Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

https://newrepublic.com/article/157576/thomas-piketty-new-book-plan-fix-economy-review

by hhs • 6 years ago

34 48 6 years ago

I am still unable to fathom why he thinks inequality is a problem in and of itself. Hunger, famine, war, disease, we all understand are bad because they have negative consequences on real human lives. Jeff Bezos owning 12% of Amazon does not make me any worse off and if he owned 11% instead it would not make my life any better.

Now there are certain things that can that can contribute to people accumulating excessive amounts at another person's expense. Regulatory capture and economic cartels for instance. But those are never brought up by Picketty's breed. Their issues is that someone owns more than someone else. I suppose my advice to Picketty would be that if he is going to commit one of the seven deadly sins, he might choose a funner one than envy.

norgie• 6 years ago

Pretty sure this just makes you a fucking moron.

missedthecue8• 6 years ago

Please follow the rules of this site.

dang3• 6 years ago

Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how ignorant someone else is or you feel they are.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN as intended, we'd be grateful.

neilwilson4• 6 years ago

The worst thing is that it is not the inequality of wealth that matters. It's the inequality of power.

What Piketty and others of this philosophical movement believe is that taking money away from people is the same as removing power.

They are going to be disappointed. Power is a capital item, not a revenue item. Money gets you the contacts with the right people. Lack of money doesn't remove them.

Plus, of course, there isn't a fixed amount of wealth - particularly not financial wealth. So why confiscate when you can accommodate?

missedthecue8• 6 years ago

Though he might handwave at this notion of "power imbalance", you and I both fully understand that this is not the core issue driving his philosophy. Someone making $120k a year can afford to hire a lobbyist in their state legislature. Should no one make $120k?

If there were no billionaires would the so called "power imbalance" be restored? Does someone with $900 million not have the power of someone with $1 billion? Of course not.

And money doesn't linearly equate with power. There are a number of powerful people in Washington, even unelected ones, who have no substantial fortune to their name yet wield far more power than say Jack Dorsey, Bill Ackman, or Marc Andreeson. If Piketty was truly against all concentrations of power, he would call himself a libertarian.

But Piketty is not against concentrations of power. The core idea behind Piketty's philosophy is a moral one. He believes that some people having a significant amount more than others is a moral failure in society, and must be corrected, even at an economic cost.

mcv4• 6 years ago

Lack of money absolutely does remove them. Billionaires like Murdoch and the Koch brothers have had a massive detrimental effect on US politics (and British, in the case of Murdoch). Without the capital they control, they wouldn't have anywhere near that kind of impact.

Not every billionaire uses their money for that kind of power, but some do, and it hurts democracy when they do. In fact, it's even been argued that legitimate philanthropy is undemocratic, because it's rich people deciding which problems society will fix, rather than a democratic process.

If money only provided luxury, people would have less problems with this inequality. And people would probably be less interested in amassing more wealth than they can consume.

mcntsh• 6 years ago

I am still unable to fathom why he thinks inequality is a problem in and of itself. Hunger, famine, war, disease, we all understand are bad because they have negative consequences on real human lives. Jeff Bezos owning 12% of Amazon does not make me any worse off and if he owned 11% instead it would not make my life any better.

Massive income inequality impacts social and economic mobility within a society. If 1% of the population owns 40% of the wealth, it means a disproportional amount value labor provides is going to a small group of people.

ChrisLomont• 6 years ago

Labor doesn’t create all value.

credit_guy2• 6 years ago

It's very easy to make the logical leap that increasing inequality is equivalent to "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". And most people don't necessarily have a problem with "the rich get richer" part, but they do object to "the poor get poorer".

It is a leap though. Bezos, Gates, Musk, Buffet, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg all started as regular people and became ultra-rich through their work and ideas.

But it's not a complete fallacy either. If you are a real estate owner in New York City, your assets continue appreciating at a good pace, well above inflation, and you have a vested interest in NIMBY, which does indeed restrict social mobility.

Social mobility, or social mobility opportunity are harder to measure though, so a lot of people are ok with using the inequality as a proxy. I do agree with you that it's an imperfect proxy, and focusing on it can have negative side-effects.

disgruntledphd22• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure that all of the people you note had middle-class to upper-middle-class parents, so potentially you are proving Piketty's point.

rathel• 6 years ago

Economic inequality (and erosion of middle class) is water to populists' mill. We have living examples of this right now.

missedthecue8• 6 years ago

My issue with statements like this is that there is no such thing as the "middle class". It's a political concept, not an economic one. It has no definition. Furthermore, if you try to define it the way is usually defined - as the people making between x% of the median - it is mathematically impossible for it to shrink so long as the population continues to grow.

supercanuck3• 6 years ago

Slavery is the most extreme case of inequality. How close do you need to get to slavery before inequality is a problem?

missedthecue8• 6 years ago

Slavery is a basic human rights violation... Jeff Bezos owning $100B in Amazon stock is not. Piketty is obviously not writing abolitionist literature

seibelj2• 6 years ago

In a voluntary society, why don’t people who advocate for things like the abolition of private property (the thesis of the linked article) just create this themselves?

Absolutely nothing stops a group from creating a non-profit, electing a board of trustees that appoints managers, and signing lifetime contracts to pledge their income to it. Then the board and it’s managers can divvy up the income among everyone fairly, build communal housing, negotiate to provide health benefits for all at group discounts, provide retirement income, etc. And if people sign on when they are young, then some will become more successful and provide more income for the whole.

This is the same as taxes, except even better because all group members are ideologically aligned and would be happy to give all their income away to an elected group of people who will spend it on everyone fairly. And this way, people who don’t want to participate aren’t forced to do so.

neilwilson4• 6 years ago

"Absolutely nothing stops a group from creating a non-profit, electing a board of trustees that appoints managers"

We have done. They're called nations.

Other nations are available. You're not forced to stay in the one you are born in. That's enshrined in the United nations charter on human rights.

seibelj2• 6 years ago

The nation is quite unlikely to radically increase taxes and outlaw private property. Why not create this system yourself among like-minded people?

TheSpiceIsLife2• 6 years ago

That's enshrined in the United nations charter on human rights.

Good luck turning up at $country’s port of entry with that as your only immigration document.

skitout• 6 years ago

The fact is people are forced to participate in our current society. There is more freedom than in Cuba, but there are still huge number of things constraining my freedom, how I can use it, how much would cost to exercise this freedom...

How capital and revenue is unequally (and many says unethically) shared in our current system, and how it is structured to favor people who have more capital, create many huge constraints for most people, while favoring few.

The goal of Pikety and of many others is to change the rules of the game, the rules we are force to live with and that have huge impact on our freedom.

Starting a non-profit does not change the rule of the game, it change only the way we live with the rule.

thedudeabides5• 6 years ago

Piketty’s solution is that we move beyond private ownership to some blend of private, public, and temporary ownership. (Total abolition of private property, à la Soviet Union, for Piketty, was an ill-advised failure.) Since many societal goods are often already owned publicly, like electrical grids, highways, or parks, and some are owned communally, like worker cooperatives, it is easy to imagine this realm expanding.

1800 words into the article and finally we get the grand plan.

Like the rest of Piketty's work, yell real loud about a real pain, make interesting allusions to economic history, and offer no real solutions.

grandridge2• 6 years ago

Piketty is a fool. End central banking and lender of last resort. That is it. There will still be a natural order of poor and rich just like every other natural system but it will not be as extreme and it will not reward the wrong people

dang3• 6 years ago

Please make your points without calling names. Maybe you don't owe Piketty better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

grandridge2• 6 years ago

No thanks, I'm good

Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

Related Stories