Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bostonreview.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 218 posts

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

#151

Post by lliamander »

cle wrote: post #137
refurb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory that lessons learned by humanity are quickly forgotten after a few generations and thus we are condemned to trying the same old ideas (with slight tweaks) again until the current generation figures out they don't work.

Conversely, sometimes constraints and situations are different enough that "failed" ideas might succeed under the new constraints. The world is not a static place, and the environments in which many lessons were learned may not be relevant anymore.

True, but it seems that Piketty's position is that those ideas succeeded and would have continued to succeed if left in place - and consequently, that if we implement them now we will also have success.

If it turns out that Piketty's history is incorrect, then the past failure of such plans should make us cautious about trying them again.

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

#152

Post by nemo »

orthecreedence wrote: post #131
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…

> [LTV is] an idea long since thoroughly discredited Not really? It has neither been proven nor disproven, not because of unsoundness in theory, but because of lack of ability to measure the data needed to (dis)prove it ( http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/308/2/20101200_cockshott_nitzan_b... ). On top of this, sure Marx made some bad predictions, but the breadth of his work was not predicting the future or describing what a…

There's no doubt you believe that, and if you would like to salvage what you can with open eyes to the glaring and serious faults in Marx's work, that's fine, though for me it's like trying to save Creationism. Those working to save both Marxism and Creationism seem like they have the same motive - a faith trying to justify a doctrine rather than follow the evidence.

I hadn't mentioned it, but Marxism's anti-empiricism is another incredibly serious issue as well that both shows what a freakish 19th c archaism Marxism is, but also undermines enough to not make it seem worth saving the micrograms of baby for the kilos of bathwater.

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

#153

Post by lliamander »

roenxi wrote: post #143
bisRepetita wrote: post #101

I am reading Capital & Idelogy currently. I find interesting how Piketty challenges the view of property rights. Many think it is something completely natural, sacred. But he shows it is actually ideology. It is not "the nature of things". As I understand it in the book, property is not, and should not be seen as, a 100% inalienable human right. If it was so, it would be completely fair that slave-owners in Haiti and…

> This is the kind of weird, morally unacceptable reasoning about property rights that you will run into if you accept property as a all-powerful, unconstestable principle. The average person has no ability to connect past and future. Most people, when tested, struggle to connect yesterday with today. Typical people don't save enough, don't plan and don't risk assess. If society gives an inch on property rights as an…

> I know 95% of people don't care about that link as much as they'd like to; but the 5% who use it are the people who accomplish literally all the infrastructure creation and planning.

I would contest the position that so few are able to make that link. Perhaps in the abstract they are not, but many people are able to conceptualize that link in concrete terms through their children. If people see a way that they can ensure a better life for their kids, they will often make the necessary choices to bring that about.

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

#154

Post by leepowers »

bisRepetita wrote: post #101

I am reading Capital & Idelogy currently. I find interesting how Piketty challenges the view of property rights. Many think it is something completely natural, sacred. But he shows it is actually ideology. It is not "the nature of things". As I understand it in the book, property is not, and should not be seen as, a 100% inalienable human right. If it was so, it would be completely fair that slave-owners in Haiti and…

No country views property rights as inviolable. Eminent domain trumps individual property rights. Property can be seized pursuant to a lien due to debt, non-payment of taxes, criminal activity, etc. We're not operating under some slavish, unyielding notion of property rights.

There's two distinct concepts being confused as one. The first concept is property rights in general. This concept is singular and correlated with the ideas of ownership and territory. This is may be a universal concept and may be a good candidate for designation as a "natural right". The second concept is the classification of what counts as property. This concept is numerous because we have to actually enumerate everything that counts as property.

Slavery is exceptional because it counts people as property. The error is not with the first concept of property but an error of the second kind, an error of misclassification. Owning a farm and working the land is ok. Owning a farm and owning slaves to work the same plot is immoral.

We see this reified during Reconstruction with Sherman's promise of forty acres and a mule. Where former slaves would be compensated by being granted property rights to the land they worked. Property rights were to be their salvation. As we all know that didn't happen. And a century of systematically denying the rights (including property rights) of their descendants (or anyone who looked like them) is the major reason for the disparities between black Americans and other racial groups.

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

#155

Post by 0x262d »

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…

> Marx does argue for a "mechanical determination of ideology"

He literally doesn't. He is a materialist in that he doesn't believe in magic or god. He is not a mechanical, deterministic one because he doesn't think there's an obvious 1-1 determination of social structure -> ideology, but instead that the two influence each other in extremely complicated ways even though ultimately everything flows from material reality. This is a pretty basic point and embarrassing to get wrong if you're an economist talking about Marx! And obviously Marx thought Engels could be a communist despite being from a bourgeois background, which is what Piketty is saying Marx has an extremely crude theory of.

> Piketty does have a theory

The other person responded to this but yeah I did not say he doesn't have a theory, but that his theory is flawed in that he thinks "why don't we just change the laws the bourgeois made".

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

#156

Post by clairity »

uk_programmer wrote: post #144
clairity wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "[the Labor Theory of Value is] an idea long since thoroughly discredited." that's quite a claim to make without any backing ("everything is nothing" is not particularly useful). i've read some of the main critiques [0], but none thoroughly discredits it. yes, the critiques show flaws, but not fatal ones. so what's the fatal flaw? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_the_labour_theor...

The labour theory of value is easily discredited. The market determines the value i.e. what people are willing to pay for something. The labour theory of value is simply describing the cost of producing something. Whether people are willing to buy it as that price (which would be same as selling it at cost) is an entirely different matter.

you're making the normative and tautological argument that values are what they are because that's what (you think) they should be, not that there is any intrinsic reason for value to be defined only by a market. markets are great theoretical constructs, but real-world markets don't behave the way we always envision they ought to. they're subject to all sorts of external forces.

beyond market settling times, what the delta between labor value and market value very likely indicates is some sort of mispricing in the market, often due to some external, malign manipulation (i.e., an application of force, or power). efficient markets should tend toward the labor value of production, that is, profits are minimized to that of idiosyncratic risk (like pandemics).

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

#157

Post by clairity »

leetcrew wrote: post #68
clairity wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes, i almost added a tangent about income, but really, that's at best second-order effect--class mobility has been dempened over those 50 years and doesn't make much difference except at the margins.

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

#158

Post by 0x262d »

paganel wrote: post #115
leftyted wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As a Trotskyist I think Russia was doomed to bureaucratization regardless of who won the power struggle given they were isolated, only semi-capitalist, and even the existing economy and proletariat were pretty much destroyed in WW1 and the civil war (resulting in losing 80%+ of many economic sectors). But it would have been interesting and maybe even more tragic to see the historical alternative...

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

#159

Post by 0x262d »

uk_programmer wrote: post #144
clairity wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "[the Labor Theory of Value is] an idea long since thoroughly discredited." that's quite a claim to make without any backing ("everything is nothing" is not particularly useful). i've read some of the main critiques [0], but none thoroughly discredits it. yes, the critiques show flaws, but not fatal ones. so what's the fatal flaw? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_the_labour_theor...

The labour theory of value is easily discredited. The market determines the value i.e. what people are willing to pay for something. The labour theory of value is simply describing the cost of producing something. Whether people are willing to buy it as that price (which would be same as selling it at cost) is an entirely different matter.

This is simply saying you disagree with the definition of the word value in LTV and want value to mean a different concept (what marxists call price or exchange-value). It's a semantic argument without real content.

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

#160

Post by vidarh »

refurb wrote: post #104
bisRepetita wrote: post #101

I am reading Capital & Idelogy currently. I find interesting how Piketty challenges the view of property rights. Many think it is something completely natural, sacred. But he shows it is actually ideology. It is not "the nature of things". As I understand it in the book, property is not, and should not be seen as, a 100% inalienable human right. If it was so, it would be completely fair that slave-owners in Haiti and…

Of course property rights are ideology. Anything to do with society and how it's organized is ideological. I think we ended up with private property because the alternatives have been tried and they are worse (e.g. tragedy of the commons).

No country has absolute property rights, and in fact many have massive carveouts.

E.g freedom to roam in the Nordic countries is based on the idea that it is unthinkable that we should allow people's access to nature to be monopolised.

Post reply on HN