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Reddit mentions of Capital in the Twenty First Century

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Reddit mentions: 71

We found 71 Reddit mentions of Capital in the Twenty First Century. Here are the top ones.

Capital in the Twenty First Century
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Found 71 comments on Capital in the Twenty First Century:

u/Lt_Rooney · 2596 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

The history is simple. The minimum wage was originally passed with the intention of providing a full-time worker the capacity to support himself and a family. The federal minimum wage in the United States was set at $0.25 per hour in 1938. It was not tied to inflation and has to be increased by law. The term "Act of Congress" is often used to describe a massive and nearly impossible action. In this case it is both a literal and figurative truth.

There are a number of commenters here who seem to think that the minimum wage was ever intended to be other than you describe it. They are wrong. The minimum wage is just that, the minimum acceptable wage that a full-time worker can make and be able to subsist without assistance.
> No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. —President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933

The minimum wage was established to ensure that all workers in the US would be able to live independently on their wages. The existence of a minimum wage provides all other workers with useful bargaining leverage, increasing wages throughout. Historically this typically results in a redistribution of wealth from owners to workers (not a commensurate increase in prices as some here have claimed), which always results in an overall increase in economic growth as workers are also consumers.

In the US minimum wage has become stagnant, failing to reflect inflation. A large part of that is the misonceptions throughout this thread. Minimum wage is not "earned solely by teenagers and college students for beer money." Nor can any reasonable person suppose that anyone doesn't desere to "live comfortably on 40 hours a week."

These, fairly recent, attitudes have been encouraged by business owners who have little incentive to pay their workers a reasonable wage, so long as there is an army of unemployed and underemployed willing to do the same job. The minimum wage subverts that desire.
Simply put, an owner pays a little as he can for the labor. The rarer a laborer's skills are (not how skilled or useful he is, the owner never pays anyone he doesn't have to) the more he can charge because he is difficult to replace. Minimum wage establishes a floor, as do overtime requirements and other fair labor standards.

The minimum wage has nothing to do with whether or not someone "deserves" to be paid for their work. Your boss will never pay you more than he has to, that is the central premise of a free market. A minimum wage says that no matter how little he wants to pay you, he should still pay you enough to live on. It is also simple economic sense, it saves money that would go to public welfare to support people who are employed. It is a decision by society as a whole that no one who is willing and able to work should find themselves in poverty.

All that being said, the shareholder prefers that money goes to his bottom line, and not into wages. So he fights any increase tooth and nail. The misconceptions throughout this thread, and the insane anger focused on those one rung lower on the socio-economic ladder, are one tool to avoid it. Another is spreading misinformation, also found in this thread, to lawmakers; claiming that increasing minimum wage dampens, rather than strengthens, the local economy. And the last is simple apathy, since the minimum wage is not tied to inflation it becomes increasingly trivial as time goes by. After a while it becomes, as it has now, a poverty wage.

EDIT:
Oh my poor inbox. Ok, I'm going to try to address some of the biggest responses.

  1. I used the term "inflation" incorrectly, or at least not in the way traditionally used in economics. I also referenced minimum wage which began in the US in 1938, ignoring the 1933 law to which the FDR quote refers. I left it out because it was struck down by the Supreme Court, while the Court upheld the 1938 law. For the same reason I used the term "inflation" rather than "cost of living" or another, more accurate metric. This is ELI5, I didn't want to confuse the issue and stuck with a term I thought everyone was familiar with, rather than explaining the difference between the two, which would have done little to answer OP's question.

  2. A sizeable percentage of minimum wage workers are young adults or retirees who don't need the income. But a sizeable percentage aren't. Someone, attempting to claim I mischaracterized things, acually supported my argument. By his numbers 54% of minimum wage earners are in the young adult bracket. Which indicates that 46% are not. He handwaves this away, claiming not all of them need that income. I submit that not all of the young adults don't need that income. Just because you're 24 doesn't make you a white, middle-class, college student looking for beer money.

  3. I am not an economist. I am someone with an interest in history and political philosophy, of which economics is a child discipline. My writing is not academic, but neither is what I say innaccurate or misleading. My statements are political, in the sense that they relate to modern policy, and they are influenced by passion. I have never seen any argument against a minimum living wage that is not either intellectually dishonest, or ethically abhorrent. I will admit that I have seen many that were both.

  4. Some kind fellow has given me gold. Thank you generous stranger, for paying what you could have for free. In itself proving that there are counter-examples to my argument that in a free market people will pay as little for labor as they can get away with. This, however, is merely the exception which prove the rule. In the absence of strong worker protection laws or powerful unions most employers view their workers as expendable resources, not people, to be procured at as little cost as possible and disposed of at convenience. I lament that we've become comfortable with that view.

    EDIT 2:

    Okay, this has blown up way to far. It needs to stop. This isn't a particularly well written or researched essay on the minimum wage. It's not an academic article on the subject, or even an editorial. I only wrote this because I was royally pissed off that every other response in this thread was shitting all over low wage workers, claiming that everyone who was paid minimum wage was either a teenager or a lazy failure in life who deserved nothing. So I pulled some references from Wikipedia and hacked together a "for" response in the form of a short persuasive essay (in the sense that the essay is intended to persuay, not necessarily that it succeeded).

  • Look, if this is really interesting to you here's John Oliver giving much more eloquent, or at least entertaining, in explanation why a minimum living wage is a good thing.
  • For further viewing here he is on income inequality.
  • If you know absolutely nothing about economics and want to know if I'm full of shit, here's a great introductory book, which assumes you know absolutely nothing.
  • If you do know a little, or a lot, about economics try reading Adam Smith's famous text on the subject, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Or try another great text, which may be more relevant to our current discussion, Karl Marx's opus, Capital. Best of all, since they're both public domain, you can read them online for free.
  • If those are both too outdated for you then by all means please consider the modern, popular work by Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
  • As long as I'm suggesting a Christmas reading list, please consider my favorite book and the one I try desperately to emulate in my writing and personal philosophy, Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man.

    If you still think I'm full of shit, if you don't like my Christmas reading list, if you have another magical panacea, or hate poor people, or hate rich people, or want to observe that minimum wage is a band-aid for some bigger social issue; please start another thread. This is crazy. There's no way I can even see your response anymore.

    The TLDR, ELIL5 of the entire post is this: Minimum wage in most places in the US is higher than the federal minimum wage, but still not always enough to live on. Minimum wage was supposed to be a living wage, but increasing it requires an act of law even though the cost of living goes up every year. Since low wages mean low costs many business leaders and investors like a low minimum wage, so they fight efforts to raise it. As time goes on what was a living wage becomes too low to stay one. I think that's bad.

    And because everyone's gotten really riled up, here's a scene from my favourite Christmas movie.
u/darien_gap · 105 pointsr/politics

In short, if we don't reverse the trend of increasing inequality, there's nothing to rule out becoming a society structurally similar to 19th century Europe, except the peasants will work in cubes and restaurants instead of fields. The top centile will own almost all means of wealth creation and the vast majority of income. As well as having virtually total power over government. No more upward mobility, meritocracy, or representative democracy. A new aristocracy cemented in place by economic feedback loops and inheritance, so stable that it will only collapse from some big shock like world war or popular uprising.

Caveat: I'm only half way through the book... Smart people of reddit who've reddit, did I get the ending right?

u/S_K_I · 47 pointsr/politics

Richard Wolff recently said something that responds to your talking point:

>"Capitalism has been here for 400 years. It has produced ever growing inequality. Periodically inequality sometimes stops and even gets reversed. The Great Depression was a reversal. The mass of poeple intervene politically. They revolt. But then, even the successful reformers fail to change the basic system. The underlying dynamic undoes the very reforms that were achieved. "To do reforms in a capitalist system but to leave a system in place, is to leave the mechanisms in place that undoes the reforms."

And using my own interpretation with what he said to your scenario, if you are actually able to shrink the big corporations, are you implying that Capitalism today as we know it needs to drown and something else replace it?

Addendum: I want to add Mr. Woff's quote is a contextual summary of Tomas Pikkety and his long time collaborator Emmanuel Saez published work on inequality called, "Capital In The Twenty-First Century".

u/fathan · 31 pointsr/TrueReddit

The hero worship of Marxist economics is largely misplaced and unproductive. Marx was ignorant of many intellectual breakthroughs in economics that occurred between his writing of The Communist Manifesto and Capital. Take, for example, the marginal revolution compared to Marx's theory of prices. No economist pays any attention to Marx's ideas on price theory, or his other "economic" contributions. Other things that people would like to credit to Marx, eg a focus on income inequality, is better credited to previous economists like David Ricardo.

Marxist economics failed to account for the core role of economics--the allocation of scare resources with alternate uses. Instead Marx simply asserted that a communist economy could achieve the same efficiency with more equitable distribution of gains, but without explaining how this could be done. He similarly ignored the tradeoff between worker's quality of life and efficiency/growth--this isn't to say that we have the right balance now, but that Marx didn't even consider the question. Every time Marx's ideas have been put into practice they have proved a dismal failure and demanded an immediate reversal to more traditional (ie "capitalist") means of organizing production. See Lenin's New Economic Policy and Deng's economic reforms. The tragic irony is that Marxist economies tend to cause the most suffering for the people they are intended to help, as the elite are perfectly capable of protecting themselves regardless of circumstances.

Marx's contributions to history are significant and his political contributions are undeniable, but we shouldn't lionize his economic theories simply by association. His contributions to economics as practiced today are non-existent. Marxist critiques of capitalism were disproven within his own lifetime. Indeed by the publication of Capital, wages of the working class were increasing. A lot of casual Marxists tend to think he predicted that "capitalism was bad" and then cherry pick periods that loosely agree with this understanding. Marxism actually makes much more specific predictions about the way the world will evolve that were false--for example, where and how the first communist revolution would take place. We shouldn't lose sight of that.

Economics is complicated and we shouldn't reduce it to hero worship of some past figure who "proved capitalism wrong". A recent book that focuses on the injustices of economic inequality with a far more sophisticated treatment is Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty.

u/afraid_of_ponies · 21 pointsr/EnoughLibertarianSpam

Essentially cons/libertarians troll Amazon and review books that they don't read.

This is not more apparent than all the one-star reviews of Piketty's, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. They simply give it one-star without reading it, call it Marxist propaganda, and tell us how discredited and dangerous Picketty is.

This works well on their low-info base, but it only drives away reasonable and intelligent people.

u/rumblestiltsken · 15 pointsr/australia

In my mind this is the actual ideological war that is currently being fought, but it never gets too much of a discussion. Glad books like Capital and Reich's new documentary are prosecuting the case.

This issue is the clear separation between the parties. This is all the data we have on equality in Australia, red is for ALP governments and blue for LNP governments.

Since 1980, the ALP have run an even keel on GINI, which is the accepted measure for inequality. They haven't improved equality of income, but it hasn't gotten worse.

Since 1980 the LNP have seen inequality increase rapidly, with GINI up 0.05, making us the 9th most unequal country in the OECD (out of 34 countries).

If GINI hadn't gone up (ie ALP was in power and maintained their trend), we would be around the tenth most equal, jumping around 15 countries or half the OECD.

Of course, as you can see, this means we have a centrist and a right party, which means inequality will always go up over time. The ALP have ceded the battle, in effect. Perhaps why the Greens vote is creeping up, along with the vote for the populist right, like PUP?

The good news? The last time inequality was this bad (US graph just because we suck at this topic, it is relevant here for a number of reasons) was the start of the Progressive Era, which resulted in more progressive taxation, a focus on education, healthcare and scientific research, exposure of political corruption, big leaps in equality for women and racial/ethnic minorities and so on.

Is the same happening now? The conversation has already started, with books like Capital. The Occupy movement and March in March were huge, and while the media basically ignored them or criticised them, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets doesn't happen for nothing.

Even some MPs are talking about it.

Time for a New Progressive movement?

u/theredmanspeaks · 13 pointsr/politics

That Piketty book really is a fascinating read though. For those interested, it's called 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century''. It covers lots of basic economic tenets, and makes a good case on his global capital tax theory, which seeks to quell the issues inherent with Capitalism that give rise to an increased disparity in income and wealth distribution.

Good food for thought.

u/igonjukja · 11 pointsr/worldnews

If you really want to understand why this is happening there's a widely praised book by an economist called Thomas Piketty that summarizes it like this:

-For most of human history the returns on capital exceeded economic growth. Because of this if you had capital to invest you were pretty sure to do a lot better than if you had only your labor to give. Economic inequality was the status quo. From a recent interview with Piketty in the NYT:
>Over the 1700-2012 period, world output has grown at 1.6 percent per year on average.
>In contrast, rates of return on capital can be 4 to 5 percent over centuries, or even higher for risky assets and high wealth portfolios. Contrarily to what Karl Marx and other believed, there is no natural reason why rates of return should fall in the long run. According to Forbes’s global billionaires list, very top wealth holders have risen at 6 to 7 percent per year over the 1987-2013 period, i.e. more than three times faster than per capita wealth and income at the world level.


-Around WWII this changed. Destruction, inflation and other crises, plus the social institutions set up after WWII in the west, caused inequality to stop rising.


-What we're finding out now is that this brief period, which lasted until the 1980s, was an anomaly. (Personally I find it interesting that this period stopped right around the time we in the U.S. and the U.K. decided we needed less regulation and government involvement in things). Things are now getting back to the way they used to be.
>U.S. inequality is now close to the levels of income concentration that prevailed in Europe around 1900-10. History suggests that this kind of inequality level is not only useless for growth, it can also lead to a capture of the political process by a tiny high-income and high-wealth elite. This directly threatens our democratic institutions and values.

The question is, what are we going to do about this?

u/pgm_01 · 10 pointsr/Connecticut

It is time to ditch conservative economic beliefs. Cutting taxes helps to collapse the middle class, government programs help maintain and expand it. Read Capital in the Twenty-First Century. We have tried conservative and neoliberal economic theories and they are proven not to work. Foley is just the latest to try to push the same broken ideas and it will lead to a predictable end, the rich get richer while the middle class gets pushed downward. While Malloy is not very good, Foley will be terrible.

u/Berning_sensation · 8 pointsr/financialindependence

> Is there anything in economic research about this?

Yes, lots. For example, Capital in the 21st Century, published in 2015, was a blockbuster work of economics.

> What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality―the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth―today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again. A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

u/Re_Re_Think · 8 pointsr/lostgeneration

Because despite huge growth in worker productivity, grow in worker wages has been stagnant. You can ignore technological and efficiency advances and blame it on overpopulation and a world facing peak oil and other peak resources (meaning less consumption would be available per person), but that hasn't stopped capital gains from going through the roof, so that doesn't make any sense.

No. The political and economic system we've tacitly settled upon is designed to concentrate wealth (which is what the phrase "the 1%" was supposed to allude to). What's happening is that everyone except the single richest person in the country is being screwed, everyone up to that just slightly less and less so the higher you go.

That's why your wage sucks.

u/billhang · 7 pointsr/philadelphia

Re: "good points" - as you surely know, the basic argument the Occupiers made has been quite clearly confirmed.

Re: "had to be reckoned with" - - just one example - - if Occupy hadn't established the one-percent-are-fucking-you narrative so firmly, Mitt Romney's "47 percent" comments would probably not have been seen so clearly as a one-percenter's hooey.

And an aside: last time we had an exchange, we were about eight comments in when you said something along the lines of, "keep typing, I don't even read your stupid shit cuz you're so wrong and dumb and I'm so right and smart haw haw." If that's still your way, let me know now - - I like a conversation, myself.

u/Randy_Newman1502 · 7 pointsr/badeconomics

A better financial history type book is the Reinhart & Rogoff one.

As long as you are building a list, let me share my to-read list after I finish reading my current book:

u/azzbla · 7 pointsr/politics

Thomas Piketty's book is what you're looking for then. It explains everything you're asking for and then some in a very readable way.

u/SammyD1st · 6 pointsr/Natalism

The answer is so obviously yes that this seems a pretty trivial criticism.

Further increases in population allow for increase economies of scale, which allow for increased specialization and therefore increased wealth. Adam Smith's parable of the pin makers doesn't work if there's not enough people who are pin makers.

If you'd like just one specific noteworthy example, I would point to Piketty's criticism that population stagnation is the major cause of income inequality.

Another good random article on this topic:
http://primacyofreason.blogspot.com/2012/01/economic-benefits-of-large-growing.html

I mean, there's lot to debate on this subject. But to merely be able to even "think" of "any problem" is a pretty low bar, that's very easy.

u/roo-ster · 6 pointsr/politics

Read this book, and you'll know.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

u/darthrevan · 6 pointsr/ABCDesis

That's my impression as well. But I wonder if the argument made in economist Thomas Piketty's recent book, that great wealth is increasingly inherited and not earned, will mean a different picture for Indian Americans today than European Americans of previous generations.

What I mean is: if Piketty is right, then it's going to be much more difficult for more recently immigrated families like Indians to amass the kind of wealth European immigrants attained over previous centuries. With much greater wealth concentration and far less economic mobility, it could be the case that Indians are going to get stuck where they're at now with a much smaller chance to move up than Europeans had when they came.

Not that Indians (on average) are in a bad spot, as you said, but shooting for something like the Walton family may now be increasingly out of reach not just for Indians but for any newer immigrants.

u/FirstAmendAnon · 5 pointsr/politics

While I do not disagree, it is Capital*

read this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

u/TheMacroEvent · 4 pointsr/Economics

This isn't exactly a novel criticism. Thomas Piketty stresses in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that economists have gone too far with mathematical models and more qualitative assessments should be used in developing models.

u/thecat12 · 4 pointsr/TechoBlanco

"Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy" sobre Anonymous. Estaba muy interesante por que, uno, describe lo que ha pasado los últimos 6 años en cuanto a seguridad en línea desde la perspectiva de Anonymous, y dos, por que me tocó vivir muchos de esos momentos en línea y en la vida real con lo de Cientología, Wikileaks, Occupy, etc. 10/10 recomendaría.
Antes de eso: "Social Physics". Dice que podemos usar "big data" para monitorear las interacciones de las personas para tomar mejores decisiones sobre como organizar nuestras empresas, organizaciones, y ciudades. Tipo chido, pero lo que argumenta sobre big data según yo puede exacerbar la desigualdad en poder que ya existe entre los "pudientes/1%/corporaciones" y el resto de la "gente común y corriente". También está el peligro de que los algoritmos que usamos para tomar decisiones no tomen en cuenta muchos factores importantes que igual pueden empeorar la disparidad económica y racial que ya existe. Pero tiene ideas muy interesantes. 8/10 léanlo si le entran a este tipo de cosas.
Siguiente: Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Trata sobre la desigualdad que existe y se ha creado con nuestro sistema económico actual. Viene muy recomendado.

u/radong01 · 4 pointsr/educationalgifs

It's true. Only 60 million make it into the top 1%, with $34,000/year. Half of that 1% (29 million) live in the US. The number comes from Branko Milanovic's work, and his book The Haves and the Have-Nots.

Here are some articles on it from well respected organizations:

http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/inequality-and-rise-global-1-great-new-paper-branko-milanovic

http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/garyshapiro/2012/05/30/we-are-the-worlds-one-percent/#7db36adf20f0

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/americans-make-up-one-half-of-the-one-percent_n_1183713.html

However, keep in mind they all cite the same source, which is Milanovic and his book, and were all written at around the same time, so I assume it was Milanovic's publisher paying a PR firm to get these written. But that's pretty much how most media works now days. So if you are still skeptical of the number, I suggest reading the book, or finding some of Milanovic's published papers and reading through the methodology used to come up with his numbers.

Another fantastic book on the subject is Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I highly recommend reading it. Picketty actually expected huge amounts of controversy when he released his book, and was surprised to find out that not many people disagreed with his methodologies and conclusions. Which is pretty scary in itself.

u/Snowpocalypse149 · 4 pointsr/intj

You hit the proverbial nail on the head. Make-work bias has been around for centuries and there is usually only temporary unemployment for those whose jobs get replaced by capital. But like you said it's not really worth worrying about at this point.
If anyone has any interest in technological advancement or capital from an economic standpoint, these are some great books to check out:

[Capital in the Twenty-First Century] (http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0ETBP81SYG4890W6R34T)


[The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/0393239357/ref=pd_sim_b_6?ie=UTF8&refRID=0N2W244G0SF4XT3Q5MDB)

[The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Lights-Tunnel-Automation-Accelerating/dp/1448659817/ref=pd_sim_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=0Q1BR5DDQRM29TZPTGBN)

u/RealFreedomAus · 3 pointsr/Anarchism

Holy crap.

The amazon reviews are hilarious.

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/product-reviews/067443000X/ref=dpx_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1

There's mostly 5-star reviews, but then a bunch of 1-star reviews from right-wingers who don't seem to have read anything more than the blurb. Sure looks like brigading.

'hurr durr communism has never worked' 'you'll all be equally poor' 'commie bullshit' etc etc (paraphrased quotes, sorry)

Ah well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXWzQW0jV3o Ain't Done Nothin' If You Ain't Been Called A Red

u/DevilishRogue · 3 pointsr/ukpolitics

There are no books that can adequately cover British politics to the extent that you're asking. Also, politics and economics are intertwined to the point that you cannot understand one without the other. Freakonomics, for example explains how the two cannot be meaningful separated and is an interesting place to start any political journey.

Depending on your background knowledge 30-Second Politics can give you a grounding of what all the different terminology means and Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box provides useful insight as to the difference between how politics is preached and practiced. Also, The Plan is essential reading to understand our current government.

You've already mentioned Douglass Murray's Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, which I would also thoroughly endorse. Further to that I'd recommend Thomas Pikkety's Capital in the 21st Century which although about economics is so closely tied to current political thought that it really is extremely useful reading

u/[deleted] · 3 pointsr/europe

> Why are you using the USA as an example in /r/europe?

Because its one of those countries where statistical data is avaible in a language everyone in r/europe speaks. Especially if someone uses the google machine to dig deeper. A historic evaluation of the tax rates of the Netherlands will soon and in alot of papers in a language 95% of the users dont speak.

In addition we need a country which was continious capitalist from the data point to now. And that is a fairly low number.

> Is it because the 1950s and 60s were unique times in America

Sure, its always "was a unique time" as soon as statistical data and historic examples dont fit the narrative.

Read this.

u/CaptainChaos87 · 3 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

What are your thoughts on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century ? I haven't read it yet but have been encouraged to.

u/MadCervantes · 3 pointsr/lostgeneration

Oh that's cute. You linked me Sowell. Now try reading a big boy economist: https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496878948&sr=8-1&keywords=Capital+in+the+Twenty-First+Century

I know the math looks really hard but trust me, it won't be so bad.

u/HandyMoorcock · 3 pointsr/australia

Just sayin... I suspect the wholesale adoption of neoliberal economic policy from the mid 70s onwards might be somewhat more responsible for the erosion of the western middle class than television.

A couple of books give pretty compelling evidence of this:

https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey/dp/0199283273

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499813570&sr=1-1&keywords=capital

u/ja524309 · 3 pointsr/changemyview

I'd be interested to hear what /u/HealthcareEconomist2 has to say in regard to Thomas Piketty's new book.

u/jollybumpkin · 3 pointsr/askphilosophy

Marx's theories were highly speculative, based on some historical examples, and some contemporary examples. He had limited access to data. His most important idea was that wealth inevitably accumulates in the hands of a few. He reasoned that such a system is not sustainable in the long run because eventually one person would hold all wealth and everybody else would be wage slaves. Accordingly, he concluded, revolutions are inevitable.

The idea that wealth tends to accumulate in the hands of a few can be tested empirically. Some philosophers are sympathetic to empirical philosophy, others are doubtful. Thomas Piketty has made a very serious attempt to test the suggestion that wealth inevitably accumulates in the hands of a few. It looks like Marx's main idea might be right. Hence, Bernie Sanders. Of course, controversy remains.

A little off topic, but of possible interest.

u/artisanalpotato · 3 pointsr/CanadaPolitics

Counter point.

I have not read the book, only a review of the book. I would be interested in hearing someone with an actual factual background in econ discuss the practical implications of both in a Canadian context.

u/yudlejoza · 2 pointsr/Economics

A better (contemporary and with more hindsight) battle would be Sowell vs Piketty.

u/strolls · 2 pointsr/unitedkingdom

Practically everything I know about politics and economics is from reading the newspapers, Reddit and the odd book, over the course of the past few years.

It takes a long time to get a deep understanding of the way the world works, and schools (in my day, at least) barely try. They'd rather teach you about the Magna Carta and Henry VIII (in my experience) than the history that affects you and I today.

I recommend the /r/UKPersonalFinance subreddit - read it every day, ask questions about the stuff you don't understand (full disclosure, I'm now a mod there), and I highly recommend the NPR Planet Money podcast.

A good reading list might be Richard Wilkinson's book The Spirit Level, Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism and Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

There's a lot resentful language in this sub towards the old, and towards certain categories of voters, but it's important to remember that few are malicious - many are just poorly educated, as I used to be. IMO the only think you can do is educate yourself and embrace evidence-based policies, even when they go against what you believe.

u/StormyWaters2021 · 2 pointsr/worldnews

You can check out /r/communism101 and /r/socialism to start, the former of which has a lot of great information in the sidebar just to start.

Economics Professor Richard Wolff has written a few books on the current and future crises of capitalism - right now I'm in the middle of this one.

There's also Capital in the Twenty First Century, and The ABCs of Socialism (PDF link).

That should be enough to get you started!

u/Sethex · 2 pointsr/Economics

> That actually wasn't really discussed in the book.

Oh I must have misread the chapter titled: Extreme inequality of wealth: a condition of civilization in a poor society? No wait, that seems to be a chapter about extreme inequality and the negative implications.

Or the Amazon synopsis of the book:

"The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. "

http://www.amazon.ca/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X


u/shaim2 · 2 pointsr/changemyview

> So we need an army of accountants to go trough everyone's stuff every year. Not impossible, but excessive.

No - just people with > $1M in assets excluding primary residence. And almost all of those have accountants anyway. Certainly all of those with > $10M.

> So lets say it's grandmas old painting that she was given by some guy Picasso after a short romantic affair. Or grandmas old summer cottage. Or veteran car. Or whatever. People have sentimental stuff that has a high market value.

A. So? Pay for it or sell it. Or sell it now for less, with physical handoff when you die.

B. This is a straw-man argument, since you're describing incredibly rare events, when the current tax system is badly broken for most people.

> The family owned businesses will get out-competed by publicly traded businesses then.

Why?

> I mean, I get that that's good in your book

Didn't say that

> Wealth is a lot easier to hide than income. Income involves two people by default. There's a transaction that can be traced.

As does the change is wealth. People keep reporting income, and this is compared to the change in wealth.

> > Non-issue. Wealth is no more private than income.
> I see clear reasons for why it should be.

So state them, and we'll see if they hold water.

> I think you could be a bit more humble here. There's no big conspiracy. There's a reason for why wealth taxes aren't mainstream.

This is reddit. I'm supposed to know better than anybody else.

But also, Piketty.

> I think your tax rates are really optimistic: you should at least double the rates

We'll need detailed distributions of wealth for the top 10%, with a lot of detail above 99%. And I couldn't find it. But I think $1.5T should be enough - you're not replacing all Federal income (~$3.5T), just personal and corporate income tax and capital gains.

u/notconservative · 2 pointsr/vegan

> if interests on equity were not higher than the gdp growth, investing wouldn't make sense at all and we'd still live in an subsistence economy

That is a magnanimous misstatement.

When return on investment is greater than GDP growth than the enormously wealthy entrench their generational wealth and we have created a new class society. When your life's wealth is determined more by your inheritance than by your work you discourage creative and entrepreneurial growth and a lot of that energy and ideas get lost. The entrenchment of wealth is counterproductive to the wealth of a nation.

But don't take my word for it, browse through the book of an economist who has been actively researching this topic for over a decade

u/yasth · 2 pointsr/nyc

3% housing stock owned foreign non resident. I could be misremembering the exact number but it was pretty small. Capital in the 21st Century

Actual investment is much higher of course, but that doesn't remove housing stock from circulation.

u/InbredNoBanjo · 2 pointsr/stopdrinking

>I started to think that I had nothing left but to start drinking again.

And then, you will really have nothing left. Congratulations on making it through another day.

>I'm seriously taken advantaged of in my job.

This is generational and macro-economic, not personal. The vast majority of people your age are in this position. It is more acute in first-world countries than it has been in nearly a century, because of the transition toward income-inequality, birth-based status and eventually if it's not stopped, hereditary aristocracy. You might want to get a hold of this book if you're (like me) the type that enjoys socio-economic issues.

I know, let's not start a side topic about economics and global politics - I just wanted to encourage you to be less hard on yourself about your economic and employment situation. You are caught up in a global flow cycle. Being underemployed and unable to do much about it is no more a sign of your personal failure than being able to support a family, a house and two cars on one income was a personal sign of superiority in the 1950s and 60s.

u/LinesOpen · 2 pointsr/OkCupid

How do you burn through kindles???

It's a solid profile. There's a couple areas you could tweak by replacing generalities ("Interesting problems to solve") with specifics ("I do the Sunday crossword while standing on my head"). Replace "I'm always doing side projects" with what the side projects are. You could also get rid of your digressions, like:

> I used to read a lot of pop-sciencey books of the Malcolm Gladwell ilk but started to find them lacking in sound scientific backing (lots of generalizing from anecdote).

I agree with your point but it's not really great dating-profile material. How successful would a message to you about Malcolm Gladwell be? Probably not successful; ergo, take it out.

One of the places that could do with the most improvement is your self-summary. I don't get a sense of you, it might as well not be there. It's definitely one of the hardest paragraphs to fill out but it's also the most important because it's top. Try out some different things, make it punchy, and make it you.

Finally, book suggestion: you should read Piketty if you haven't.

u/Logan_Chicago · 2 pointsr/todayilearned

You're looking for this: Capital in the Twenty First Century

As long as those with money make more off of interest (money earned by having money) than the rest of us can through labor, money will coalesce near the top.

r > g

u/TJWataman · 2 pointsr/mildlyinteresting

Maybe another way to think of it is in terms of return on capital vs return on labor. If producing a certain good takes equal units of capital and labor, but the capital is rewarded 90% of the value of producing that unit, then the "return on capital" is significantly higher than the return on equally priced labor. Hence the providers of capital benefit much more than the providers of labor, even though both "input" the same value.

Here's where I've got the idea from:

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

u/avnti · 1 pointr/Manna

Has anyone here read the book Capital by Thomas Piketty?

u/SteadilyTremulous · 1 pointr/socialism

I prefer beating the dead horse of reading 1 star amazon reviews of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

u/casualfactors · 1 pointr/AskSocialScience

Actually, the development of private property rights is strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly associated with improvement of quality of life for the poor. I have yet to see any data suggesting there is any credible alternative to the market if your interest is a healthy and wealthy society.

On inequality I think Piketty and Piketty and Saez are probably about right, but there isn't that much variation across societies where "ownership of assets" varies. I'm prepared to argue that North Korea might stand as the world's most unequal society however (perhaps asymptotically so?), even though we lack for real data on the subject.

If your interest is in reducing inequality, you should probably be thinking more about taxing the stuff that the rich earn rather than eliminating the social construct of the rich owning stuff.

u/Neurolimal · 1 pointr/news

>Smaller countries with freer markets have net immigration.

Depends on the country, and we were specifically discussing migration of labor, not general privatization on this specific tangent.

>It was a model for meeting state demand.

In the short term, with no planning for long term because Hitler's long term plan was for Germany to become 'too big to fail'. They rapidly burnt through their warchest and raided resources because it's a poor strategy for the longterm.

It seems you've abandoned trying to equate nazis with socialism, but just in case you still internally believe in that nonesense, I recommend these articles:

"Betting on Hitler: The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany" , by Thomas Ferguson and Hans-Joachim Voth. Goes into detail how Hitler had been the choice of german capital, and jow they were lavishly rewarded for doing so.

http://www2.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/wpol/schumpeter/pdf/Voth.pdf

"Capital in the Twenty-First Century", by Thomas Piketty, which compares the share of national income that went to Capital in US & Germany, from 1929 to 1938.

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

"Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in the 1930s", by Germà Bell, which demonstrates how the third reich went against economic mainstreams in systematically privatizing swathes of publicly owned utilities.

https://coreyrobin.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/bel-2010-nazi-privatizations1.pdf

u/lughnasadh · 1 pointr/Futurology

Interesting phrasing. "As productivity increases, labor is likely to receive a significant share of the benefits."

Automation/Globalization doing exactly the opposite to labor's share of wealth/money. They have got lesser "benefits" in lower cost goods (not Health/Housing/Education though).

Thomas Piketty advanced strong arguments for why this is happening (see Capital in the Twenty-First Century )

This just seems like a rosy counter claim with no evidence.

u/merryman1 · 1 pointr/CapitalismVSocialism

>LMAO where have I heard this before??

I have attempted to explain how each author has presented a false understanding of Marxian value or the nature of social production. I have given in Marx's own words and my own attempts to explain these concepts. If you are struggling I am happy to try again. Dusty's essay in particular is just mind-boggling in terms of how closely it mirrors Marx and then seems to ascribe to him all of this 'intrinsic axiologist' stuff that is literally contradictory to the Marxist conception of the human species.

>Except there is no real difference in the real world.

Yes there is. Water may have a multitude of use values. It may have a multitude of exchange values in relation to any given object. It may be present in such a material condition as to hold no value whatsoever, it may be present in such a material condition as to be the most valuable thing an individual could possibly want. A man dying of dehydration in the desert does not care for water's utility as a solvent or cleaning agent. A man drowning in the sea is not currently looking for a refreshing spigot to drink from. No one object holds some singular intrinsic or objective use value, this is a socially and subjectively derived phenomena. No one object holds some kind of set exchange ratio with another object outside of a given relational context which ultimately stems back to the material conditions within which the exchange takes place. My knowing how much a bottle of water sells for in central London relative to a bottle of Diet Coke does not tell me how much water I am going to need to turn an area of dirt into mud for the making of bricks. These values are distinct and separate.

>This didn't clarify anything.

Well again, see above. You have an appallingly bad understanding of the Marxian conception of society, which is why you are repeatedly presenting these quite shoddy arguments and then pretending like no one is giving you any kind of answers. The answer lies deeper than you want to look because you have not challenged some very basic presuppositions about our understanding of the material world around us. Like I said, I did not want to address what you said so much as critique the places you are clearly getting these ideas from. If you want to raise where you are struggling to understand or feel I am not making sense, I am more than happy to make another attempt in a more specific and detailed manner.

>We hate Mondays because we don't like working.

Except people will spend hundreds of hours working on whatever hobby satisfies them? Labour is not simply the act of going to work for your employer or engaging in market activity. As per Dusty's essay that you shared to support your position -

>Value-judgements and actions on them do not spring from a vacuum and can not float away and apart from the axiological lattice binding all values as instruments to a standard or ultimate value...It is the constant conditionality of the form of life that gives rise to the need of values and to the need of acting to secure and keep things instrumental to an organism’s preservation.

So when we say forced to work, as the video makes clear, we are talking about being forced to work in a manner in which we are unfree to determine how to allocate our own labour, rather than simply the need to labour in and of itself. In fact the need to labour freely is, again as mentioned in the video, part of Man's intrinsic nature without which we become alienated from both ourself and the society in which we exist. We hate Monday's during the work-week because it signals a resumption in which the majority of our time is spent working in a manner in which we have little to no control over.

>No one is forced to work for a capitalist.

Yes, you are free to go to the woods and build a mud-hut and die of starvation a few months down the line. Well, not really because most land is privately owned, but in principle. The reality is of course that we are social beings and we are talking about social labour. Your ability to engage in social labour under Capitalism without engaging with the market is... not really possible. Hence you are always going to be reliant on some form of Capitalist or Capital in order for your labour to actually meet your basic needs for survival, let alone the needs required to enjoy a social existence.

>Capital also does not concentrate or accumulate into fewer hands.

There's a big door-stopper book published on just this not that long ago. It is worth a read, but it can be a bit exhausting! The accumulation of Capital historically since the 18th century has only been curtailed by an anomalous period of political restraint on the activity of Capital during the mid-20th Century.

>They are not "deprived" of anything to not get paid.

I mean... Yes you are? Time? Freedom to be doing things with that time? The money assuming you have signed a contract judging your labour-time to hold a certain agreed value between yourself and your employer and are not some slave-labouring illegal immigrant?

>Your life is not owned by someone else.

Well, yeah it is. Again back to the last example. Yes theoretically I can go out and make myself a farmstead and live off the wheat I grow. In reality there isn't the public land to be doing that, and realistically you're not going to get those materials to even do that without first exchanging your labour-time for money.

>Bosses are not unaccountable. Bosses do not control more of your life than dictators.

I would have preferred he used Capitalist or Employer over bosses. I chalk it down to English as a second/third language. But where was he incorrect? What dictator on the planet could hope to have 8 to 12 hours a day in the lives of each of their subjects in which they control the minutiae of their actions, dictate when they are free to take breaks for essential biological functions? What do you mean bosses cannot force you to work for free, you've never done unpaid overtime?

>I'm 3 minutes in...

Good to know one side can sit through three long-form essays of absolute trash and come out with 10,000+ words of argument, while t'other feels more knowledgeable despite being unable to sit through 3 minutes of a video before getting too emotional to continue :) If its trash then you can put together the same kind of argument against on a point-by-point basis as I have tried to do and we can discuss onwards from there.

u/SexLiesAndExercise · 1 pointr/Economics
u/zedest · 1 pointr/unitedkingdom

>Who has it been validated by?

Stiglitz backed the Labour manifesto at the last general election, a Nobel Prize winning economist. If you do a search on an academic database, you will find many more articles in support of the type of platform pushed by Corbyn.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/07/austerity-britain-labour-neoliberalism-reagan-thatcher

>How does it?

Above.

>So you keep saying. Without any evidence.

If you have access to academic journals, then do a search, and read some of the results. If not, buy some books on the topic. It's as if you want the knowledge that comes with reading, without actually putting in the work. I've spent thousands of hours reading about topics such as this one over the past few years, a lot of effort and hard work has gone into constructing my political outlook, if you're not convinced by it, then all I can do is point you in the direction of academia, the same place I learnt about politics.

>I don't. And I also don't see you explaining exactly how he is tackling them.

I've explained multiple times. At this point you're rejecting it for the sake of rejecting it. If not for Corbyn, the Labour party would still be towing the line that austerity is an economic necessity. Corbyn is challenging the neoliberal common sense of how to run a countries political economy. I feel that you must not have a very good understanding of politics if you don't understand how Jeremy is responding to the problems i mentioned above.

Though, at this point, I'm fairly sure your just an anti-Corbyn shill that is trying to waste my time. You have not projected a coherent argument over the past few days, and the very few political claims you yourself have made, completely fail to withstand the criticism you appear to be holding my opinions to. Claiming you supported Corbyn at the start, but now you don't know what he's doing to solve the problems i mentioned above, as if this has changed.

No, it doesn't make sense I'm afraid. I doubt you ever supported Corbyn, and claiming you don't know how he's responding to the crises I mentioned, after claiming you've read the manifesto, either means you're not intelligent enough to understand basic politics, or you're being disingenuous, but either way, I've wasted enough time on you.

My advice, if you are a real person that doesn't particularly understand politics very well, buy some introductory books in the area of political economy, and you should soon see how and why Corbyn's platform is different to the Tories, Blair, and all the other political parties and politicians that accept the neoliberal parameters brought to this country by Thatcher.

Gonna block you now, because this conversation is going nowhere, and it won't go anywhere until you actually read about the subjects you're attempting to talk about. I will leave you with a few books, a good jumping off point.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Price-Inequality-Joseph-Stiglitz/dp/0718197380

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=TC0MC2C9DQ8NXVW7MSR0

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neoliberalisms-British-Politics-Christopher-Byrne-ebook/dp/B07HGGT4NT

https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Way-World-Neoliberal-Society-ebook/dp/B00J209OFQ/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=neoliberalism+world+order+dardot+and+laval&qid=1550859195&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-fkmr0

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey-ebook/dp/B005X3SA74/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=a+brief+history+of+neoliberalism&qid=1550859270&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-fkmrnull

u/metalbox69 · 1 pointr/unitedkingdom

>a very complex issue is summed up in a 500 word report

Yeah, you probably need about 600 pages to get the full shebang.

It was a low quality application of Piketty's thesis and he didn't even have the courtesy to credit his source.

u/owlpellet · 1 pointr/cscareerquestions

Oh, it's very much economics, but not the stuff they teach in neoclassical universities. Power shapes markets, with theory racing to come up with an "in universe" explaination. Cite

u/Exodus111 · 1 pointr/Futurology

What the utter fuck????

Loss of the Middle class in recent times is due to unfettered and uncontrolled global capitalism moving the resources of the world into ever fewer hands. Trying to Juxtapose that with recent, barely relevant, Automation is not just Moronic, its fucking criminal.

The low paying menial jobs are EXACTLY what the robots are coming for, the Automation of the Job market will in time render 80% of the world without a Job, and that percentage starts at the bottom and moves up from there.

Even attempting to blame Automation for the dwindling middle class is borderline criminal. Read the book Capital in the 21st Century by Piketty If you want to understand what is happening with the middle class.

u/sonnyclips · 1 pointr/NeutralPolitics

I've been reading some works by Piketty and Fukuyama and both seem to be looking at Europe prior to the revolutions of the 18th and 19th century and drawing parallels to our current stagnation. They point out that powerful elites had dominated both the royals families and the populous in their countries squeezing the monarchs on lowering taxes for them and their ilk shifting the burden onto the people. This caused a kind of death spiral where wealth became concentrated and the balance of the bond between monarch and subjects became strained, kings and queens had in years past a symbiotic relationship with the people because both gave the other power to keep the landed gentry in check. When this balance was undermined by the successful nobility that undermined the fabric of their countries civil order and finances creating both vulnerability from without, the invasions of Hungary, and strife from within, the revolution in France. They point out that this financial situation is not unlike what is driving the current economic problems ala tax expenditures to big business including property tax abatements and other sweeteners governments provide to take free rides from local and state governments.

It should be noted that these two economists, Piketty is French and an advisor to the British Labour Party and Fukuyama has been called a Neocon and was an advisor to both Reagan and Bush. They could not be politically farther apart really and yet they come to very similar conclusions. I think their prescriptions for ensuring a more fair distribution of wealth are different but it is notable that they come to very similar conclusions. I would also add that since the 70s businesses are paying roughly half of the taxes they would have paid since the disco era. They seem to also be predicting a certain amount of unrest as the consequence of concentrating so much wealth.

u/Nefandi · 1 pointr/politics

I wouldn't put so much blame on just those two. Yes, they've contributed and promoted the process of corporatisation of America.

But look at the broader trend. Check out Thomas Piketty's book, "Capital in the 21st Century". The short of it is -- this has been a trend for over a hundred years, easily. We can't just put 100% of the blame on two guys for a huge trend.

Clinton has promoted corporatisation as much as any politician.

u/Allways_Wrong · 1 pointr/TrueReddit

> Macro-economics has a major problem in that it cannot conduct proper experimental studies with a control group.

Are there any computer models that you are aware of that do, or may do in the future, a good approximation of the real world?

Also, everything you have described is, I'm sure you are aware, a kind of bottom-up intelligence. There are patterns in society, across both space and time, that influence us far more it seems than any top-down approach the we believe to be steering this ship.

> Economics is complicated and we shouldn't reduce it to hero worship of some past figure who "proved capitalism wrong". A recent book that focuses on the injustices of economic inequality with a far more sophisticated treatment is Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty.

I'd like to second this too. I've only just bought it but it sounds an amazing, thoroughly researched book. Can't wait to start reading it this weekend. There's a brief review here that includes a link to a lengthier review in the first sentence.

u/Miserygut · 1 pointr/unitedkingdom

I thought the report would be a lot shorter... Bugger. ;)

The report is critical of Neoclassical orthodoxy in academic study and in the profession as a whole.

It suggests moving towards a multidisciplinary approach, allowing other sciences and subjects to contribute. Social theory, behavioural theory and biological underpinnings of microeconomic activities should be defined by other disciplines. Not based on the assumptions of how people behave made by economists. Big data and quantitative method should be the cornerstone of informed economic theory.

Further to this, the INET group is working towards a discussion-based approach to theory presentation. It talks about what policy was implemented in various real world situations, the results and discusses them both with the focus on many different subjects to explain the outcomes. This builds a breadth of understanding as well as teaching historical context.

This breadth of understanding is converted into critical thinking when approaching economic problems, real or imagined. Again, a restatement of the idea that knowledge of many subjects is important.

This train of thought runs through the entire critique of Manchester's Economic syllabus, and is gently applied to the subject in both academic and professional circles. The evidence is compelling and Picketty's treatise on economic equality should stand on it's own as a good example of unorthodox economic thinking - unorthodox in that it is based in reality.

I'm just finishing my degree and honestly, I feel ignorant of many aspects of economics. Perhaps my disengagement is down to studying so many theories that have literally zero grounding in reality - interesting but unrealistic. It's exciting to read that so many fresh eyes will be able to contribute to pushing it forward into a broader, more robust and cohesive discipline. It's a shame it'll take a couple of decades before the fruits of this endeavour come to bear, but better late than never!

u/Cryptolution · 1 pointr/Bitcoin

> why are you in to crypto?

Because bitcoin is sovereign money and so long as it remains decentralized it will resist state monetary control. This mostly has to do with printing money, inflation, etc.

It is not a conflict to believe in bitcoin and also believe in taxation. Taxation is essential for civilized societies to exist.

Thomas Piketty has already proven that taxation and healthy regulation who's purpose is public benefit leads to the most healthy economies. Its corrupt politicians pandering to specialized industries, monopolizing industries and creating bad regulations/laws that favor these special interest groups that fuck society. I encourage you to read the book, he's an economist that worked for over a decade with big data scientists to gather empircal data to back up his proposals. There's a difference been economic theory and economic reality, Piketty engages in the reality part.

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

u/PhotoDoc · 1 pointr/AskSocialScience

Not a stupid question at all. You - quite delightfully - observed something many social scientists have been tracking for some time. A common Sociological perspective is that it isn't gender equality pushing women into the economy. Rather, it is the economy pushing women for increased labor equality. The common term for this phenomenon is 'economic determinism' and you may find terms in "Feminist Theories."

In the US after WWII, for example, households had made a lot of money, so there needed to be only one breadwinner. This was in large part, as Piketty's "Capital" describes, because the rest of the world was pretty much devastated. Money for goods and services flowed to the US. Essentially, Americans made a lot of $$ from simple jobs so there needed to be only one income.

When the rest of the world starts catching up and competes with the US, single income wages started declining. This was because international competition drove wages down. Therefore, in order to maintain a certain lifestyle and purchasing power for the people and for businesses to produce more than its competition, the economy required women to have jobs. More people in labor force = increased profits = maintain standard of living.

So what you're seeing is that the economy did not accommodate the new members of the labor force as you wrote. It's the opposite. The labor force is accommodating the economy's needs for more labor participation (caused by global competition). Prices aren't going higher (necessarily) because of increased demand with more streams of income, but the streams of income is a response to declining purchasing power. (Economically speaking, prices of things has actually gone down in the long term! The difference is that our 'purchasing power' has been either stagnant or declining, making things seem more expensive.)

Hope this helps!

u/Gamion · 0 pointsr/SandersForPresident

I haven't read it so I don't know if it applies but I've heard good things about Capital in the 21st Century.

u/TheRealAntacular · 0 pointsr/investing

LOL do you not know how to read? I didn't say "IN 1720s France," I said "SINCE 1720s in France," meaning there's enough data points to go back 3 centuries, making the resulting calculation of 4-5% that much more accurate. Go to r/research and learn something about modern quantitative methods.

EDIT: Source.

u/FuriousFap42 · -5 pointsr/SubredditDrama

Yeah, the same response comes form every regressive after saying something racist/sexist/etc.

These people are the fucking worst, they hide behind economic orthodoxy to not admit that their ideology and economic predictions have failed, they mock people on starvation wages, mock them for wanting a fair share of their productivity, mock them for wanting true equality of opportunity for their children, all the while ignoring economic studies that contradict their unregulated marked fanatisem, in favor of what is thought by econ departments with conflicts of interest, funded by Koch backed groups.

Economics has been ideologicalised and fails to live up to scientific scrutiny. I really recommend anyone to read this book https://www.amazon.de/Economism-Bad-Economics-Rise-Inequality/dp/1101871199

or this one https://www.amazon.de/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

Even if they were right, if unregulated capitalism with no minimum wage, no public healthcare etc were the best way, if people working in slave like conditions all over the world and in privat prisons were the only way, and it is not, what does it say about the people in that sub mocking people for wanting a bit more than that?

This is a subject where any humor is just spitting in someones face

u/guohuade · -7 pointsr/Libertarian

Looks like you've got some reading to do.

u/Wicked_Truth · -12 pointsr/Economics

...said the pot to the kettle.

Look again. Hey, here's some more evidence (note the timing of major income/wealth inequality changes). If that's still not enough economic data to satisfy your interest, I hear Thomas Pikkety's book, "Capital in the 21st Century" is full of data. Too soon?

If you want details, I'm sure a competent economist, like yourself, will have no problem locating the data to substantiate the economic elements pointed out.

Political history is notoriously data deficient. Special interest groups and politicians like it that way, but there's another data trail that's quite revealing if you'd like to go there too...it's called political contributions. The Academic community has it's own data trail that can be quite enlightening as well (i.e., endowments, research grants and speaking engagements). Much to the chagrin of some ideologues, money leaves a data trail in life as it does in economics.

Feel free to provide data which refutes what has been pointed out. I would love to see it.