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The Real Class War

americanaffairsjournal.org

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221–230 of 634 posts

Re: The Real Class War

#221

Post by bzbarsky »

helen___keller wrote: post #201
paulsutter wrote: post #187

The top 0.1% consists mostly of top 1% folks having a windfall, and the top 1% is mostly top 10% folks having some good years. These aren’t really separate and distinct classes of people as is popularly imagined > The performance gap between the top 1 or 0.1 percent versus the top 10 percent is actually larger than the gap between those right at 10 percent and any part of the bottom 90 percent.

> The top 0.1% consists mostly of top 1% folks having a windfall, and the top 1% is mostly top 10% folks having some good years. These aren’t really separate and distinct classes of people as is popularly imagined They aren't "separate" in that we're not literally a feudal society. Sure, I can agree that an ordinary engineer has a chance of making it big on stock options and becoming a multi millionaire. But that's n…

The key thing here is that most of these measures are measuring income, not wealth. The graphs in the article definitely show income.

And what that means is that "top 0.1%" or "top 0.001%" is not the same group year to year. Especially given the way capital income is handled: in the year when you sell a bunch of stock, or sell a house, or whatever, you suddenly move much higher in the income distribution, but just for that one year.

To make this concrete, let's look at the "top 1%" of the population in the sense that their income is consistently in the top 1% of incomes (let's ignore lifecycle effects for now, which throw extra wrenches into the works). These people buy houses, then sell them at some point. I really doubt they average more than 20 years between sales, so in any given year at least 5% of them are selling houses. Any such house sale is likely accompanied by significant capital gains (from inflation, if nothing else, though the real estate markets in various places have been helping, of course). In what fraction of cases are those capital gains enough to move you into the 0.1% for that one year? What fraction of 0.1% incomes are then due to "top 1%" people selling their house?

If we were tracking lifetime cumulative incomes here, rather than annual incomes, we might be able to say something more useful. But a significant part of what we are seeing in the data is that income at the top has become more volatile, so when you get taxable events those taxable events are larger than they used to be.

Now of course the gap between someone who consistently makes a "0.1%" income and someone who consistently makes a "10%" income has in fact been widening. But I'd really like to see some data on how big those classes of people are. Consistent "0.1%" income accrues to _much_ less than 0.1% of the population, from everything I've seen.

Re: The Real Class War

#222

Post by dragonwriter »

> However one defines the working class, it has scarcely any political agency in the current system and no apparent means for acquiring any.

Revolutions don't happen when people feel that they have political agency in the status quo system. And if people don't have actual agency, the outlets which provide the illusion of agency eventually fail.

Re: The Real Class War

#223

Post by blfr »

BuckRogers wrote: post #208
blfr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks like myself support him even though we're some sort of "upper middle class" or some form of middle-merchant class. Why do you say "even though"? Sanders and Warren target upper middle class and people aspiring to it.

I was referencing the article which states, it's (almost) against class interests for these people to do so. That said, I disagree with any distinction in classes other than their actual function, workers vs owners. The upper/middle/lower descriptions don't mean much to me.

No, the article explains that Warren and Sanders are popular among exactly the professional class and that this is their natural electorate. Which it is.

Sanders’s left-wing challenge to Clinton found significant support among educated, relatively affluent voters, especially younger ones (similar to Obama’s). As one 2016 Vox headline put it, “Bernie Sand­ers’s base isn’t the working class. It’s young people.”32 Within any given age group, the article explained, higher-income voters were actually more likely to support Sanders.

Elizabeth Warren’s campaign more explicitly appeals to the professional class, both in form and content.

Re: The Real Class War

#224

Post by triceratops »

AlexandrB wrote: post #146
Pigo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if China played by the rules, and did something about ip theft...

I really hope they don't. Western IP laws have become suffocating to innovation (life of author +70 years copyright, software patents), and need to be weakened. Perhaps if China is successful with weaker IP laws it will get some politicians off their ass on the issue.

How is theft of trade secrets going to undermine draconian copyright laws? Two wrongs don't make a right.

Re: The Real Class War

#225

Post by claudiawerner »

_carl_jung wrote: post #212
claudiawerner wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be worth noting that this is a pretty strong (and I don't think defensible in the case given) claim to make - you're echoing the Marxist/socialist objection to profits (one which I may agree with) but Marx (nor anyone else) ever claimed that this happens without employing wage labour. For profits to be nothing more than unpaid wages, we need to be talking about at least one waged worker who applies labour,…

For what it's worth, the principle objection I have to the Marxist position on wage and profit is the redefinition of the term "exploitation". It muddies the argument because it enables a circular argument whereby the transaction of employment can be labelled as exploitative, where it's easy to defend against the claim of exploitation if the original definition of the word is preserved. In other words, profit generat…

The definition of "exploitation" is a technical one; even those who argue against the Marxist claim actually take this in stride, for instance, there is an objection to the Marxist idea of exploitation that Marx's selection of labour-power as the exploited commodity is arbitrary, thus we can say that any commodity (such as steel, peanuts or shoes) is "exploited" - the Marxist reply to this isn't to say "well, exploitation doesn't mean that, exploitation is evil and you can't be evil toward inanimate objects".

In other words, I think the definiton used by Marxists is somewhere between the two. It not only means to use something up (to exploit resources) but also the Marxist idea that exploitation relates to workers being forced (by man-made historically arisen structures, that is) to sell their labour-power.

Nevertheless, newer schools of Marxism (such as the ones from the 80s which attempted to use neoclassical economic models) have axiomatic definitions of exploitation. For some simplified models of a commodity economy, researchers such as Veneziani and Yoshihara (and Roemer on different grounds) prove that the axiomatic definition of exploitation is satisfied. Defined axiomatically, we can escape the talk about morality. But you can easily rephrase Marx without the word "exploitation" - the claim is, rather simply, that there is some amount of labour that is unpaid, this labour forms the substance of surplus value, which is appropriated. No judgement, no morality, no right or wrong - that's just the fact, and of course it may well be a good thing(!) that workers are "exploited" - Marx certainly said as much, when writing that the capitalist's point of view, his idea of "fairness" is just as worhless as anyone else's.

Re: The Real Class War

#226

Post by anigbrowl »

username90 wrote: post #181
theohofpleasure wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a company which makes the profit. If you started a company and sold the tool for $500 and the company paid you $500 then there is no more profit for the company. If the company paid you $250, only then can they claim to have made $250 profit. Hence, profits are nothing more than unpaid wages.

A goes and buys flour for 100$ from farmer B. Then A goes and pay independent baker C 100$ to make bread from the flour. Then A goes and pay independent retailer D 100$ to sell the bread for $500. Each cycle A makes $200 in profit, nobody loses out as everyone agreed to the terms. This is enough margin for A to pay an independent manager $100 each time he repeats the process, ultimately netting A $100 without A doing…

In reality most people are not sole traders and the market does not operate under conditions of perfect competition. Over-simplification is not helpful; I could describe a similar virtuous circle based on entirely different economic arrangements, and it would be just as facile.

Re: The Real Class War

#227

Post by triceratops »

maxerickson wrote: post #71
TomMckenny wrote: post #52

It makes sense that the top 10% to 2% become more active as blame and anger are re-routed toward them. For example, many people think the "elite" are the educated but not necessarily the wealthy. So for many, adjunct faculty are called "elites" while the Koch brothers are not. Likewise, discussions of wealth inequality are becoming conflated with income inequality. Yet the professional class has only marginal voting…

I wonder if the typical adjunct faculty is more or less 'educated' than someone with a masters in engineering from MIT.

Don't you have to have a PhD to teach at most universities in the US? Not to mention someone with a masters in engineering from MIT could very well be an adjunct faculty themselves.

Re: The Real Class War

#229

Post by 0x445442 »

simonh wrote: post #105

This is all driven by globalisation, and don't get me wrong I'm a globalist, but this is just a fact. First manual labour in manufacturing was outsourced abroad, then higher tier tech jobs in software and product engineering. Now big firms from former third world countries are muscling in on markets at every level of the economy, creating competition at every level of business. You can't add hundreds of millions of C…

The problem is the imbalance between the mobility of capital and the mobility of labor. If it were as easy for Joe Iowa to move some place with a lower cost of living to compete for labor as it is for Joe CEO to setup manufacturing there then I'd be all for Globalization.

Re: The Real Class War

#230

Post by refurb »

rapnie wrote: post #198
hnuser77 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could consider Americans poisoned by something , considering that 40% of the American population is obese (not just overweight) and sperm count has declined 50% in developed countries over the past few decades.

[flagged]

Are you arguing communist and socialist systems don’t have greed?
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