A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”
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A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”
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Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”
#2We need only believe in the possibility of a better, different future to act. We need only act to manifest it.
Go vote. Go work on things that truly matter.
Edit: If you have ideological differences please consider posting a reply rather than just downvoting.
Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”
#3I'm currently working my way through Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It's been really eye-opening about how bad inequality actually is. I suggest everyone read it, and I'm excited to read his new one soon after.
Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”
#4> "[hyper-capitalism] is defined by unlimited international capital mobility to evade regulation and taxation at the national level, alongside definite limits on the ability of labor to act in the same autonomous way."
such inequities imbalance the power between labor and capital, which then destabilizes the social structures resting on these economic (and political) foundations. power is a highly dynamic, and as a result, a highly destabilizing force. no (static) socioeconomic idealogy (that we've come up with so far) can dominate it, not even capitalism.
and that means we can never truly rest in our vigilence to create and retain the properity, peace and stability that we enjoy only fleetingly.
the balance between labor and capital has tipped wildly and we need to enact measures--progressive and dynamic taxes/tariffs, both removing and enacting regulations, de-monopolizing markets, etc.--to bring it back into balance.
Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”
#5I'm currently working my way through Capital in the Twenty-First Century . It's been really eye-opening about how bad inequality actually is. I suggest everyone read it, and I'm excited to read his new one soon after.
The narrative about capital providing opportunity for many is largely a myth IMHO. While this may have been true when companies reinvested in their products and people, in the age of stock buybacks and leveraged takeovers, capital seems to serve more as simply a tool for accumulation; permanently removing value from the economy for the benefit of a very few.
Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”
#6I'm currently working my way through Capital in the Twenty-First Century . It's been really eye-opening about how bad inequality actually is. I suggest everyone read it, and I'm excited to read his new one soon after.
It's a fascinating book and deservedly highly influential, but please also read some of the rebuttals and counter-points for a good understanding of the issues.
Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”
#7" “the Democratic Party in the United States transitioned over half a century from the workers’ party to the party of the highly educated.” Elites’ distance from working-class interest, he contends, led the Democratic party and its ideological counterparts abroad to accede to a policy program betraying the values of social democracy: regressive taxation, elite domination of higher education systems, and forms of globalization that enabled the wealthy to hide their assets from tax authorities and trade agreements that facilitated outsourcing. "
This is great point. I see this on social media commentary all the time and wonder if educated elites being merely oblivious or totally asshole about working class concerns.
Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”
#8Although I haven't read Captial and Ideology, Piketty seems to be situated in a weird place, as I gathered by his previous book. He isn't critical of capitalism as such[0] - as economists like Sen, Roemer, Kliman and Veneziani are, but on the other hand he is aware of the transparent ideological forces which shape the way we view the economy and capital. The content of this book, between social, historical and economic axes seems closer to Marx than Samuelson - and it's refreshing in a climate that seems to take the concepts under investigation for granted. I look forward to reading it.
[0] There is a debate between Piketty and Marx-leaning philosopher/economist Frederic Lordon in French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDY3aczWOd0
Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”
#9I'm currently working my way through Capital in the Twenty-First Century . It's been really eye-opening about how bad inequality actually is. I suggest everyone read it, and I'm excited to read his new one soon after.
The thing I took away from Capital in the Twenty-First Century was his conjecture that the post-WWII (until about 1990) period was one of the few times in history that prosperity was widely shared with workers. The era that I consider to be normal (since I lived it) is in fact very abnormal.
Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”
#10It's worth noting that Piketty has an astonishingly basic misunderstanding/non-understanding of the marxist analysis of capitalism despite the titles of his books. He hasn't even read Capital. I like his politics relatively well as far as most liberals go but that is still pretty disappointing.
“What I mean,” Piketty says, explaining his differences with Marx, “is that your class position is not enough to determine your view of what’s the best system of property, education, taxation. We need ideas and ideologies and we need to take them seriously.” (Guardian in Feb). However, that is a trivially wrong mischaracterization. Marx himself was from a relatively privileged background and he, Engels, Lenin, etc have never argued for a mechanical determination of ideology.
In general I think his analysis is that "capitalism should just change some specific things to reduce inequality" without any materialist, political-economic understanding of why inequality is so rampant in the first place - why capital's dominance comes from the structure of the economy. That is why marxism is interesting, marxism makes a very compelling argument for it, and liberals ignore it at their peril.