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Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

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Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#101

Post by idanb »

hash-set wrote: post #99
idanb wrote: post #91

I'm a huge fan of Piketty, and have been slogging through his terrific (but long) book and it's change my perception on a lot of things. I don't want to challenge capitalism - competition drives innovation, and the need to survive and to make a better life for oneself is at the core of that. However, we need to admit that not all people are driven by this, and in our world (at least in the United States) it's not abo…

All that you said is right--we have allowed a monster to grow. And killing that monster is going to require sacrifice now. It never comes any other way.

yes - either we need to find a new "source of value" or some form of tear down needs to take place. I think historically tear downs have been at a core of human growth and progress, so I think that will happen before people are forced to change their minds.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#102

Post by hash-set »

VodkaHaze wrote: post #17
Tycho wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there must have been some string pulling that made this book so popular.

It just came out at an appropriate time; a year after Occupy Wall Street, etc. Inequality and inter-generational mobility is clearly on people's minds these days. Similar story happened with Nassim Taleb's Black Swan book. It's not a particularly good book -- it's rambling, hand wavy, and only ever presents anecdotal evidence as support for its claims. But the book came out at an appropriate time (right before the fi…

We need a complete top-to-bottom restructuring of our Federal Government--end welfare, end the giant socialist military system hiding within our economy. We need to audit the Fed and then probably close it down or somehow come up with sound money. We need to prosecute every banker and every entity involved in the 2008 financial crisis.

That would solve 90% of what ails us. Getting the EPA off people's backs and back to some level of sanity would help a ton, too.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#104

Post by nuncanada »

trapperkeeper79 wrote: post #32
smallnamespace wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a sort of facile answer, since there are a lot of details to prove, but in short, because monetary policy over the long run should not have any effect on the real rate of return r and economy-wide growth rate g , which is what the book's argument hinges on. The two big differences between the gold-backed system before the 70s and afterwards are: - We picked fixed pegs to gold, meaning exchange rates were fixe…

Some people believe central banks are essentially printing money right now (since 2008, so for nearly a decade). Why has inflation not picked up?

But ohh, it HAS!!! You are just looking in the wrong place... Basically it happens all over the world, what is called 'carry trade'... All the money being printed in Japan in the last 30 years has been creating inflation in a lot of the underdeveloped countries in the world, just not in Japan... The World economy is so interconnected nowadays that most policies of the past doesn't work anymore as Central Bankers would expect. Keynesian Ben Bernanke's helicopter isn't creating inflation nor growth...

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#105

Post by quadrangle »

hash-set wrote: post #95
broke_wagon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism isn't some "radical" boogeyman, it's just a process to eliminate inequality. (Why should there be any inequality at all?) We don't need to be diminutive about relatively different ideas; that's unhelpful at best.

Yeah, tell that to the millions of dead left in its wake.

There have been nowhere near enough actual trials of communism to conclude anything fully. The core examples were all poorer countries with various problems, corruption… To reject communism as a concept over the atrocities of Stalin et al is as reasonable as rejecting capitalism because the U.S. was built on slavery and the genocide of first peoples.

The atrocities were real, and they did connect to economics, but to just assert that capitalism is the slavery of U.S. history or that communism just is gulags and bread lines is extremely short-sighted. Neither system was anything like the core principles of the economic models (which are just models, so we should reject anyone who focuses only on the models and not on practical reality, but we can't treat each real-world case as the definitive case either).

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#106

Post by tmnvix »

wyager wrote: post #69
tmnvix wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. We should be taxing wealth and not income (or roughly speaking, unearned instead of earned income). Taxing productive activity is literally counter-productive. This will only become a more pressing issue once automation (esp. of the transport industry) gets into full-swing. Eventually we won't have a choice in the matter. There are a whole host of current issues that are culminating in wealth and income dist…

The fundamental premise of your argument - that investment "isn't productive" - is entirely wrong. Investment is what provides capital for growth.

You assume all investment is useful. Property speculation is an example of what I would call 'unproductive' investment.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#107

Post by timecube »

hash-set wrote: post #96
jernfrost wrote: post #76

I wish more people could have Thomas Piketty's balanced view on capitalism. Too often it is treated as some sort of game where you have to pick sides whether you are for or against capitalism. Especially in America there seems to be a kneejerk reaction to any calls for regulations or moderations of the effects of the free market. Usually it is dismissed without further discussion with "look what happened in the east…

You sound like a rambling fool. For starters, no one alive today has even experienced capitalism. What we have in the US is a joke, a complete, miserable joke. It's a system to transfer wealth to the top while avoiding any real accountability for that act. So don't get all righteous like you know anything about regulation or any of it. You can keep your communism, too. Bunch of murderous idiots is all they ever are.

If you want to make the silly argument that anything other than completely free markets isn't capitalism, stop calling authoritarian state capitalism "communism".

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#108

Post by DarkLinkXXXX »

hash-set wrote: post #95
broke_wagon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism isn't some "radical" boogeyman, it's just a process to eliminate inequality. (Why should there be any inequality at all?) We don't need to be diminutive about relatively different ideas; that's unhelpful at best.

Yeah, tell that to the millions of dead left in its wake.

If deaths caused by leaders purporting to advance communist ideals can be attributed to communism, then how many have died at the hands of those purporting to advance capitalist ideals? Would it be reasonable to attribute these deaths to capitalism as well? I really don't these type of conclusions are a positive contribution to economic discourse.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#109

Post by darawk »

DarkLinkXXXX wrote: post #108
hash-set wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, tell that to the millions of dead left in its wake.

If deaths caused by leaders purporting to advance communist ideals can be attributed to communism, then how many have died at the hands of those purporting to advance capitalist ideals? Would it be reasonable to attribute these deaths to capitalism as well? I really don't these type of conclusions are a positive contribution to economic discourse.

Are there significant examples of that in history? I would be looking only at governments causing the deaths of their own citizens. I don't think it'd be fair to count foreign wars there.

EDIT: Just to be clear, i'm not implying that they do not exist. Genuinely don't know of any and would be curious if you do.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#110

Post by aminok »

ebalit wrote: post #51
aminok wrote: post #33

Compelling counter-evidence to Picketty's C21: https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-gra...

Why would it contradict Piketty's theory? Housing is capital. This post seems to respond to the theory that wealth inequality is caused by the rise of automation. That has nothing to do with Piketty's theory.

Picketty's theory is that there's something inherent to market economies that leads to capital's share of income increasing. The evidence suggests it's due to peculiarities related to how advanced economies treat property/land, that are orthogonal to their status as market economies, that are responsible for capital's growing share of income.
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