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A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”

bostonreview.net

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Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”

#61

Post by kansface »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #40
save_ferris wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that's more of a symptom of the rise of identity politics in particular than the two-party system. Policy and political discourse is driven so heavily by identity today that political parties find it easier to coalesce around groups of unrelated issues in order to find their voting base. But I do agree with you in that it's an issue.

The two party system is a big factor because it allows the two parties to stay closely within their positions and voters have nowhere else to go. When I compare this to Germany there the traditional two big parties received a rude wake up call because suddenly the greens and the AFD started rising. So these parties have to refresh themselves unless they want to become irrelevant. In the US there is no such pressure.

> So these parties have to refresh themselves unless they want to become irrelevant. In the US there is no such pressure.

That does not square with the US electing donald trump.

Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”

#62

Post by throw0101a »

Paul Krugman's review:

* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/books/review/capital-and-...

Krugman liked Piketty's previous book (Captail-21C), but concluded this one needed some more editing:

> The bottom line: I really wanted to like “Capital and Ideology,” but have to acknowledge that it’s something of a letdown. There are interesting ideas and analyses scattered through the book, but they get lost in the sheer volume of dubiously related material. In the end, I’m not even sure what the book’s message is. That can’t be a good thing.

Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”

#63

Post by worik »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #52
worik wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental point (r>g) is irrefutable. It may be possible to claim that inequality does not matter. In the absence of poverty that may be possible, but when the richest country in the world (USA) has a health system that leas out ~20% of the population and one of the poorest (Cuba) has a gold plated health system, that is a hard claim to make.

> The fundamental point (r>g) is irrefutable. There's a really easy refutation of that point: it is literally impossible over any major span of time, because r is a component of g. If r were to grow systematically faster than g, it would end up dominating everything else, with the result that g = r.

But economies do not follow uninterrupted tracks.

r>g is unstable, and it will collapse.

It should have collapsed in 2008, but capitalism is very resilient and capitalists very resourceful and they persuaded the victims to pay the costs.

Perhaps it will not survive the current pandemic, I fail to see how it can survive the looming environmental collapse, but time will tell.

(By "it" I mean a economic system with r>g)

Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”

#64

Post by reggieband »

wycy wrote: post #46
geodel wrote: post #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 glob…

This is painfully true. This is pretty well captured by the completely out of touch sentiments in [0], written by the folks at Crooked Media (generally Democratic establishment people). The wealthy upper middle class sees the coronavirus quarantine as just a chill time to work from home on a laptop and drink wine. These people are not ignoring the plights of the poorer working class; they are altogether completely bl…

> They know that 3 million people just filed for unemployment, but they only know about it as an abstract statistic.

In a thread on HN someone commented that the 3m unemployment figure was only 1% of the population. I had to take a moment to let that sink in.

It makes me worried about a future dominated by technocrats.

Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”

#65

Post by nemo »

jahaja wrote: post #56
nemo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone interested in Marx should read Bertrand Russel's critiques of Marxism and his analysis of the Manifesto with an honest mind. The Hegelianism behind Marxism is a tool that can prove both that the Kingdom of Prussia in the 1760s was a reflection of God's will, as well as giving Marx the idea that he had a scientific approach to history that let him predict the future. Any tool of reasoning that can prove anythin…

You know that Bertrand Russell was a socialist/communist right?

He was a socialist, but anti-authoritarian, and a strong critic of all forms of Hegelianism including Marxism. He tried (with limited success) to formulate alternate concepts of socialism that weren't authoritarian and had a respect for civil liberties, as he saw that Marxism's various tries at revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat were not only failing to bring socialism, but perverting it into something even worse than capitalism.

I'm not a fan of Capitalism at all, but Marxism is even worse.

Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”

#66

Post by NeutralCrane »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #17
0x262d wrote: post #10

It'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 y…

The greatest work of capitalist propaganda has been to almost completely replace Marx with a straw man in the public imagination. Even if you disagree with Marx, knowing his actual work and thoughts is vital to understanding the world that we live in. If you think Marx is wrong, you should at least be able to articulate it in terms of the things Marx actually wrote. The fact that the American left is about as ignoran…

> If you think Marx is wrong, you should at least be able to articulate it in terms of the things Marx actually wrote.

Piketty articulate what he thinks is wrong with Marx in "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" with fairly compelling arguments.

Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”

#67

Post by Ididntdothis »

kansface wrote: post #61
Ididntdothis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two party system is a big factor because it allows the two parties to stay closely within their positions and voters have nowhere else to go. When I compare this to Germany there the traditional two big parties received a rude wake up call because suddenly the greens and the AFD started rising. So these parties have to refresh themselves unless they want to become irrelevant. In the US there is no such pressure.

> So these parties have to refresh themselves unless they want to become irrelevant. In the US there is no such pressure. That does not square with the US electing donald trump.

Trump is just more of the same. He talks differently but he is a typical hard-right Republican in his actions.

Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”

#68

Post by leetcrew »

clairity wrote: post #26
hkmurakami wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to remember is that everyone thinks they're "middle class". Even the corporate VP making half a million dollars thinks she's middle class.

this is why i define the middle class as the middle 3 quintiles of wealth rather than some nebulous standard of living, the latter of which can be manipulated more easily for political ends. it's more obvious then to see that the 20-80% middle class standard of living has unambigously become more stressed, debt-laden, fearful, and immobile over the last 50 years, while the 1% has become much freer in all dimensions.…

class, wealth, and income are all distinct concepts. imo you're better off being more specific if you really mean wealth or income buckets. taken alone, wealth throws away some important information. a retired couple worth $500k (roughly 80th percentile household net worth) is living a very different life than a twenty something who already has that in the bank.

Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”

#69

Post by rxhernandez »

hkmurakami wrote: post #20
geodel wrote: post #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 glob…

One thing to remember is that everyone thinks they're "middle class". Even the corporate VP making half a million dollars thinks she's middle class.

An anecdote, but, most of my closest friends definitely believe they are poor; most of their friends that I've met also believe they're poor. I honestly haven't met too many people that believe they're "lower" middle class.

Conversely, except in SV, everyone I know that pulls over $300k thinks they're rich.

Re: A review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”

#70

Post by Kalium »

geodel wrote: post #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 glob…

I've witnessed two modes at work here. One is elites deciding that since their sympathies are in the right places, they must know what the concerns of the working class are. Since they're better educated, they're also clearly best equipped to address those concerns!

The other is highly educated people feeling economically unprivileged and concluding that this now means they are the working class and what's in their interests is what's in the interests of the working class.

Both are misguided. The former leads to patronizing policy, the latter selfish. The best example I can think of for the latter is student loan forgiveness - lots of educational elites have student loans, comparatively little of the working class does.

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