Page 2 of 11 FirstFirst 123456 ... LastLast
Results 26 to 50 of 266
  1. #26
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    via Forbes: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...107.5728v2.pdf

    if there is a vast, transnational conspiracy to indebt nations and suborn their political processes, it might look something like this.

  2. #27
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    skeptical posters have yet to address Piketty's book, fwiw. carping about the alternet coverage doesn't quite get anyone across the finish line and scoffing at boutons is more or less a commonplace.

  3. #28
    I play pretty, no? TeyshaBlue's Avatar
    My Team
    Dallas Mavericks
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Post Count
    13,319
    skeptical posters have yet to address Piketty's book, fwiw. carping about the alternet coverage doesn't quite get anyone across the finish line and scoffing at boutons is more or less a commonplace.
    I havent read the book nor am I likely to. The synopsis offered by alternet doesnt offer any insight that cant be gleaned by a minimal amount of rational thought. The notion that a realtively small subset of families holds an inordinate amount of power in America has been around for, oh...a hundred years or so.

  4. #29
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    fair enough. the re-consolidation of capital (to take one example, one difference between now and 100 years ago is that the Standard Oil trust has essentially merged back together; to take another, the consolidation of banking is startling compared with even 20 years ago) might bode ill for a rising tide that lifts all boats. gross inequality and collusive/monopolistic business practices led to disruptive social movements 100 years ago. it could happen again.

  5. #30
    I play pretty, no? TeyshaBlue's Avatar
    My Team
    Dallas Mavericks
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Post Count
    13,319
    I think its likely already started...see OWS et al.

    Cyclical is the word that comes to mind.

  6. #31
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    combined with the influence of essentially unlimited, untraceable political contributions by "social welfare" nonprofits, there is the bare chance special interests can suborn politics, but twas ever so, I suppose.

  7. #32
    I play pretty, no? TeyshaBlue's Avatar
    My Team
    Dallas Mavericks
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Post Count
    13,319
    I agree...SCOTUS ruling adds an additional level of leverage above what has been at their disposal...ye olde graft.

  8. #33
    Veteran
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Post Count
    97,514
    Looming SCOTUS Decision Could Deal Another Blow to Campaign Finance Regulations

    A progressive attorney and expert on campaign finance laws is warning that a pending decision by the Supreme Court could deal a huge blow to efforts to keep the rich from disproportionately influencing elections. Citizen’s United was one step on that path. The new decision, says Demos counsel Adam Lioz, could mean more disaster, he told Salon’s Josh Eidelson.

    The case at hand is McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. It concerns a Republican National Committee objection to laws that restrict how much one person can donate to a candidate or a political committee in one election cycle.

    “The worst-case scenario would be that the Court not only strikes down the aggregate limits, but does so in a way that calls into question contribution limits more generally, and puts them in the crosshairs,” Lioz told Eidelson.


    http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...tter971759&t=6



  9. #34
    Veteran
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Post Count
    97,514
    wealth at the top increasing while poverty/income stagnation for everybody else is increasing. That situation will continue indefinitely.

    Depends on what the definition of catastrophe in this context, but for 10Ms of Americans enslaved in poverty with tiny to no opportunity to escape, the catastrophe is already here.

    And if the Repugs get control of the federal govt, the catastrophe will be worsened and spread to many more Ms.

    Vote Repug and yourself.

  10. #35
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    according to this reviewer, slowing population growth is key:

    I have just read a very interesting piece in the Economist about a book by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century. This book looks at the links between demography, growth and inequality. Essentially, demographic growth feeds into economic growth, along with productivity growth. To increase economic growth, one must either increase the number of workers or the output that each worker is producing. According to Piketty, the world’s economic growth since the birth of Christ has been roughly equally due to an increasing population and increasing productivity. Thus, in the century ending in the year 2012, the world economy grew at roughly 3% a year. Population growth was 1.4% and per capita output grew at 1.6%.

    Now however we are facing a century of slowing population growth. As the Economist argues:

    “Projections from the UN indicate that global growth will average 0.7% a year between 2012 and 2050, and then slow to 0.2% between 2050 and 2100. By the second half of the current century, the only area to show a population rise will be Africa. Asia's population will be falling, along with that of Europe where a decline is expected for the first half of the century as well.”

    This means that economic growth will slow along with this slowing population growth. To assume that productivity growth will rise to pick up the slack in the years ahead is, according to the Economist, “an act of the purest optimism”. It quotes Piketty:
    “ ‘there is no historical example of a country at the world technological frontier whose growth in per capita output exceeded 1.5% over a lengthy period of time’

    By the "world technological frontier", he simply means advanced nations. Countries can grow per capita output faster when they are catching up with the others, like China. But when they have caught up, they slow.”

    This means that the years of relatively high economic growth that those living now have grown up with, particularly in the 1950 and 1960s, will not be repeated. It was a golden age it seems. Piketty argues that both logic and history show that dreams of economic growth of 3-4% a year in the future will be “illusory”.

    Of course, many argue that this is not a bad thing; we can’t continue to rely of economic growth and should get used to a world where growth is much more anaemic. However, according to Piketty, rapid growth reduces economic inequality, whereas economic stagnation increases inequality. He argues:

    “in a society where output per capita grows tenfold every generation, it is better to count on what one can earn and save from one's own labour; the income of previous generations is so small compared with current income that the wealth ac ulated by one's parents and grandparents doesn't amount to much.

    Conversely, a stagnant, or worse, decreasing population increases the influence of capital ac ulated in previous generations. The same is true of economic stagnation.”

    During the twentieth century there was a rapid reduction in economic inequality, also known as the “Great Compression”. Piketty argues that this was due to world wars, high taxes, high inflation which destroyed private wealth. Compare that to the nineteenth century when, by contrast, the Economist states that “many upper class people lived quite comfortably off the income from government bonds”.

    Therefore, according to Piketty:

    “in a quasi-stagnant society, wealth ac ulated in the past will inevitably acquire disproportionate importance. The return to a structurally high capital/income ratio in the twenty-first century, close to the levels observed in the eighteenth century, can therefore be explained by a the return to a slow-growth regime. Decreased growth - especially demographic growth - is thus responsible for capital's comeback.”

    Does this mean that we may be heading toward a century of low demographic growth, low economic growth, widening inequalities? Pickett would say yes we are. The Economist is not sanguine about the future if that is the case:

    “But if economic power has gone back to the rich, we may be sliding back into plutocracy, where government is controlled by the rich; look at the expense of US political campaigns or Larry Bartels's work on the correlation between congressional votes and the views of their better-off cons uents. Silvio Berlusconi's long career in Italy indicates the way that economic wealth can translate into power in a more direct fashion. We may indeed being going back even further than the 19th century to the Roman republic where rich men bought their way into the Senate and placated the populace with bread and circuses - junk food and reality TV, perhaps?”

    And that’s just with population slowdown on a global scale. What will happen to those countries where population will (and is already in some cases) decline absolutely for a sustained period in peacetime? We are entering unchartered territory in those cases, we simply do not know what happens to countries and civilisations which decide to not replace themselves for any long stretch of time…
    - See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/demograph....9dx6vet1.dpuf

  11. #36
    Veteran
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Post Count
    97,514
    "But if economic power has gone back to the rich"

    it has

    "we may be sliding back into plutocracy, where government is controlled by the rich"

    may?

    Last edited by boutons_deux; 03-19-2014 at 12:36 PM.

  12. #37
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2001
    Post Count
    32,408
    Wall Street Bonuses vs the Minimum Wage
    Raising the minimum wage would give our economy much more bang for the buck than we get from the financial industry's yearly windfalls.
    By Sarah Anderson


    Purveyors of Ferraris and high-end Swiss watches keep their fingers crossed toward the end of each calendar year, hoping that the big Wall Street banks will be generous with their annual cash bonuses.

    New figures show that the bonus bonanza of 2013 didn’t disappoint. According to the New York State Comptroller’s office, Wall Street firms handed out $26.7 billion in bonuses to their 165,200 employees last year, up 15 percent over the previous year. That’s their third-largest haul on record.
    http://otherwords.org/wall-street-bo...-minimum-wage/

    The $26.7 billion Wall Streeters pocketed in bonuses would cover the cost of more than doubling the paychecks for all of the 1,085,000 Americans who work full-time at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per h

  13. #38
    Veteran
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Post Count
    97,514
    "studies have shown" the main cause of wealth inequality is tax policy purchased by the 1% and corps

    http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfa....cfm?Docid=323

    With no change in tax policy, income inequality will continue its catastrophic trajectory.

  14. #39
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    In more technical terms, the central argument of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that as long as the rate of return on capital, r, exceeds the rate of broad growth in national income, g—that is, r > g—capital will concentrate. It is an empirical fact that the rate of return on capital—income in the form of profits, dividends, rents, and the like, divided by the value of the assets that produce the income—has averaged 4–5 percent over the last two centuries or so. It is also an empirical fact that the growth rate in GDP per capita has averaged 1–2 percent. There are periods and places where growth is faster, of course: the United States in younger days, Japan from the 1950s through the 1980s, China over the last thirty years. But these are exceptions—and the two earlier examples have reverted to the mean. So if that 4–5 percent return is largely saved rather than being bombed, taxed, or dissipated away, it will ac ulate into an ever-greater mass relative to average incomes. That may seem like common sense to anyone who’s lived through the last few decades, but it’s always nice to have evidence back up common sense, which isn’t always reliable.


    There’s another trend that intensifies the upward concentration of wealth: Fortunes themselves are ratcheting upward; within the proverbial 1 percent, the 0.1 percent are doing better than the remaining 0.9 percent, and the 0.01 percent are doing better than the remaining 0.09 percent, and so on. The bigger the fortune, the higher the return. Piketty makes this point by looking not only at individual portfolios but also (and ingeniously) at US university endowments, for which decades of good data exist. The average American university endowment enjoyed an average real return—after accounting for management costs—of 8.2 percent a year between 1980 and 2010. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, in a class by themselves (with endowments in the $15–$30 billion range), got a return of 10.2 percent a year. From that lofty peak, the average return descends with every size class, from 8.8 percent for endowments of more than $1 billion down to 6.2 percent for those under $100 million. In short: Money breeds money, and the more money there is, the more prolific the breeding.


    It was once believed, during the decades immediately following the Great Depression and World War II, that vast disparities in wealth were features of youthful capitalism that had been left behind now that the thing was reaching maturity. This theory was first enunciated formally in a 1955 paper by the economist Simon Kuznets, who plotted a curve representing the historical course of inequality that looked like an upside-down U: Kuznets’s chart showed that disparities in wealth rose dramatically during the early years of growth and then reversed once a mature capitalist economy reached a certain (though none-too-specific) stage of development.



    Kuznets’s curve fit nicely with the actual experiences of the rich economies in what the French call the Trente Glorieuses, the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975, when economic growth was broadly shared and income differentials narrowed. In the United States, according to the Census Bureau’s numbers (which have their problems—more on that in a moment), the share of income claimed by the top 20 percent—and within that group, the top 5 percent—declined during the glorious years. At the same time, the income of the remaining 80 percent gained.
    But in the United States, the thirty glorious years were actually twenty-odd years; depending on how you measure it, the equalization process ended sometime between 1968 and 1974, again according to the census figures. Still, quibbles aside, the process of relative equalization went on for long enough that it felt like Kuznets was on to something with his curve. I say “relative” because these are still not small numbers: The richest 5 percent of families had incomes about eleven times those of the poorest 20 percent in 1974, the most equal year by this measure since the census figures started in 1947. But that number looks small now compared with the most recent ratio, almost twenty-three times in 2012.

    http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_01/12987

  15. #40
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    But the major frustration of the book is political. Piketty clearly shows that short of depression and war, the only possible way to tame the beast of endless concentration is concerted political action. The high upper-bracket tax rates of the immediate postwar decades couldn’t have happened without serious fears among elites—fresh memories of the Depression, threats from strong domestic unions, compe ion on a global scale with the USSR, which, for all its problems, was living proof that an alternative economic system was possible. As those things waned, upper-bracket taxes were lowered, wages and benefits were cut, and capital’s increased mobility led to increased compe ion among jurisdictions to offer a “favorable investment climate”—meaning weak regulations, low wages, and minimal taxes. All these trends have contributed to the concentration of capital over the last thirty years, as wealth and power have shifted upward on an enormous scale. None of these features will be reversed spontaneously. Nor will they be altered through “democratic deliberation”—several times Piketty notes the hefty political power of the owning class—or improved educational access, as Piketty actually urges at one unfortunate point. Brushing up the working class’s skill set is no match for the power of r > g.

    Starting with the le, the eternally recurrent specter of Marx hangs over this book. Early into the first page of the introduction, Piketty asks, “Do the dynamics of private capital ac ulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century?” Phrasing the question as something grounded in the past is a nice distancing technique, as the psychoanalysts say, but the answer is clearly yes. Several times, Piketty disavows Marx—just a few lines later he credits “economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge” for allowing us to avoid “the Marxist apocalypse”—but he also concedes that those prophylactics have not changed capitalism’s deep structures and the tendency for wealth to concentrate. It seems, in other words, that Piketty’s own research shows that the old nineteenth-century gloomster had a point.
    same

  16. #41
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    Piketty calls the tendency for inequality to rise during periods when the rate of return on capital is higher than the economy’s rate of growth “the central contradiction of capitalism.” Of course, the logic can also run in reverse. If the rate of growth exceeds the rate of return, wages and salaries will grow more rapidly than income from capital, and inequality will fall. That’s what happened in much of the twentieth century. The problem, Piketty argues, is that this state of affairs is unlikely to be maintained. “A concatenation of cir stances . . . created a historically unprecedented situation, which lasted for nearly a century,” he writes. “All signs are, however, that it is about to end.”

    How convincing is all this? The standard account of economic development—often attributed to Simon Kuznets, a Harvard economist who popularized it during the nineteen-fifties—has inequality rising during the early stages of industrialization but then falling steadily as incomes converge and over-all living standards rise. Piketty is certainly right to emphasize that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the income compression that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. It was the product of global conflict and domestic political struggles. In Europe, two World Wars and the progressive tax policies that were needed to finance them did enormous damage to the old estates and great fortunes: many rich people, after paying their income and inheritance taxes, didn’t have enough money left to replenish their capital. During the postwar era, inflation ate away at their savings. Meanwhile, labor-friendly laws enabled workers to bargain for higher wages, which raised the proportion of income that labor received. And the task of rebuilding after the wartime destruction made for the rapid expansion of G.D.P. This helped to keep the growth rate above the rate of return on capital, fending off the forces of divergence.


    In the United States, the story was less dramatic but broadly similar. The Great Depression wiped out a lot of dynastic wealth, and it also led to a policy revolution. During the nineteen-thirties and forties, Piketty reminds us, Roosevelt raised the top rate of income tax to more than ninety per cent and the tax on large estates to more than seventy per cent. The federal government set minimum wages in many industries, and it encouraged the growth of trade unions. In the decades after the war, it spent heavily on infrastructure, such as interstate highways, which boosted G.D.P. growth. Fearful of spurring public outrage, firms kept the pay of their senior executives in check. Inequality started to rise again only when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan led a conservative counter-revolution that slashed tax rates on the rich, decimated the unions, and sought to restrain the growth of government expenditures. Politics and income distribution are two sides of the same coin.


    Piketty takes some well-aimed shots at economists who seek to obfuscate this reality. “In studying the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it is possible to think that the evolution of prices and wages, or incomes and wealth, obeys an autonomous economic logic having little or nothing to do with the logic of politics or culture,” he writes. “When one studies the twentieth century, however, such an illusion falls apart immediately. A quick glance at the curves describing income and wealth inequality or the capital/income ratio is enough to show that politics is ubiquitous and that economic and political changes are inextricably intertwined and must be studied together.”
    http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critic...urrentPage=all

  17. #42
    Veteran
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Post Count
    97,514
    "Politics and income distribution are two sides of the same coin."

    and the politics in the USA ain't gonna change, the "compounded" ac ulation of wealth from US tax cuts, avoidance, evasion will continue to worsen inequality.

    Aux Barricades, Les Enfants de la Patrie



  18. #43
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425

  19. #44
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425

  20. #45
    Veteran
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Post Count
    97,514
    "Piketty has relatively little to say about how—

    with organized labor weakened,

    moneyed interests strengthened, and

    anti-government forces emboldened

    —the kind of political movement necessary for a fairer future will emerge"

    iow, see the this thread's le.



  21. #46
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    absent political adjustment, war and depression do the main work of redistribution.

  22. #47
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    facing its own catastrophic moment in the 1930s, the US guaranteed wages, raised taxes and supported trade unions. at a bare minimum, there's historical precedence for political solutions to extreme inequality.

  23. #48
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
    My Team
    Portland Trailblazers
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Post Count
    43,117
    facing its own catastrophic moment in the 1930s, the US guaranteed wages, raised taxes and supported trade unions. at a bare minimum, there's historical precedence for political solutions to extreme inequality.
    You have to remember. We didn't have "free trade" back then.

  24. #49
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    we don't now either

  25. #50
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    but even if we did, what's your point?

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •