Defending the One Percent

A large number (majority?) of people who are proponents for american-style capitalism, advocating for less government intervention, are from big universities around the U.S, and will often earn a relatively high wage. Although it's very hard to quantify, I feel as though these people are very disassociated from the everyday life the claim to be studying. If you live near Harvard earning ~300k a year, how easy is it to imagine (pretend?) that everything is fine and that the skewed income distribution is actually a positive thing. Boiled down - can people who are part of such a skewed system really produce unbiased studies and theories about the system?

They back up their claims with various arguments as to the nature of the average consumer and echoes and remnants of trickle-down economics theories.

Why don't people instead look at the actual world for more accurate evidence? The U.S. is a pioneer of creating highly divided cultures, with the top 1% earning ridiculous amounts of money and living in relative luxury, while having a very large population of people struggling to make ends meet, or even get healthcare due to the associated costs.

At the same time, countries exercising a highly socialistic economic policy (welfare countries), such as the Nordics and Germany to some extent have a far higher "average" quality of life, as well as (arguably) a happier population. Being a taxi driver in Norway or Denmark doesn't mean you live in near-poverty and have to work 80 hours a week to make ends meet.

While I'll try to not get into details of economic theory, and so forth, one question that has always irked me is the following:

Does the evidence not speak for itself? In what country has pure capitalism (or at least as close as we can get), actually worked to produce a happy and harmonious society?

This guy's a professor of economics at Harvard?! ...Actually that explains a lot.

Wow lots of strawmen here.

"A large number (majority?) of people who are proponents for american-style capitalism, advocating for less government intervention, are from big universities around the U.S"

Source? So what?

"Boiled down - can people who are part of such a skewed system really produce unbiased studies and theories about the system?"

Can people who are part of the lower earning rung of society give a unbiased opinion of the system?

"Does the evidence not speak for itself? In what country has pure capitalism (or at least as close as we can get), actually worked to produce a happy and harmonious society?"

Yes the evidence does speak for itself. Capitalism worked out pretty great for much of Western Civilization. Everywhere where more socialist approaches were tried it failed. Just ask all soviet countries', Japan, East Germany, China etc. citizens if they are happy.

America is not for nothing the land of opportunity, and it is not for nothing that emigrants are flocking to the USA, Europe and Australia.

Unfortunately the soviets discovered you cannot have a classless society. It is that drive to elevate yourself to a higher class that makes us want to achieve more than the absolute minimum required effort.

Isn't the entire 'one percent' debate (in America) centered around the fact that one party wants to institute a modest tax increase on that group, and the other party wants to, irrationally, keep cutting their taxes even when faced with deficits? Nobody reasonable is actually advocating for 'perfect economic equality'.

I'm generally a free market guy (in that I believe the free market should be the foundation of the economy but not dictate every aspect of it), but I just can't see a reasonable tax increase as being a problem.

I don't see a problem with a reasonable minimum wage either ($12-$15/hr), especially when tax dollars are subsidizing the working-poor with food stamps, students loans, public housing, health-care etc. As much as I'm disappointed with Wal-Mart for not being embarrassed their employees are on food stamps, I understand that they can't raise their wage unilaterally lest it puts them at a competitive disadvantage - which is why you need legislation! Make it fair for everybody.

The absurd example in the second paragraph put me off, so I didn't really find it in me to read the argument thoroughly. But if the premise is that a single man can "come up with an idea" and magically produce an ipod with comparable personal effort, and no reliance of a third world factory economy -- as an author can come up with a book -- then I don't think the author of the article has the required connection to reality to discuss economics at all.

Earlier today I came across this, which may (or may not) be an interesting counter-point -- or at least make a meta-point: "Exposing the false prophets of social transformation": https://opendemocracy.net/transformation/nicole-aschoff/expo...