that too. But when someone sees property it as inalienable right, at any level, is a problem.
For example, if one person talks about a tax based on wealth, two people can have a healthy disagreement, and discuss how to implement.
But when someone does not event want to consider it... because it would supposedly bring us back to communism dark ages, that is basic ideology in action, not rational thinking.
Malthus does not stand up to scrutiny.
There's two distinct concepts being confused as one. The first concept is property rights in general. This concept is singular and correlated with the ideas of ownership and territory. This is may be a universal concept and may be a good candidate for designation as a "natural right". The second concept is the classification of what counts as property. This concept is numerous because we have to actually enumerate everything that counts as property.
Slavery is exceptional because it counts people as property. The error is not with the first concept of property but an error of the second kind, an error of misclassification. Owning a farm and working the land is ok. Owning a farm and owning slaves to work the same plot is immoral.
We see this reified during Reconstruction with Sherman's promise of forty acres and a mule. Where former slaves would be compensated by being granted property rights to the land they worked. Property rights were to be their salvation. As we all know that didn't happen. And a century of systematically denying the rights (including property rights) of their descendants (or anyone who looked like them) is the major reason for the disparities between black Americans and other racial groups.
However, quite a few individuals do seem to view property rights as inviolable, and reject the exceptions you enumerated.
At the time of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were in agreement about playing down the protection of property. Franklin saw property as a "creature of society"[1]. This is why they changed the language of the Declaration of Independency to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". The last is not meant to be a stand-in for "property" or "estate," it actually derives from a separate clause in the Virginia Declaration of Rights[2]: "life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." Jefferson intentionally dropped the property clause in the Declaration of independence, reflecting how he saw property: not an inalienable right.
Entering into the early US, the majority of fiscal revenue was based off of taxing property (there was no income tax). This aligns with Franklin and Jefferson in basically saying that the state has a claim to the property that is possessed by citizens.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_... [2] The Virginia Declaration of Rights was an influence on Jefferson's Declaration of Independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...
The average person has no ability to connect past and future. Most people, when tested, struggle to connect yesterday with today. Typical people don't save enough, don't plan and don't risk assess. If society gives an inch on property rights as an all-powerful, uncontestable principle then how exactly are we supposed to give people who plan ahead enough power to influence the flow of society?
For example, we're currently facing what is probably a 1:100 year pandemic. There are specialists out there (actuaries, some entrepreneurs, some doctors) who are comfortable with thinking about 1:100 year pandemics. If property rights were truly unbreachable, those people would quite happily build up a strategic supply of masks, tinned food, etc, etc ready for deployment in a crisis. Their families would make out like bandits once every hundred years; we'd be minting people as wealthy as Croesus. They don't do that. Because it would be stupid to. Because in a crisis, property rights break down a bit and it would be quickly identified that they don't 'need' supplies for 100,000 people and they would be pressured to give up supplies at an economically irrational price.
Nigh unconstestable property rights and the ability to act like a bastard in the short term are critical tools for linking the past and the future. Break that at your peril. I know 95% of people don't care about that link as much as they'd like to; but the 5% who use it are the people who accomplish literally all the infrastructure creation and planning. You won't miss it until it is gone; even then most people don't seem to understand what is happening if the communist failures we see every decade or so are any guide.
I would contest the position that so few are able to make that link. Perhaps in the abstract they are not, but many people are able to conceptualize that link in concrete terms through their children. If people see a way that they can ensure a better life for their kids, they will often make the necessary choices to bring that about.
To consider your example, in the current crisis, there are plenty of people who did not link anything from past to present, but who do show up in hospitals evry day, help people and save lives. They have a much bigger impact on society than the smart planner who could link past and present, but they see no rewards for it. Property rights do very little for those people. See how first responders of 9/11 got treated as another example.
I am afraid that incentivising property rights to absurd levels such as protecting slave-owners through compensation, or protecting people stock-piling masks does not do much for society, even in the long run.
There are ways to do it in an organised, moderate, law-abiding, rational and fair way though. To me, using words like "communism" is just a red-herring to avoid a rational discussion.
This is great point. I see this on social media commentary all the time and wonder if educated elites being merely oblivious or totally asshole about working class concerns.
These people are not ignoring the plights of the poorer working class; they are altogether completely blind of it. They know that 3 million people just filed for unemployment, but they only know about it as an abstract statistic. The human cost is entirely lost on them.
[0] https://crooked.com/articles/we-are-doing-fine-coronavirus/
In a thread on HN someone commented that the 3m unemployment figure was only 1% of the population. I had to take a moment to let that sink in.
It makes me worried about a future dominated by technocrats.
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"So we need to make sure that our economic recovery does not come at the expense of those who can least afford it or who are just getting started in life: Hard-working young people in service industries and retail that are being decimated by layoffs; all those who are hustling to make a living in the gig economy, and those who were already struggling to get by before this crisis, who are drowning in credit card debt or student loans, and who now are in even greater need of a lifeline."
When I scroll further down the page I can see a fundraiser for readers to support "people and communities who are more vulnerable and need extra support during this time" including the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Restaurant Workers Community Foundation, and One Fair Wage. Apparently readers and podcast listeners have contributed about $650 000 which at least from an Australian perspective seems non-trivial.
Finally, one of their most recent articles (I'm going through the articles because I'm not going to listen to the podcasts) on the politics of a pandemic titled "How Democrats Should Navigate Pandemic Politics" talks about the importance of directly supporting workers including with "paid-leave provision that’s much bigger than the one the White House watered down in the initial House bill, along with a broad Emergency Unemployment Insurance provision".
I can't reconcile all this stuff with being blind to it. It looks like the founders of this site were in the white house while the medicaid expansion was passed which, at least from an outside perspective, seems to be the most important legislation of the past few decades for the poorer working class.
Even that article you linked to doesn't seem like a damning indictment. If you read it a bit more closely it's at least partially a joke article where the writer talks about the resilience of the human spirit while writing on the walls in lipstick, getting gum in her hair, and napping in the middle of sentences. If it was a manifesto of values I'd agree with you that a lack of focus on unemployed people undergoing hardship would be notable, but it's not. It's just a joke.
I lean to "oblivious" argument. People inherently see things through their own experience.
Back in the 80s I took some classes that tried to break through the bubble (especially funny that it was MIT where I like to joke "if you don't arrive arrogant they'll beat it into you").* This was just before the CMC machine tools arrived so we were working on WWII surplus Bridgeport mills and the like. And we were sent down (literally in the basement of building 35 IIRC) to work on them under the supervision of the folks in blue who were all polite but also unstinting in their criticism (in my case -- I deserved it!). After a few sessions of this, in lecture we were reminded that "you'll be up in the air conditioned design shop sending prints down for these guys to build. They may only have a high education but they are at lest as smart as you guys, often smarter. If you send something stupid to them you'll hear about it". It was a good lesson.
* This is actually an exaggeration: in my experience nice people continued to be nice. But MIT does have quite a few jerks, not all of them intentionally so.
BUT their upbringing, the media they consume, and the reinforcement of beliefs through their social echo chamber makes it insanely hard to change their "obliviousness", to the point where it's not so innocent anymore - more like willful ignorance.
Part of the problem is the two-party system, which essentially ensures that control remains between the Dems and GOP. This is why so many presidential elections wind up being contests of the least-worst option.
Even the corporate VP making half a million dollars thinks she's middle class.
it's more obvious then to see that the 20-80% middle class standard of living has unambigously become more stressed, debt-laden, fearful, and immobile over the last 50 years, while the 1% has become much freer in all dimensions.
we need to bring that back into balance (which is not perfectly equal distributions by the way).
Friedrich Merz, a politician of Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, but purged by her years ago, is trying to become next party chief and chancellor.
He is a board member of Blackrock. A lobbyist, and a successful business lawyer. He owns private airplanes.
Yet, in a much laughed about interview, he claimed to belong to the "upper middle class".
In a capitalist society, class is determined by ownership of, and your relationship to, capital.
Conversely, except in SV, everyone I know that pulls over $300k thinks they're rich.
The other is highly educated people feeling economically unprivileged and concluding that this now means they are the working class and what's in their interests is what's in the interests of the working class.
Both are misguided. The former leads to patronizing policy, the latter selfish. The best example I can think of for the latter is student loan forgiveness - lots of educational elites have student loans, comparatively little of the working class does.
Well said. I cringe a little whenever I hear a complaint like "we're the first generation who won't be as well off as our parents", usually from educated young adults who've never known what it's like to have your utilities shut off, or not know where your next week of meals is coming from.
I don't mean to trivialize issues like health care costs, student debt, or general economic anxiety; those problems are real, and go far beyond finger-wagging admonitions to "stop wasting money on lattes and experiences". But there's absolutely a conflation by many young college graduates that because they face uphill economic challenges (relative to their middle-class norms), that they must be in the same category as the hand-to-mouth working class. To the extent that creates political solidarity, great; but quite often, it belies selfishness and entitlement, with no awareness of, or gratitude for, much better they have it than the majority of the planet.
(Full disclosure: I have a bit of a grudge against twenty-somethings at the moment, for talking a big game, and then failing to show up to the primaries this year.)
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1.) For the welfare of the worker, social programs, universal healthcare, "standard of living"
2.) Open borders immigration, free trade, outsourcing, and other ultra capitalist policies.
The point is workers elsewhere is equally entitled to support and liberty.
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The socialist left is against free trade and outsourcing. Period. We are internationalist and support trade with countries that will raise their labor conditions to parity. We also support anti-capitalist struggles abroad.
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* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/books/review/capital-and-...
Krugman liked Piketty's previous book (Captail-21C), but concluded this one needed some more editing:
> The bottom line: I really wanted to like “Capital and Ideology,” but have to acknowledge that it’s something of a letdown. There are interesting ideas and analyses scattered through the book, but they get lost in the sheer volume of dubiously related material. In the end, I’m not even sure what the book’s message is. That can’t be a good thing.
He is right that Piketty's first book is probably just worth it for the introduction and most non-economists never read the rest, but if he cant get through A Brief History of Time then he's got other problems. Hawking made that book very readable and accessible!
But I still think any account of the woeful separation between the Democratic Party and the common people which ignores the rise of the pro-life movement has to be incomplete. Piketty thus misrepresents those who are concerned about the prevalence of destructive beliefs among the working class:
>“The problem” with the story of a bottom-up defection “is not just that it depends on the notion that the disadvantaged classes are by their very essence permanently racist...”
But racism, while extant, is not the most significant ideological issue that separates the elites from the working class, nor can it reasonably explain their disagreements with Democrat policy -- current anti-racist policy is laughably weak, and elites are not consistently anti-racist. That award must certainly go to religion, not racism.
That an elite who bemoans the disconnection between the elites and the working class could write a book about ideology which largely ignores the predominant ideology among the working class in Western countries is painfully ironic. Ignore this correlation at your peril:
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/FT_18...
One could argue, of course, that the pro-life movement has been cultivated and manipulated for the benefit of capital. But it would be better to actually write the argument. Such a key step should not be left as an exercise to the reader.
From the way it sounds, the program of social democracy nearly destroyed the country. I would take Piketty's nostalgia for those times with a grain of salt.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcX6BUZlEw4
Also the “social democracy” you talk about is still there. University education is still free. Social democratic programs have not been completely destroyed.
Don't know exactly what you mean by that, but OK.
> You can gather any number of “experts” on any given topic to give you any form of a story you’d like to tell...
Trivially true. Are the arguments sound? Are the basic facts correct? Those are the questions that matter.
> Also the “social democracy” you talk about is still there.
Arguable, but in any case certainly not to the degree it was in the 70's. Why?
> University education is still free. Social democratic programs have not been completely destroyed.
And yet the documentary claims that there is still a very high-level of student debt in Sweden. Not because of the education, but in order to subsist while going to college.
I'm not sure if I'd call that a documentary. The makes describe themsevles as "comedy news show" who are "equal-opportunity offenders":
https://www.wetheinternet.tv/:
> ABOUT US
> We the Internet TV isn't your average comedy news show: we're equal-opportunity offenders with new videos every week on current events, politics, and culture. You might call us a safe space for satire. Or you might call us something else in the comments section. We make fun of everyone—especially you—so don't say we didn't warn you!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomperipossa_in_Monismania
Next election the social democrats lost it for the first time in 40 years.
Perhaps, but something still has to explain why the nordic countries are considerably less socialist than they were in the 70's.
> That was the time when the nordic countries built their succesful system that's in place today and is widely held in high regard.
The argument in the documentary is that the wealth and success was built prior to the period of social democracy, and that abandoning the system was the necessary step to avoid collapse.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute
Continuing with wikipedia: Sweden is a competitive and highly liberalized, open market economy. The vast majority of Swedish enterprises are privately owned and market-oriented, combined with a strong welfare state involving transfer payments involving up to three-fifths of GDP.[27][28] In 2014 the percent of national wealth owned by the government was 24%.[29]
So again this is not the Soviet type of socialism(which I've lived through) but strong welfare state is definitely part of Sweden.
I am a staunch Capitalist and I'd like to see another great era of America ingenuity and invention. I think the path to solve inequality comes from creating wealth and solving big global issues in energy, health and transportation.
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[0] There is a debate between Piketty and Marx-leaning philosopher/economist Frederic Lordon in French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDY3aczWOd0
That weird place is simply social democracy. It seems to be unpopular because it is essentially the "centrism" of the capitalism/socialism debate, and everyone hates centrists these days.
It's much easier (and more historically accurate) to see social democracy, socialism and capitalism on the same axis, and not to think that social democracy transcends all hitherto established political and economic thought by The Right Choice as if by default.