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American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

economist.com

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Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#141

Post by BloondAndDoom »

Frieren wrote: post #60

Fascism needs existential threats. Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic. > A millenarian economy is necessarily a paranoid one. The economy does not need to be paranoid, it becomes paranoid with inequality increases the stakes on everything, when you can be obscenely rich or depressingly poor and there is no in between. That makes reasonable people para…

> Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic.

Wish this was true, but clearly not. Unless you define existential as “inconvenience”

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#142

Post by srean »

crossbody wrote: post #134
srean wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Norway seems to be doing swell.

Well, if Norway managed to pull it off, we can just ignore all the countless counter examples

Another way is to learn from what Norway is doing right and see what can be replicated. Norway is not a sole example though, just a prominent one.

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#143

Post by WalterBright »

andyferris wrote: post #99
WalterBright wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a summary of Piketty's argument? We could start off with how are you worse off because of people wealthier than you?

That depends how they got wealthy. Did they steal everything outright? Someone is worse off in that transaction. (Or everyone a little bit worse off if it’s government grift). Did they create all that value themselves? Might be fine - positive sum games do exist. Did they create some system where a bunch of money flows just to them based on the labour of others? Maybe it depends on the details, like how much the labo…

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Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#144

Post by norir »

WalterBright wrote: post #39
abuob wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're genuinely curious, a few suggestions that I personally found incredibly enlightening: Anand Giridhardas, Winners Take All: The book is fantastic, there's also his now infamous google talk where he talks about dismantling google: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st century: Probably the most comprehensive (but at times also longwinded) outline on how wealth inequalit…

How about a summary of Piketty's argument? We could start off with how are you worse off because of people wealthier than you?

> We could start off with how are you worse off because of people wealthier than you?

You are smart enough to come up with some answers of your own. It's rude to demand others to do your own thinking for you.

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#145

Post by WalterBright »

rileymat2 wrote: post #57
WalterBright wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a summary of Piketty's argument? We could start off with how are you worse off because of people wealthier than you?

It’s a rather public example but DOGE did immense damage and was facilitated by the ability to leverage wealth into power. There is a dangerous feedback cycle.

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Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#146

Post by crummy »

WalterBright wrote: post #95
shric wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walter, I believe the idea against wealth inequality is not purely that there are wealthier people but that their wealth should be redistributed such that the wealthier people are less wealthy (but still wealthier) and the poorer people are less poor (but still poorer).

There have been many attempts at taking from the rich and giving to the poor, and the result was always everybody was worse off except the people who ran the government.

Are you arguing against the concept of progress taxation entirely?

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#147

Post by wvenable »

WalterBright wrote: post #83
wvenable wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so much wealth is being created , why is everyone so poor?

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Do they really? The poor have castles and servants and hardly work? No, the real poor work 60 hours a week and live out of their cars. My children, who are not poor, with good jobs still can't afford their own home -- where is their castle, sir?

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#148

Post by sevenzero »

satvikpendem wrote: post #137
sevenzero wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did, which made me come to this conclusion. You seem to think value is created by extracting money from a product, while value actually is created by the work it takes to create said product. How much money one does extract has nothing to do with a products value. In your Tailor Swift example earlier, the value was created by her recording the music, not by her selling tours.

The value is absolutely in how much you can sell it. Otherwise every startup that subscribes to the "build it and they will come" philosophy would've been successful, which is obviously not the case and is a common problem that YC specifically tells founders to look out for. There is no value in building anything if you cannot convince others it is valuable. The labor theory of value is not valid.

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Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#149

Post by srean »

crossbody wrote: post #120
srean wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that's the theory. It used to be mostly true in the past, but given current valuations it does not look true at all. My worry is that we are not creating enough new wealth but just distributing it lopsidedly.

Is your worry based on vibes? Because statistics clearly show median real wealth growing rapidly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

That's money and not wealth and its a flow not stock and denominated in something that can depreciate, has it even been priced correctly ?

I grant you that it is very hard to measure ownership of (wealth generating) assets, hidden behind legal obfuscations.

Lorenz curve [0], GEI [1], Gini index of owned wealth generating assets would be the right thing to measure to see how understand one's share of the pie. But an enormous amount of records of such wealth is just hidden away, using laws that those very owners helped pass.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_curve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_entropy_index

BTW I am willing to be convinced to adopt a different position if I see a well researched, credible Lorenz curve data that has tracked the shadow wealth to some degree of accurate approximation.

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#150

Post by antiframe »

WalterBright wrote: post #96
crummy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not read Piketty. But I could imagine a society where the poor are 10% better off and the rich are 1000% better off to be a less stable society that ends up falling apart.

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Citation Needed (that they actually made everyone equal and it wasn't just a talking point). You may want to read a history book that talks about how Stalin denounced uravnilovka and about the existence of the nomenklatura.
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