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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”

#111

Post by refurb »

skrtskrt wrote: post #98
gumby wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wonder if educated elites being merely oblivious or totally asshole about working class concerns. I lean to "oblivious" argument. People inherently see things through their own experience. Back in the 80s I took some classes that tried to break through the bubble (especially funny that it was MIT where I like to joke "if you don't arrive arrogant they'll beat it into you").* This was just before the CMC machine too…

I attended a top-20 US University and many of my classmates and friends had multimillionaire parents & fell into the "oblivious" camp, (like telling me $50k income for an entire family was upper middle class)... BUT their upbringing, the media they consume, and the reinforcement of beliefs through their social echo chamber makes it insanely hard to change their "obliviousness", to the point where it's not so innocent…

I knew a guy in graduate school who had never held a "crap" job like working the register at a retail store or working as a janitor. His parents made sure he never had to take summer jobs to pay for schooling.

His first job out of school was at an investment bank. The world of blue collar work was entirely foreign to him.

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

#112

Post by aabeshou »

jmole wrote: post #72
reggieband wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

a better percentage to use would be the delta in unemployment rate, e.g. 3M / (# of people who want to work). This would be approximately 3M / 158M [0], or a 1.8% rise in the unemployment rate. In the 2008 recession, we saw a total unemployment rate of almost 10%, so we'd have to lose an additional 7-8M jobs to get to that level. [0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm

let's be clear - it's a 1.8% percentage point increase, relative to the entire US population. but data from the U.S. Dept of Labor (graphed in The Guardian [0]) shows weekly unemployment claims just shot up from around 250k to around 3.25 million, which is a 1300% increase

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/26/us-unemploy...

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

#113

Post by dopu »

leftyted wrote: post #77
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…

> 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. Economists use the word "capital" without making reference to Marx. Marx didn't come up with that word, it had a meaning i…

> Economists use the word "capital" without making reference to Marx. Marx didn't come up with that word, it had a meaning in classical economics since Adam Smith (and maybe before).

How does this refute OP's point? They're really just pointing out how absurd it is that a study on wealth inequality and class fails to even consider the Marxist perspective. Genuine scholarly negligence.

> This is also bizarre. Piketty does have a theory about "why inequality is so rampant in the first place". He just thinks we can change the laws and fix it!

OP isn't arguing that Piketty has no theory -- just that it's a pretty naive one. A Marxist perspective understands that "changing the laws to fix it" is not enough. The state is dependent on the bourgeoisie for its survival (see [0]), and will thus bend to their demands. So long as we have no organized and militant labor movements (and labor parties to represent them), the working class will have neither leverage over the state nor the means to enact their demands.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_the_state#T...

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

#114

Post by kirrent »

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…

That seems like a little bit of a cherry picked article to support your point. Scrolling through the front page of that website the top article is an opinion piece by Joe Biden which writes about the importance of supporting young people and those out of work:

"So we need to make sure that our economic recovery does not come at the expense of those who can least afford it or who are just getting started in life: Hard-working young people in service industries and retail that are being decimated by layoffs; all those who are hustling to make a living in the gig economy, and those who were already struggling to get by before this crisis, who are drowning in credit card debt or student loans, and who now are in even greater need of a lifeline."

When I scroll further down the page I can see a fundraiser for readers to support "people and communities who are more vulnerable and need extra support during this time" including the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Restaurant Workers Community Foundation, and One Fair Wage. Apparently readers and podcast listeners have contributed about $650 000 which at least from an Australian perspective seems non-trivial.

Finally, one of their most recent articles (I'm going through the articles because I'm not going to listen to the podcasts) on the politics of a pandemic titled "How Democrats Should Navigate Pandemic Politics" talks about the importance of directly supporting workers including with "paid-leave provision that’s much bigger than the one the White House watered down in the initial House bill, along with a broad Emergency Unemployment Insurance provision".

I can't reconcile all this stuff with being blind to it. It looks like the founders of this site were in the white house while the medicaid expansion was passed which, at least from an outside perspective, seems to be the most important legislation of the past few decades for the poorer working class.

Even that article you linked to doesn't seem like a damning indictment. If you read it a bit more closely it's at least partially a joke article where the writer talks about the resilience of the human spirit while writing on the walls in lipstick, getting gum in her hair, and napping in the middle of sentences. If it was a manifesto of values I'd agree with you that a lack of focus on unemployed people undergoing hardship would be notable, but it's not. It's just a joke.

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

#115

Post by paganel »

leftyted wrote: post #77
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…

> 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. Economists use the word "capital" without making reference to Marx. Marx didn't come up with that word, it had a meaning i…

> He just thinks we can change the laws and fix it!

Not the OP and I must confess that I haven't read anything by Piketty just yet but imho if these are indeed his views then OP seems certainly to be right in saying Picketty only wants that "capitalism should just change some specific things to reduce inequality".

That's also not want Marx really believed in, i.e. he certainly did not believe that we'll all be better off under a different, better form of capitalism. That's what guys like Lassalle [1] believed and what modern European social-democracy really believed too, starting with the 1930s (see the Popular Front in France [2]) up until the 1980s - 1990s (when all modern European social-democracy went into clinical death). Imho the only true heir of Marx that really got to put its hands on the reins of power was Lenin, and it would have been interesting to see how Trotsky would have extended the world revolution outside USSR's borders had be managed to outplay Stalin.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Lassalle

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Front_(France)

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

#116

Post by refurb »

frant-hartm wrote: post #96
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.

If you stop working an can't live off your savings indefinitely you are middle class by definition.

So if I'm clearing $750K per year but spending it all on my home in Manhattan, private school for my kids and 4 weeks of international vacations per year I'm middle class?

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

#117

Post by paulintrognon »

lliamander wrote: post #99

I was watching a documentary[1] about Sweden's shift away from social democracy in the 70's/80's time-frame that Piketty talks about. From the way it sounds, the program of social democracy nearly destroyed the country. I would take Piketty's nostalgia for those times with a grain of salt. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcX6BUZlEw4

That's funny. I just finished reading his book "Permanent Record" and that's really not what I understood from him. Maybe I missed something.

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

#118

Post by refurb »

take_a_breath wrote: post #108
codingslave wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always viewed it as paradoxical that the left is both: 1.) For the welfare of the worker, social programs, universal healthcare, "standard of living" 2.) Open borders immigration, free trade, outsourcing, and other ultra capitalist policies.

I can never find this left block of "open borders" support. Can you provide some sources?

Really? It's pretty widely reported in the media.[1]

[1]https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/democrats-double-...

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

#119

Post by csallen »

reggieband wrote: post #64
wycy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that's an extreme position, not a common one. I've also heard similar from a few on the right. "Only 1% of the population would die. That's not worth risking the economy over." And another gem: "People die every year, but what we are going to do about people losing their jobs?"

There's nothing uniquely non-empathetic about technocrats.

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

#120

Post by orthecreedence »

defterGoose wrote: post #90
worik wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good advice. But in the face of power imbalances ineffective.

Sadly true. Guess it's war then?

I've been very interested lately in dual power as an alternative to both voting in a system where governments are captured agencies and also bloody revolution.

In effect, forming a network that bypasses the current powers until they disappear.

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