The history is simple. The minimum wage was originally passed with the intention of providing a full-time worker the capacity to support himself and a family. The federal minimum wage in the United States was set at $0.25 per hour in 1938. It was not tied to inflation and has to be increased by law. The term "Act of Congress" is often used to describe a massive and nearly impossible action. In this case it is both a literal and figurative truth.

There are a number of commenters here who seem to think that the minimum wage was ever intended to be other than you describe it. They are wrong. The minimum wage is just that, the minimum acceptable wage that a full-time worker can make and be able to subsist without assistance.
> No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. —President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933

The minimum wage was established to ensure that all workers in the US would be able to live independently on their wages. The existence of a minimum wage provides all other workers with useful bargaining leverage, increasing wages throughout. Historically this typically results in a redistribution of wealth from owners to workers (not a commensurate increase in prices as some here have claimed), which always results in an overall increase in economic growth as workers are also consumers.

In the US minimum wage has become stagnant, failing to reflect inflation. A large part of that is the misonceptions throughout this thread. Minimum wage is not "earned solely by teenagers and college students for beer money." Nor can any reasonable person suppose that anyone doesn't desere to "live comfortably on 40 hours a week."

These, fairly recent, attitudes have been encouraged by business owners who have little incentive to pay their workers a reasonable wage, so long as there is an army of unemployed and underemployed willing to do the same job. The minimum wage subverts that desire.
Simply put, an owner pays a little as he can for the labor. The rarer a laborer's skills are (not how skilled or useful he is, the owner never pays anyone he doesn't have to) the more he can charge because he is difficult to replace. Minimum wage establishes a floor, as do overtime requirements and other fair labor standards.

The minimum wage has nothing to do with whether or not someone "deserves" to be paid for their work. Your boss will never pay you more than he has to, that is the central premise of a free market. A minimum wage says that no matter how little he wants to pay you, he should still pay you enough to live on. It is also simple economic sense, it saves money that would go to public welfare to support people who are employed. It is a decision by society as a whole that no one who is willing and able to work should find themselves in poverty.

All that being said, the shareholder prefers that money goes to his bottom line, and not into wages. So he fights any increase tooth and nail. The misconceptions throughout this thread, and the insane anger focused on those one rung lower on the socio-economic ladder, are one tool to avoid it. Another is spreading misinformation, also found in this thread, to lawmakers; claiming that increasing minimum wage dampens, rather than strengthens, the local economy. And the last is simple apathy, since the minimum wage is not tied to inflation it becomes increasingly trivial as time goes by. After a while it becomes, as it has now, a poverty wage.

EDIT:
Oh my poor inbox. Ok, I'm going to try to address some of the biggest responses.

1. I used the term "inflation" incorrectly, or at least not in the way traditionally used in economics. I also referenced minimum wage which began in the US in 1938, ignoring the 1933 law to which the FDR quote refers. I left it out because it was struck down by the Supreme Court, while the Court upheld the 1938 law. For the same reason I used the term "inflation" rather than "cost of living" or another, more accurate metric. This is ELI5, I didn't want to confuse the issue and stuck with a term I thought everyone was familiar with, rather than explaining the difference between the two, which would have done little to answer OP's question.
   
   
2. A sizeable percentage of minimum wage workers are young adults or retirees who don't need the income. But a sizeable percentage aren't. Someone, attempting to claim I mischaracterized things, acually supported my argument. By his numbers 54% of minimum wage earners are in the young adult bracket. Which indicates that 46% are not. He handwaves this away, claiming not all of them need that income. I submit that not all of the young adults don't need that income. Just because you're 24 doesn't make you a white, middle-class, college student looking for beer money.
   
   
3. I am not an economist. I am someone with an interest in history and political philosophy, of which economics is a child discipline. My writing is not academic, but neither is what I say innaccurate or misleading. My statements are political, in the sense that they relate to modern policy, and they are influenced by passion. I have never seen any argument against a minimum living wage that is not either intellectually dishonest, or ethically abhorrent. I will admit that I have seen many that were both.
   
   
4. Some kind fellow has given me gold. Thank you generous stranger, for paying what you could have for free. In itself proving that there are counter-examples to my argument that in a free market people will pay as little for labor as they can get away with. This, however, is merely the exception which prove the rule. In the absence of strong worker protection laws or powerful unions most employers view their workers as expendable resources, not people, to be procured at as little cost as possible and disposed of at convenience. I lament that we've become comfortable with that view.
   
   EDIT 2:
   
   Okay, this has blown up way to far. It needs to stop. This isn't a particularly well written or researched essay on the minimum wage. It's not an academic article on the subject, or even an editorial. I only wrote this because I was royally pissed off that every other response in this thread was shitting all over low wage workers, claiming that everyone who was paid minimum wage was either a teenager or a lazy failure in life who deserved nothing. So I pulled some references from Wikipedia and hacked together a "for" response in the form of a short persuasive essay (in the sense that the essay is intended to persuay, not necessarily that it succeeded).
   
   

• Look, if this is really interesting to you here's John Oliver giving much more eloquent, or at least entertaining, in explanation why a minimum living wage is a good thing.
  
• For further viewing here he is on income inequality.
  
• If you know absolutely nothing about economics and want to know if I'm full of shit, here's a great introductory book, which assumes you know absolutely nothing.
  
• If you do know a little, or a lot, about economics try reading Adam Smith's famous text on the subject, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Or try another great text, which may be more relevant to our current discussion, Karl Marx's opus, Capital. Best of all, since they're both public domain, you can read them online for free.
  
• If those are both too outdated for you then by all means please consider the modern, popular work by Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
  
• As long as I'm suggesting a Christmas reading list, please consider my favorite book and the one I try desperately to emulate in my writing and personal philosophy, Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man.
  
  If you still think I'm full of shit, if you don't like my Christmas reading list, if you have another magical panacea, or hate poor people, or hate rich people, or want to observe that minimum wage is a band-aid for some bigger social issue; please start another thread. This is crazy. There's no way I can even see your response anymore.
  
  The TLDR, ELIL5 of the entire post is this: Minimum wage in most places in the US is higher than the federal minimum wage, but still not always enough to live on. Minimum wage was supposed to be a living wage, but increasing it requires an act of law even though the cost of living goes up every year. Since low wages mean low costs many business leaders and investors like a low minimum wage, so they fight efforts to raise it. As time goes on what was a living wage becomes too low to stay one. I think that's bad.
  
  And because everyone's gotten really riled up, here's a scene from my favourite Christmas movie.

He wrote the book capital. Thomas Piketty, a world renowned french economist who talks about the inequality in our society.

"Let me break down to you why not only should you change your perspective on UBI, but why you should know it's inevitable... and I'll use my own words years ago when Joe Rogan first heard about it, and thankfully since then he's shifted his stance... and hopefully you as well."

Tighten your sphincter holes ladies because this is a long one. So... before we begin let's throw out some palabras:

• The Strange Reality of Fiat Money

• Debt-damned economics: either learn monetary reform, or kiss your assets goodbye

•1 billion living in poverty

•15% live below poverty line in US

• 46.2 million Americans are on food stamps

• There’s no 100% capitalist or socialist country in the world

• Corporate profits are at an all-time high

• Unemployment is at multi-decade low

• Shallowest period of job recovery (jobless recovery)

The statement “r > g” (meaning that the rate of return on capital is generally higher than the rate of economic growth)

50% jobs will be completely automated by 2040, and other estimates saying sooner, by 2030: Transportation, retail sales, first line supervisors, cashiers, secretaries, managers, registered nurses, elementary school teachers, janitors/cleaners. Multibillion dollar companies’ are hiring fewer and fewer people. Combine Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, they are worth 1$ trillion, but only have created 150,000 jobs.... marinate on that for a moment. Now Uber has acquired $18 billion in a short amount of time, however, they only employ a few hundred people. This leads to inequality, and situations like these only exacerbates it. Humanity desperately needs to reassess the future.


Structural inequality, means that it’s ingrained the system the same way money is. The fairy stale we tell ourselves, it’s inevitable and it’s the nature of capitalism. However, countries have already successfully redistributed wealth through policies and innovations like South Korea and Germany. But nobody has an answer to structural inequality. Nobody is having this discussion, but instead it’s a simplistic argument of agreeing or disagreeing with the argument about what they might do or whether it’s morally right. Or you might disagree because it’s atrocious or it’s not going to work, and you just can’t give money for whatever reason. And that is where the inherent challenge lies, so we should be asking the salient question: How much it will cost? How to pay for it? How to finance it? Would people stop working if they just receive an income? And will it solve the problem? Humanity should focus on the goal, not the story or the fairy tale that we tell ourselves, which Joe lost on during his interview with Eddie. He was very attached to and he defended it quite well through his wit and humor, but it’s still a devil’s advocate fallacy, and I'll address that further down.

So we need to think about the goal, otherwise it’s going to end up like the discussion with capitalism and socialism for perpetuity. We don’t have that time. A good starting point is from Article 25 of the International Declaration of Human Rights from the UN, it states: EVERYONE HAS THE RIGHT TO A STANDARD OF LIVING ADEQUATE FOR THE HEALTH AND WELL-BEING OF HIMSELF AND OF HIS FAMILY, INCLUDING FOOD, CLOTHING, HOUSING AND MEDICAL CARE AND NECESSARY SOCIAL SERVICES […]

So does a basic income fulfill this goal or not? Because if it does, it won’t matter the dissenters ideology because it’s actually fulfilling the goal. Now, look at the experiments in 14 countries (out of 200 industrialized countries) 3 were unconditional UBI, and only two had more than a thousand. Let’s be clear here, this still isn’t enough data to argue for or against the issue because we simply don’t know or haven’t done enough experiments. But anyways, let’s start with two big industrialized nations:

CANADA

• 5 years (1974-79)

• ~10,000 People

• $500/Month

─ Hospitalization rates fell by 8.5%

─ Only two groups worked less: Women who took extended maternity leave and (male) youth.

─ High school completion rates increases

INDIA

• 3 years (2011-13)

• 6,000 Peoples

• $4/month (40% subsistence)

─ Improved food sufficiency

─ Improved nutrition

─ Increase in livestock

─ No increase in alcohol consumption

─ Reduced incidence of illness

─ Improved school attendance

─ People were 3 times more likely to start their own business

These results are definitely promising, but still inconclusive because there have been so few experiments. There are other open ended questions that need to be addressed, and that is rent. Suppose each one of us receives $1,000 dollars every month, what happens to rent? If you’re not a homeowner and you have a landlord instead, what’s stopping them (other than policy or mechanisms) to raise the rent exactly $1,000 dollars? But that inherently increases inequality because you’re moving more capital to those who already have capital, based on Thomas Piketty’s research. So actually, UBI would actually increase inequality and increase poverty, and destroy the middle class even faster. And then if you get rid of social programs and arbitrarily tell everyone to do whatever they want with their income so we don’t need this bureaucracy, because you don’t need so much social programs and government involvement. Well, everyone here should be abundantly aware by now (I fucking hope) what happens when you privatize healthcare. Quality goes down, prices go up, and everything goes to hell. So we have to remember that it’s not going to be a panacea, because complex things such as UBI need to be contextualized, and if implemented, they must be a comprehensive package of larger reforms, and the larger implications of what you’re doing. And it must be different in other countries because of different social contexts, social adaptation, and social norms, and not everybody is at the same social level. So it’s never going to be one size fits all. And of course, it always goes back to we don’t have enough experiments to come to anything conclusive. Which is why we need politicians and the people who are in position of mandating legislation to warrant more research and study, just like other controversial (but beneficial)* reforms as the legalization of marijuana and MDMA therapy.

Politicians who want to get on board and help should:

• Conduct their own experiment with at least 10,000 people

• Control Group

• Truly Unconditional

• More than two years

• True basic income

The key points is it has to be unconditional and long term because if they know it’s going to last 2 years, they can plan for the future, because if you only conduct the experiment for 6 months, you’re not going to see the social dynamics that actually unfold in a complex society. And it must be a true basic income, not a fraction of a percent, of like 10-40% of the poverty line, it must be, many economists suggest about half the median income, or somewhere close to that number. And we need detailed feasibility studies, because nobody has done a thorough research looking at all the implications in the economic activity in the largest sense of the broader research. The technology is available to make things easier especially for entrepreneurs to run a basic income experiment, thanks to block chains and crypto-currencies. And in developing countries mobile payments are very successful, like in Kenya.

Continued below...

In short, if we don't reverse the trend of increasing inequality, there's nothing to rule out becoming a society structurally similar to 19th century Europe, except the peasants will work in cubes and restaurants instead of fields. The top centile will own almost all means of wealth creation and the vast majority of income. As well as having virtually total power over government. No more upward mobility, meritocracy, or representative democracy. A new aristocracy cemented in place by economic feedback loops and inheritance, so stable that it will only collapse from some big shock like world war or popular uprising.

Caveat: I'm only half way through the book... Smart people of reddit who've reddit, did I get the ending right?

Sorry but you are very wrong. Canadians and Americans are very differnet.

Example:

• Walk into a American house and ... oh wait they lock all thier doors. Ok knock on an American's door and ask them who is the head of the house. They will more than likely tell you its the father or eldest male.
  
  
• Walk into a Canadian house and ask who the head of the house hold is and they will look at you, then each other, and shurg their shoulders.
  
  
  The culture is very different ... in many ways. Having the same music and clothes dosen't mean squat. Read this book Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values
  
  
  
  Some other examples from the book: (yes it has the head of the house thing in it)
  
  
• Only 20% of Canadians attend church weekly vs 42% for Americans
  
• Only 18% of Canadians feel that the father must be Master of the house vs 49% for Americans
  
• 71% of Canadians felt that a couple living together were family vs 49% for Americans
  
• Only 25% of Canadians were prepared to take great risks vs 38% of Americans
  
• Only 17% of Canadians feel a widely advertised product is probably good vs 44% of Americans
  
• Americans are more likely to brag about the new car they just bought while Canadians are more likely to boast about the trips they have taken

The hero worship of Marxist economics is largely misplaced and unproductive. Marx was ignorant of many intellectual breakthroughs in economics that occurred between his writing of The Communist Manifesto and Capital. Take, for example, the marginal revolution compared to Marx's theory of prices. No economist pays any attention to Marx's ideas on price theory, or his other "economic" contributions. Other things that people would like to credit to Marx, eg a focus on income inequality, is better credited to previous economists like David Ricardo.

Marxist economics failed to account for the core role of economics--the allocation of scare resources with alternate uses. Instead Marx simply asserted that a communist economy could achieve the same efficiency with more equitable distribution of gains, but without explaining how this could be done. He similarly ignored the tradeoff between worker's quality of life and efficiency/growth--this isn't to say that we have the right balance now, but that Marx didn't even consider the question. Every time Marx's ideas have been put into practice they have proved a dismal failure and demanded an immediate reversal to more traditional (ie "capitalist") means of organizing production. See Lenin's New Economic Policy and Deng's economic reforms. The tragic irony is that Marxist economies tend to cause the most suffering for the people they are intended to help, as the elite are perfectly capable of protecting themselves regardless of circumstances.

Marx's contributions to history are significant and his political contributions are undeniable, but we shouldn't lionize his economic theories simply by association. His contributions to economics as practiced today are non-existent. Marxist critiques of capitalism were disproven within his own lifetime. Indeed by the publication of Capital, wages of the working class were increasing. A lot of casual Marxists tend to think he predicted that "capitalism was bad" and then cherry pick periods that loosely agree with this understanding. Marxism actually makes much more specific predictions about the way the world will evolve that were false--for example, where and how the first communist revolution would take place. We shouldn't lose sight of that.

Economics is complicated and we shouldn't reduce it to hero worship of some past figure who "proved capitalism wrong". A recent book that focuses on the injustices of economic inequality with a far more sophisticated treatment is Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty.

That book was published before they corrected their spreadsheet error--it applied some of the same theoretical lessons of the debt issue & therefore is somewhat poisoned.

For the record, this book discusses the exact same crisis set as a R&R but explicitly includes those stable countries (like Australia, NZ, CA) who haven't had financial crises, or debt-fueled growth slowing.

My point isn't to pitch for a particular book, but it seems that a certain Academic integrity requires that a 'panoramic' analysis of any issue, includes those aspects uncomfortable for or in opposition to one's own theories.

I've never seen Akerloff & Schiller, for example, shy away from confronting monetarist & other rebuttals. Even Larry Summers who, in other issues is pretty sleazy (namely Russia privatization & his misuse of research on women) has a good deal of integrity in Academics when it comes to being wrong. And a past generation of economists, such as JM Keynes, Nikolas Kaldor, Paul Samuelson & a young Milton Friedman & Robert Solow regularly delighted in admitting their errors publicly. (See Kaldor & Friedman's debate and also Samuleson's 'A Summing Up'--in addition, B. deLong's admitting that healthcare's positive externalities are low, Stiglitz' Mea Culpa on globalization, Summers on free trade & protectionism, Bruce Bartlett on fiscal stimulus, Steve Marglin's volte-face in one direction & Gintis & Bowles in the opposite direction--on the opposite issue, refusal to update beliefs, we have the trenchant obstinance of inflation hawks and deficit hawks )

Edit:

Here are some other panoramic sources on the same area of study as This Time is Different:

Manias, Panics & Crashes is a famous textbook on the issue.

Akerlof & Schiller's Animal Spirits is a smaller range but an interesting analysis

For the record, Schiller was one of the people who foresaw the housing crisis

Mark Blyth wrote a history of the concept of Austerity and its political causes & consequences as well as the economic data--while polemical, and coming squarely down against austerity, is nonetheless expansive and well written.

Peter Bernholz has written a massive study, but a short book, on inflation crises in world history, expanding from Rome to the modern day that, while chained to an outdated Austrian conception of money & finance, is sufficiently data rich.

Additionally, there's a neo-classical study of Trade & Growth I quite enjoy, written as an implicit neo classical answer to the new economic history & institutional theory. Here's a neo-malthusian perspective on the same issue.

Here is a post-Keynesian analysis of the same stuff, a neo-marxian/neo-ricardian one, an alternative B-of-P crisis theory, a geoist analysis by another person who foresaw the 2007 crisis and a radically alternative view of debt & money which is theoretically interesting but empirically sparser.

Charles' Geisst is a historian with a balanced analysis of both Wall Street & debt in history.

Not an economist, David Graeber has written an interest history of debt.


The point is there is a VAST, empirically & theoretically rich & sophisticated set of analyses, from diverse & contradictory perspectives, all of which are higher standard works than either the Debt & Growth paper or the This Time is Different book. I add these overkill, both for those who are interested in follow up & to emphasize the diversity & availability of good scholarship from other authors.

>Just FYI, there's another side to that film (which is essentially propaganda). You should also research views and evidence from actual economists to get the whole picture.

Do you have a link to this other side? Because from what I gather from sources like Capitalism in the 21st Century and all the credible reviews of this book, is that there isn't much discussion or dispute about income inequality that would say Robert Reich's documentary is propaganda.

This is the syllogism they are using.

A) Black people use this social program
B) Republicans want to cut this social program

Therefore, Republicans want to cut social programs because Black people use them.

So if you want to cut welfare you hate black people. If you point out that the large majority of people who use welfare in America are not black, so why you hear, "DIBRPORITONALLHY BLACK." These people have no idea what a proportion is or what it should mean. Ask someone, "What is the proper proportion that something should be of another thing?" They have no idea and can't unpack it.

Recommended reading.

Bonus points, if instead of talking about disproportionate black people they instead say "people of color" you can ask them how they got so racist that they would use an old-timey racist phrase like "colored people" AND lump in all races into one group as if Cubans, and Italians, and Arabs and Indians and African Americans and Koreans are all the same, have no special identity that matters to them and their only feature is not being white. Sounds like a white supremacist talking point, doesn't it?

Edit: People should actually just read this book instead of launching misinformed and unrelated arguments against what I said. It turns out the professional academic goes into a little more detail and cites extensive sources, unlike my exceedingly brief reddit comment. Literally, go read a book. It's very short, because half of it is citations.

Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an excellent read for anyone interested in wealth inequality, the data behind it, and its effects.

If you're interested in economics then I'd recommend. It gives a comprehensive overview of the titular economic models and their historical-societal contexts.

Essentially cons/libertarians troll Amazon and review books that they don't read.

This is not more apparent than all the one-star reviews of Piketty's, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. They simply give it one-star without reading it, call it Marxist propaganda, and tell us how discredited and dangerous Picketty is.

This works well on their low-info base, but it only drives away reasonable and intelligent people.

I don't know how hours of reading can be avoided. One book I've found very valuable is Richard Wolf's Contending Economic theories. https://www.amazon.ca/Contending-Economic-Theories-Neoclassical-Keynesian/dp/0262517833

As far as left economics it really only deals with Marxist style socialism. But it does so by contrasting it with Keynesian and Neoclassical theory in such a way that you come out the other end with a pretty good picture of the entire economic horizon (at least in the minds of the most influential thinkers in economics today). From there I'd look for books on other variants of post-capitalist economics.

I read Thomas Pickety's "Capital in the 21st Century"
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617
And it was quite an economic tome. I can't properly articulate the work, but he made the case that economic growth in the future is not going to be as high as it was in the decades after WWII. Most likely, 1% is what to expect. 3.5% is a fantasy.

In my mind this is the actual ideological war that is currently being fought, but it never gets too much of a discussion. Glad books like Capital and Reich's new documentary are prosecuting the case.

This issue is the clear separation between the parties. This is all the data we have on equality in Australia, red is for ALP governments and blue for LNP governments.

Since 1980, the ALP have run an even keel on GINI, which is the accepted measure for inequality. They haven't improved equality of income, but it hasn't gotten worse.

Since 1980 the LNP have seen inequality increase rapidly, with GINI up 0.05, making us the 9th most unequal country in the OECD (out of 34 countries).

If GINI hadn't gone up (ie ALP was in power and maintained their trend), we would be around the tenth most equal, jumping around 15 countries or half the OECD.

Of course, as you can see, this means we have a centrist and a right party, which means inequality will always go up over time. The ALP have ceded the battle, in effect. Perhaps why the Greens vote is creeping up, along with the vote for the populist right, like PUP?

The good news? The last time inequality was this bad (US graph just because we suck at this topic, it is relevant here for a number of reasons) was the start of the Progressive Era, which resulted in more progressive taxation, a focus on education, healthcare and scientific research, exposure of political corruption, big leaps in equality for women and racial/ethnic minorities and so on.

Is the same happening now? The conversation has already started, with books like Capital. The Occupy movement and March in March were huge, and while the media basically ignored them or criticised them, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets doesn't happen for nothing.

Even some MPs are talking about it.

Time for a New Progressive movement?

I just started reading Boomerang. The first chapter is devoted to Iceland. One of the main points is the feeling of deservedness felt by the Icelandic investment bankers who had been fishermen days before. One says on his first day of his first banking job (no training) his job was to advise on currency hedging. The overall feeling in Iceland was that the Icelandic people were particularly well suited to investment banking.

https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1541645634

A very good book was written on this topic by French economist Thomas Piketty:

Capital in the 21st Century

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

That Piketty book really is a fascinating read though. For those interested, it's called 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century''. It covers lots of basic economic tenets, and makes a good case on his global capital tax theory, which seeks to quell the issues inherent with Capitalism that give rise to an increased disparity in income and wealth distribution.

Good food for thought.

If you're interested, Fragile By Design by Calomiris and Haber. It's controversial but made a lot of sense to me. From the Amazon recap:

"Analyzing the political and banking history of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil through several centuries, Fragile by Design demonstrates that chronic banking crises and scarce credit are not accidents. Calomiris and Haber combine political history and economics to examine how coalitions of politicians, bankers, and other interest groups form, why they endure, and how they generate policies that determine who gets to be a banker, who has access to credit, and who pays for bank bailouts and rescues."

https://www.amazon.com/Fragile-Design-Political-Princeton-Economic/dp/0691155240

http://www.amazon.com/How-Asia-Works-Joe-Studwell/dp/0802121322/

This book actually argues that WB/IMF advice is counterproductive. The East Asian countries that lifted themselves out of poverty did so by going against the advice of those two institutions. Top comment provides great TL;DR.

For context, the author of this article, Thomas Piketty, is one of the most prominent and influential left-wing economists in the world. His book, Capital in the 21st Century, was extremely well-received.

I have a few you might be interested in:

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky
The footnotes to Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

Foundation by Isaac Asimov This book will bring up many interesting discussions on power systems, for a discussion group I would recommend just reading the first book in the series and discussing the themes.

The Mexican Revolution by Alan Knight

Dreams of Freedom : A Ricardo Flores Magon Reader

Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins

The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin

Fragments of Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber

[Zapatista Reader] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Zapatista-Reader-Nation-Books/dp/1560253355)

Our Word is Our Weapon

The Kingdom of God is Within You by Leo Tolstoy

Government is Violence by Leo Tolstoy

That's as much as I can remember, but my recommendations are bias towards my interests.

He co-authored a pretty decent book on Economics. I've been reading it, pretty dry tbh.

Other than that, I think he's just been busy doing his political activism, which probably leads to some marginalization by the academic community.

If you really want to understand why this is happening there's a widely praised book by an economist called Thomas Piketty that summarizes it like this:

-For most of human history the returns on capital exceeded economic growth. Because of this if you had capital to invest you were pretty sure to do a lot better than if you had only your labor to give. Economic inequality was the status quo. From a recent interview with Piketty in the NYT:
>Over the 1700-2012 period, world output has grown at 1.6 percent per year on average.
>In contrast, rates of return on capital can be 4 to 5 percent over centuries, or even higher for risky assets and high wealth portfolios. Contrarily to what Karl Marx and other believed, there is no natural reason why rates of return should fall in the long run. According to Forbes’s global billionaires list, very top wealth holders have risen at 6 to 7 percent per year over the 1987-2013 period, i.e. more than three times faster than per capita wealth and income at the world level.


-Around WWII this changed. Destruction, inflation and other crises, plus the social institutions set up after WWII in the west, caused inequality to stop rising.


-What we're finding out now is that this brief period, which lasted until the 1980s, was an anomaly. (Personally I find it interesting that this period stopped right around the time we in the U.S. and the U.K. decided we needed less regulation and government involvement in things). Things are now getting back to the way they used to be.
>U.S. inequality is now close to the levels of income concentration that prevailed in Europe around 1900-10. History suggests that this kind of inequality level is not only useless for growth, it can also lead to a capture of the political process by a tiny high-income and high-wealth elite. This directly threatens our democratic institutions and values.

The question is, what are we going to do about this?

What you're looking for is the idea of "Free banking." The US had that system for periods in its past, so you aren't asking a hypothetical, you're asking about history. There are tons of resources and papers on free banking. It worked very well in Scotland during the 18th century, but worked horribly in the US during parts of the 19th. In the US, it was pretty awful because the proliferation of banks plus the prohibition on inter-state banking (few people remember this, but banks weren't allowed to operate across state lines in the US until 1994) led to the creation of one of the most unstable economies in the world prior to the establishment of the Fed.

The academic scholarship is interested in when and why free banking works and doesn't work. The Hayek/Friedmans of the world love it from a libertarian / pure economic perspective, but as with most "pure" economic ideas, the actual implementation of it has a spotty record.

If you go to an academic library you'll find tons of stuff by searching "Free banking," same with google. I just started reading this book on the topic, and it's approachable for non-economist types. On the topic of banking system structure in general (which is very much related to the success and failure of free banking; the banking system must be designed to compliment free banking, and vice versa) I cannot recommend highly enough Calomiris and Haber's Fragile by Design.

It is time to ditch conservative economic beliefs. Cutting taxes helps to collapse the middle class, government programs help maintain and expand it. Read Capital in the Twenty-First Century. We have tried conservative and neoliberal economic theories and they are proven not to work. Foley is just the latest to try to push the same broken ideas and it will lead to a predictable end, the rich get richer while the middle class gets pushed downward. While Malloy is not very good, Foley will be terrible.

>"Why would I bother to read some marxist bullshit?"

Sadly, that is what many of the one-star reviews of Piketty's book consist of; people never reading Piketty, but calling it Marxist bullshit while literally comparing it to Das Kapital (which they probably did not read either).

Sowell is a Libertarian fanatic and his faith in the market approaches that of religious devotion (yes, I've read his work), so let's provide something with a little more balance.

Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian for the basics, and to help the reader understand that our system isn't a gift from god but a choice among competing systems, and Democracy at Work for something a little more granular.

My first year in the Master's program I took a seminar in Culture and Economy. We had a pretty good stack of books we read through out the semester. I highly recommend these.

Stephen Gudeman- The Anthropology of Economy

Wilk and Cligget- Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology 2nd Ed

Marshall Sahlins- Stone Age Economics

Karen Ho- Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

Colloredo-Mansfeld- The Native Leisure CLass: Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the Andes

Nancy Munn- The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society

Michael T. Taussig- The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

Taussig is a great writer. Wilk and Cligget's book is good for basic foundations Economic Anthropology. Karen Ho's book is also a great institutional ethnography as well. Happy Reading!

> Every ideology likes to claim it was the "original" way...

Denying that humans had spent the majority of their existence in a form of primitive communism is the anthropological equivalent to denying evolution or climate change. It's pure anempericism, plain and simple. Anthropologists, especially prehistoric/protohistoric archaeologists, have been operating upon this as established fact since at least the early 70s. [I recommend reading this book and the studies contained within.](
http://www.amazon.com/Stone-Age-Economics-Marshall-Sahlins/dp/0202010996)

> Like feminists, claiming there was this golden age of matriarchy before recorded history began.

lol what? What feminists claim this or even advocate a matriarchy?

Because despite huge growth in worker productivity, grow in worker wages has been stagnant. You can ignore technological and efficiency advances and blame it on overpopulation and a world facing peak oil and other peak resources (meaning less consumption would be available per person), but that hasn't stopped capital gains from going through the roof, so that doesn't make any sense.

No. The political and economic system we've tacitly settled upon is designed to concentrate wealth (which is what the phrase "the 1%" was supposed to allude to). What's happening is that everyone except the single richest person in the country is being screwed, everyone up to that just slightly less and less so the higher you go.

That's why your wage sucks.

> Is there anything in economic research about this?

Yes, lots. For example, Capital in the 21st Century, published in 2015, was a blockbuster work of economics.

> What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality―the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth―today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again. A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

If you're a logic based person then you should research social mobility and generational transfer of wealth.

I would suggest Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century for a logical and evidence-filled examination of this subject.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

Thomas Piketty's book is what you're looking for then. It explains everything you're asking for and then some in a very readable way.

A better financial history type book is the Reinhart & Rogoff one.

As long as you are building a list, let me share my to-read list after I finish reading my current book:

• The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King
  
• Exorbitant Privilege by Barry Eichengreen
  
• An Uncertain Glory: India and its contradictions by Amartya Sen & Jean Dreze
  
• Success and Luck by Robert Frank
  
• Economics Rules by Dani Rodirik
  
• The Midas Paradox by Scott Sumner
  
• Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries by Jagdish Bhagwati
  
• Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic
  
• After the Music Stopped by Alan Blinder
  
  You should also read Piketty's book and Bernanke's book but I didn't list them since I have read them and assume you have read them too.
  
  I tend to only read and alternate between history and econ books for my pop/non-academic reading. I've only listed the pop-econ books since I assume that's what you are after.
  
  Has anyone else read any of the books on my list? Are some terrible? If so let me know so I can avoid them.

Re: "good points" - as you surely know, the basic argument the Occupiers made has been quite clearly confirmed.

Re: "had to be reckoned with" - - just one example - - if Occupy hadn't established the one-percent-are-fucking-you narrative so firmly, Mitt Romney's "47 percent" comments would probably not have been seen so clearly as a one-percenter's hooey.

And an aside: last time we had an exchange, we were about eight comments in when you said something along the lines of, "keep typing, I don't even read your stupid shit cuz you're so wrong and dumb and I'm so right and smart haw haw." If that's still your way, let me know now - - I like a conversation, myself.

The definitive book on the subject is Thomas Picketty's Capital in the 21st century

I'm skeptical of populists of any stripe. I don't trust anyone who leads with " developers and corporate money are in charge at City Hall. " without providing any evidence. This is an easy yarn to spin, but if you're going to basically allege wide-spread corruption in local government, you should back it up with facts.

Other issues:

Proposes several new budget items without proposing how to pay for them. The only new proposed revenue source is a "mansion tax" on the top 1%. This is a seriously cynical way of appealing to Glebeites in the top 10% without actually threatening their livelihoods or doing anything to reduce inequality between the upper middle professional class and everyone else.

Supporting free public transit through his own ward without proposing a new tax increase to cover the losses. Users of other routes will end up subsidizing people who take the 6 and the 7.

His incoherent policy on housing supply. Menard both pledges to go out of his way to privilege the interests of "communities" over developers, to increase required inclusionary zoning, and to make housing more affordable. More money for public housing might alleviate poverty for those at the bottom in theory, but the city will still need to create the conditions for that housing to be built - it's likely going to be higher density and opposed by the same communities Menard plans to privilege. Furthermore, making it harder for developers to turn a profit makes it less likely they'll build new supply for those in the 30th percentile of income and above who will likely rent or buy on the private market. If an average person is finding themselves squeezed out of the housing market, they're more likely to try and take advantage of subsidized or public housing, thus pushing the truly poor out of the system and onto waiting lists. We need solutions for more affordable housing at all income levels, which Menard doesn't offer. Menard also advocates for stronger environmental standards in building construction, despite the fact this will likely increase the cost of owning/renting a home across the board. In his campaign video, Menard suggests it's "cynical" to suggest we can't pursue affordability and environmentally friendly homes, but this doesn't magically make the cost/environment trade-off disappear. Finally, Menard suggests charging higher fees to developper's outside the greenbelt. This fee increase will be passed on to prospective homebuyers, many of whom will have a greater incentive to move within the greenbelt. Unless there is a corresponding increase of housing supply inside the greenbelt, this will further push up demand and home prices.

Changing the rules to deprive TimberCreek of the ability to renovate their own properties and to provide better quality affordable housing. Again, his platform does not suggest he supports the creation of high quality affordable housing for the long-term.

Supporting the City's decision to force Immaculata high school to turn off their soccer field lights sooner without any legal authority to do so. Ottawa footy 7s invested in that field and now they can't even use it during standard operating hours because a few residents complained about noise.

Now that he's in office, maybe dealing with the constraints that come with governing will moderate his approach. We'll see. I look forward to the building of public housing in his ward near the mega-mansions on brown's inlet.

http://www.amazon.ca/Fire-Ice-United-States-Converging/dp/0143014234

Robert Fulford, Bob, Bobby, can I call you Bobby? You must not have read this book. any Canadian who is beset with views of intolerance of Americans, should read this book. They can then say "no I am not Anti-American. On Mass I am more tolerant. It is just that our views are much different then yours (and growing more different!). I am sorry that you feel discriminated for judgments of your Nations policies, aforementioned Dubya, but I speak out against such policies. and some people, like our friend Bobby, confuse the attack against the policy with an attack against the people."
If we are universally tolerant, Americans are the exception to the rule. I could bring up examples why we got this way, http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Comedian+Edmonton+cancelled+over+joke+about+military/1419573/story.html, but you would ignore it or say that does not represent America. True, but on mass...

>My question is, does something like this exist for marxist economics?

It's a solid question. One I'm actually trying to flesh out myself. I don't trust myself to give a good enough explanation of the topic so rather than that I'll try to point you in a couple directions.

Before I start listing stuff off though I'm going to make a quick note on the nature of the problem. In my opinion, one major feature of Marxian economics which has left it so fractured is the fact that Marx never got around to writing a tract on methodology. Because we have to reconstruct his method based on how he used it, it leaves a lot of room for debate over the nuances of what Marx was and wasn't doing. In broad strokes you can identify the major component parts, but once you get into the nuts and bolts of how each fits together, it can be tough to handle. I've found Paul Paolucci's book, 'Marx's Scientific Dialectics' to be useful on this front, but I'm not an expert and because of that remain skeptical even of that book as I recommend it.

I'd also note that I think it is more useful to categorize Marxian economics under the rubric of Political Economy rather than Economics as it's practiced today.

[This list is by no means exhaustive] Anyway, some books/articles/resources you may find helpful:

The Marxists Internet Archive Encyclopedia - Useful in general, may not help on this specific question.

Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian by Wolff and Resnick - Generally a useful text/primer. I'd suggest checking the table of contents provided there to see if it will address some issues you're interested in. I think the discussion of 'Class' is pretty useful.

'Microfoundations of Marxism' by Daniel Little - This article appears as chapter 31 in a text entitled Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science

'The Scientific Marx' by Daniel Little - I haven't been able to read this yet but chapter 5 is devoted to Microfoundations and chapter 6 to the use of evidence.

'Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory' by John Roemer - Roemer is(was?) a member of the analytical Marxist tradition which sprang up in the 1970s. One of their major differences between other forms of Marxism was the rejection of dialectics and the use of Neoclassical modelling tools to develop various Marxian economic/social theories. Many of their methods and developments are considered controversial among orthodox Marxists, but I think they're worth reading none-the-less. This leads naturally to:

Analytical Marxism by John Roemer - A more general take on analytical Marxism. Addresses issues with historical materialism, combining Marxism with game-theory and even moral considerations.

I've also been reading the Elgar Companion to Marxian Economics which contains a set of essays on various topics within more orthodox Marxian econ

That's my impression as well. But I wonder if the argument made in economist Thomas Piketty's recent book, that great wealth is increasingly inherited and not earned, will mean a different picture for Indian Americans today than European Americans of previous generations.

What I mean is: if Piketty is right, then it's going to be much more difficult for more recently immigrated families like Indians to amass the kind of wealth European immigrants attained over previous centuries. With much greater wealth concentration and far less economic mobility, it could be the case that Indians are going to get stuck where they're at now with a much smaller chance to move up than Europeans had when they came.

Not that Indians (on average) are in a bad spot, as you said, but shooting for something like the Walton family may now be increasingly out of reach not just for Indians but for any newer immigrants.

Read this book, and you'll know.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

The answer is so obviously yes that this seems a pretty trivial criticism.

Further increases in population allow for increase economies of scale, which allow for increased specialization and therefore increased wealth. Adam Smith's parable of the pin makers doesn't work if there's not enough people who are pin makers.

If you'd like just one specific noteworthy example, I would point to Piketty's criticism that population stagnation is the major cause of income inequality.

Another good random article on this topic:
http://primacyofreason.blogspot.com/2012/01/economic-benefits-of-large-growing.html

I mean, there's lot to debate on this subject. But to merely be able to even "think" of "any problem" is a pretty low bar, that's very easy.

I really like Introduction to Modern Economic Growth by Acemoglu, which was the first year Macro textbook at my alma mater and where I currently teach. He does all his own proofs and includes more on institutions and directed technical change.
For Micro theory, I'd suggest Nicholson and Snyder's Microeconomic Theory: Basic Principles and Extensions, although the standard first year text for graduate school is probably Mas-Collel.
If you want a more heterodox book, check out [Microeconomics: Behavior, Instituions, and Evolution by Sam Bowles] (https://www.amazon.com/Microeconomics-Institutions-Evolution-Roundtable-Behavioral/dp/0691126380/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510358192&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=behavior+institutions+and+evolu)

https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/154164560X

Whole book about this, just came out. It’s unlikely the author is racist since he’s black himself. Main point is that a lot of “discrimination” comes from people making logical choices about individuals based on group data in situations we don’t have access to individual data.

If group Y beats women twice as much as group X you’re nit racist for preferring to have sex with men of group X even if the vast majority of both groups don’t beat women. If those are the only two groups and that group data is all you have access to you’re cutting your risk of being beaten in half by only sleeping with group X.

I guess to me what's reasonable should be indexed both against individual need (accounting for everything from survival to comforts to self actualization, all within the realm of encouraging entrepreneurship) and societal need. I figure leaving an heir $100M sets them up for life, and if they're smart with the money, sets up their children and grandchildren as well. That's 4 generations, at least, of wealth and power. 3 generations that don't have to do a damned thing but oversee their investment managers. If a multibillionaire's fortune can go to fund healthcare, or poverty assistance programs, or education, or job training, and still leave his heirs $100M or so, what is the problem? What's the great tragedy or affront to liberty?

And speaking of liberty, consider the disproportionate influence that the wealthy have on public policy. Estate taxes and progressive income taxes work to reduce that disparity in political power. Are you more comfortable in a democratic republic or a plutocracy? Thomas Piketty pretty much wrote the definitive work on the effects of unconstrained wealth accumulation. A low tax policy doesn't bode well for our future.

He has written maybe a dozen books about it:

https://www.amazon.com/Race-Culture-World-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465067972

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Economics-and-Politics-of-Race-Audiobook

https://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Race-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465058728

https://www.amazon.com/Race-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/067930262X

https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/154164560X

But here is a speech he wrote about three such books (Race and Culture, Migrations and Culture, and Conquests and Cultures.)

https://www.tsowell.com/spracecu.html

Note he immediately points out not only that things aren’t equal or just, but also that there’s no reason one should expect equality, nor that we should expect everyone to behave morally. That’s specifically what I was responding to re. your post.

Edit: Here's a video of Sowell summarizing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_pQ7KXv0o0

Recommended reading.

Wealth, Poverty and Politics

https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/046509676X/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1518457313&sr=8-5&keywords=thomas+sowell&dpID=41xv6IUkCkL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

Discrimination and Disparities

https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell-ebook/dp/B075JDB769/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1518457313&sr=8-6&keywords=thomas+sowell

While I do not disagree, it is Capital*

read this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

I meant being willing to actually read a full article, or in this case LRonPAul2012's excellent post. How many crazy Austrian economics articles have you read, just to try to understand the opposing point of view?

But yes a basic macro textbook would be a good start.

Edited to add: I would be up for starting a EPS book club of relevant books if anyone is interested.

I just started "Boomerang" by Michael Lewis.

Paul Krugman has a nice summary here. Experts will disagree about how Krugman begins his analysis, and where he goes, but I think this is as good a place to begin as any. A longer treatment, but a more controversial one, is Boomerang by Michael Lewis.

<Aside>
I think it is controversial because of the way Lewis paints citizens of any one country with the same brush. Claiming Germans have characteristic X while Greeks have characteristic Y, and the interaction of X and Y contributed to the Euro crisis is not exactly a formal treatment of the subject. That said, his ability to tell an interesting story about boring things like the IMF and fiscal policy is astounding.
</Aside>

Once you've finished the Krugman piece, I think The Economist is the good place to keep up with current events. (See this for example.)

Moving beyond journalism, I would browse through the articles at VoxEU. While I wouldn't call the work there popular writing, it is certainly accessible. (As an example, this piece on Spain is worth a read.)

You hit the proverbial nail on the head. Make-work bias has been around for centuries and there is usually only temporary unemployment for those whose jobs get replaced by capital. But like you said it's not really worth worrying about at this point.
If anyone has any interest in technological advancement or capital from an economic standpoint, these are some great books to check out:

[Capital in the Twenty-First Century] (http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0ETBP81SYG4890W6R34T)


[The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/0393239357/ref=pd_sim_b_6?ie=UTF8&refRID=0N2W244G0SF4XT3Q5MDB)

[The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Lights-Tunnel-Automation-Accelerating/dp/1448659817/ref=pd_sim_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=0Q1BR5DDQRM29TZPTGBN)

It's true. Only 60 million make it into the top 1%, with $34,000/year. Half of that 1% (29 million) live in the US. The number comes from Branko Milanovic's work, and his book The Haves and the Have-Nots.

Here are some articles on it from well respected organizations:

http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/inequality-and-rise-global-1-great-new-paper-branko-milanovic

http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/garyshapiro/2012/05/30/we-are-the-worlds-one-percent/#7db36adf20f0

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/americans-make-up-one-half-of-the-one-percent_n_1183713.html

However, keep in mind they all cite the same source, which is Milanovic and his book, and were all written at around the same time, so I assume it was Milanovic's publisher paying a PR firm to get these written. But that's pretty much how most media works now days. So if you are still skeptical of the number, I suggest reading the book, or finding some of Milanovic's published papers and reading through the methodology used to come up with his numbers.

Another fantastic book on the subject is Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I highly recommend reading it. Picketty actually expected huge amounts of controversy when he released his book, and was surprised to find out that not many people disagreed with his methodologies and conclusions. Which is pretty scary in itself.

"Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy" sobre Anonymous. Estaba muy interesante por que, uno, describe lo que ha pasado los últimos 6 años en cuanto a seguridad en línea desde la perspectiva de Anonymous, y dos, por que me tocó vivir muchos de esos momentos en línea y en la vida real con lo de Cientología, Wikileaks, Occupy, etc. 10/10 recomendaría.
Antes de eso: "Social Physics". Dice que podemos usar "big data" para monitorear las interacciones de las personas para tomar mejores decisiones sobre como organizar nuestras empresas, organizaciones, y ciudades. Tipo chido, pero lo que argumenta sobre big data según yo puede exacerbar la desigualdad en poder que ya existe entre los "pudientes/1%/corporaciones" y el resto de la "gente común y corriente". También está el peligro de que los algoritmos que usamos para tomar decisiones no tomen en cuenta muchos factores importantes que igual pueden empeorar la disparidad económica y racial que ya existe. Pero tiene ideas muy interesantes. 8/10 léanlo si le entran a este tipo de cosas.
Siguiente: Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Trata sobre la desigualdad que existe y se ha creado con nuestro sistema económico actual. Viene muy recomendado.

This isn't exactly a novel criticism. Thomas Piketty stresses in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that economists have gone too far with mathematical models and more qualitative assessments should be used in developing models.

The standard grad school text these days for dynamic macro is Ljungqvist & Sargent's Recursive Macroeconomic Theory. You won't need to go through the whole thing necessarily, but to be able to tackle the Woodford book, I would think chapters 1-4, 7-8, 12-13, 16-17 and 24-26 would be quite helpful.

There's also Simon & Blume's Mathematics for Economists, which is a good reference book should you need it. For example, the discussion and motivation of Lagrange multipliers and the Kuhn-Tucker optimization conditions is very good.

One noteable omission from both of those books which you will likely encounter at some point is continuous-time optimization/optimal control. This topic is often covered in the appendices of various grad-level macro textbooks, but perhaps the best I've come across is Chapter 7 of Daron Acemoglu's Introduction to Modern Economic Growth. The appendix to Barro & Sala-i-Martin's Economic Growth also has some pretty good coverage.

By the way, if you hunt around, all of these textbooks can be found online for "free".

In fact, the most recent analysis by Thomas Piketty demonstrates that it was a combination of both factors - the war, and the abundance of socialist policies - that dramatically reduced income and wealth inequality, and that trajectory ends decidedly and empirically around the late 1970's/early 1980's, and continued steadily until the point we're at now thanks to both Reaganomics and neoliberalism.

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491534656

Absolute nonsense.

I love how you site the Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, people like him live in an echo chamber that tells them every day they deserve all their money, because that is what they want to hear.

Let me break it down as simply as I can, and if you can't explain something simply, you simply don't understand it.

The Natural state of the unregulated market is Feudalism.
Remember Feudalism? When Rich Nobles ruled over the dirty, ignorant, uneducated masses. When a Noble girl could throw a coin out of a cart and watch filthy peasants kill each over it. Yeah, that was the state of human society for thousands of years.

And it happens because money trickles upwards. Corporations become bigger before they become smaller, and eventually the Monopoly game ends, and the rest of us runs out of money, then the rich eat each until only a few remain, Highlander style.

And the ONLY thing keeping this from happening are Market regulating, typically Left Wing policies.

Feel free to read all about it in Capital by Thomas Piketty, one of the most highly acclaimed books on economy in recent time.

What that means is that Sanders policies are the only thing that can actually save the market from destroying itself.

You: But but... Military spending creates technological innovation.

Nope. Only a tiny fraction of, and most of it completely by coincidence. If we wanted to incentivise technological innovation we would be far better off just creating an official science division of the US Government as an expansion of NASA.

Fact of the matter is Bernie saves the most money out of any politician out there.

Obamacare is already projected to cost 15 Trillion dollars over 10 years IF Pharmaceutical companies do not increase their projected INCREASE in Drug prices. (fat fucking chance of that).

Sanders wants a Canada style Single Payer system which costs HALF of what the cost is in the US Per Capita. And 30% less as a percentage of GDP.

So that is AT LEAST 5 Trillion shaved of that number.

Further more he wants to slash Military spending in half, which would be a good thing since the vast majority of it simply goes to producing weapons nobody needs and has no effect on innovation or technology in any way shape or form.

So that's another 3 Trillion over 10 years. Link

And he wants to raise taxes on the Rich, resulting in, at least, another 3 trillion dollars over 10 years.

So that's 5 + 3 + 3, or 11 Trillion saved from the 15. And he wants to take a large chunk of that and spend it on rebuilding Roads and other Government owned property, which is gonna hands down create massive amounts of jobs. People on the bottom will have money, they will spend that money on houses, goods and services, the market will grow, everyone will be happy. And it moves the market away from a purely speculative economy that benefits absolutely no one in the long run. (No jobs created, no new technologies invented)

The thing about Sanders policies is that they just make sense once you clean your head of Capitalist bullshit. Despite conspiracy theories to the contrary.

> Basically he proves the key flaw of Libertarianis - there are times when government should get in the way of the free market to protect the citizens.

Which is exactly why I never got a hard on for Libertarianism. Its so frustrating when someone like Gary Johnson is so right on almost ALL the issues, and then so illogically dead wrong on some of the biggest.

Global warming is the largest disaster facing humanity. This is not idle speculation. The most intelligent and researched beings on this planet have long reached consensus on this issue. Anyone who says otherwise simply has not done the research.

Yet here gary johnson advocates that the free market will take care of everything. Yet, he knows thats not true.

Wealth and power concentrates without government interference. This is what Thomas Piketty has proven in his book on capitalism which is not just theory or speculation, but based on using empirical evidence from 30 countries going back to the 17th century.


>The wealthy are getting wealthier while everybody else is struggling. Inequality will widen to the point where it becomes unsustainable – both politically and economically – unless action is taken to redistribute income and wealth. Piketty favours a graduated wealth tax and 80% income tax for those on the highest salaries.

This is not a capitalism problem, this is a human problem. Capitalism is just one form of governing that has taken shape in modern history. Its better than theocracy or monarchies in regards to inequality, but still suffers the same issue. Wealth and power concentrates. Without regulation, that concentration becomes a monopoly that always acts within its best interest.

This is the problem with humanity, and libertarianism does not fix it. It enables it to go full blown retard. The only way that you can fix wealth and power from being over-concentrated is through a constitution and government regulation. Maybe in the future we will have AI to govern us. Its our only chance at saving ourselves, by removing humanity from governing.

Now, we all know all the fuckups of the past and the current. There is obviously good regulation and bad regulation. The issue is that we cannot decide on which ones to expand and which ones to cut back.

But anyone who thinks anarchy or full blown deregulation can fix anything have not thought this through. The existence of humanity literally depends on it.

And a footnote on ALL of this - There is no fucking free market. Anyone who thinks there is a free market is delusional. The free market exists in theory, but not in practice. The genie is out of the bottle. Wealth and power in concentrated forms exist. There never is and never was, in modern society, a free market. There are always players with more power that will dominate the game, people with power to rig the system. Thats not a "free" market. The board was never equal and never will be. The health of Society requires that monopolies be abolished. So we have to ask ourselves....do we want inequality and massive suffering, or do we want a balanced society? Some of you want the way of the old, where if you paid the iron price you could be king. Well you heathens can go live in filthy fucking forests and fight to the death then.

Bitcoiners should especially know this. Why do you guys think there is so much "game theory" applied to bitcoin? Because all systems get gamed.

"The Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, requires a credit score of at least 500 to buy a home with an FHA loan. A minimum of 580 is needed to make the minimum down payment of 3.5%. However, many lenders require a score of 620 to 640 to qualify"

So that means they still need established credit AND a down payment. In other words credit and at least a little wealth. As for adult schools, there are highly educated people working shitty low paying jobs because that's whats out there. This seems a lot like you want it to be a certain way, the by the boot straps, get educated, buy a house, etc. mantra, that's just not how it actually works. It is possible to be educated and hard working and to be stuck in poverty.

You're reducing a huge and complex issue into the Republican "Pull yourself up by your boot straps", they are just lazy explanation. Thing is, when you look at data and have also lived this shit first hand, you realize it is not so simple. You realize that there are plenty of educated hard working people that will never escape poverty, not because they don't try but because of how our society is structured and the various intersections of identities and social constructs. When exactly does a single parent raising 2 kids have time between their children's needs and their 2 jobs to go to school? These are the sorts of things people don't think about. What the reality is, not what they want it to be.

Americans want to believe that hard work will get you ahead in life, but we live in a oligarchy and it's about networking more so than skill sets and hard work. Hell corporate structure itself limits opportunity for promotion with its top down approach. 80 employees and 1 management spot, not a lot of opportunity. There's a multitude of influences playing out, and those influences affect one's ability to climb out of poverty. Also, those Adult School have been traditionally made for White people, most education opportunity throughout US History has been made to specifically assist Whites, not poor PoC.

The Meritocracy Myth - https://www.amazon.com/Meritocracy-Myth-Stephen-J-McNamee/dp/1442219823/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=0X1W94PHVX1MTDTXX4SF

Oligarchy Study - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Capital in the 21st Century - https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

I'm sure there are some good books on the matter, and hopefully someone else in this sub will have some recommendations for you as well.

Politics and economics make terrible bedfellows, but if you would like to know about policy making some historical books would probably be in order.

Lords of Finance

Piketty's Capital

Sorkin's Too Big to Fail

And most readers of this sub know that nearly anything by Michael Lewis is good, if a bit dramatized.


Really though, economic policy making is done mostly by politicians, or politically motivated economists. The politicians don't have a clue about economics, and the economists tend to be picked by the politicians for saying what the politicians like to hear.

This is more a political question than a finance question. The guys in finance don't really care who's in office as long as regulatory capture is still around.

Read Thomas Sowell's Discrimination and Disparities. 200 pages of narrative critique shouldn't be too hard to digest before embarking on an activist career. Worst case scenario is that you learn what other people think about these issues and you can become proficient at countering it.

I highly recommend reading this book Thomas Sowell describes three types of discrimination. What you are talking about is discrimination but not racism. It is not racism because race is not the primary factor in your judgement, it is past interactions. Anyways, if you read the book, you'd understand what I am talking about.

It's out on the 29th!

https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/154164560X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

Just finished that book...it was mostly a long essay. I'm looking for another one now while I work towards finishing To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.

I toy with the idea of reading Discrimination and Disparities...but I just don't hate myself enough...

I'm doing my part — even got me a spray painted frowny face as you head up the mountain =P

----

All joking aside, "median household income" is an absolutely terrible metric. If you'd like to know more about this, you should read Dr. T. Sowell's "Dicrimination and Disparities" (it's his shortest work at <130 pages). To summarize (as it applies to Chattanooga): with our CoL being much lower than the average geographic area, it's more likely that households are going to be smaller since housing costs much less (and there is much more housing available than say NYC or SF).

Instead, the metric of "average income per person" should be used to truly show income growth.

Example (from Sowell's book):

>"Household income data ... [is] often used to indicate ... economic disparities in a society. But to say that the top 20 percent of households have X times as much income as the bottom 20 percent ... exaggerates the disparities between income brackets. That is because, despite equal numbers of households in each 20 percent, there are far more people in the top 20 percent of households [69m v 20m, 2002].

>"As the ... Census pointed out, more than half a century ago, the number of households has been increasing faster than the number of people. In short, American households tend to contain fewer people per household over time — a trend continuing into the 21st century.There are not only smaller families in later times, more individuals are financially able to live in their own individual households, rather than live with relatives or roommates."

>"When income per person is rising over the same span of years when the average number of persons per household is declining, that can lead to statistics indicating that the average household income is falling, even if all individual incomes are rising."

>"Household income statistics can be misleading in [many] other ways. If two low-income people are sharing an apartment ... [and] if either or both has an increase in salary, that can lead to one tenant moving out to live alone ... and that, in turn, can lead to a fall in average household incomes."

"Median Household Income" is usually used when the intent is to skew data through an "Error of Omission" (i.e. the household income statistic is highly manipulatable).

Tim swamson wrote a pretty fabulous book, and one of the chapters details this problem. If you havent read it you should. I would gladly pay 9.99 for it, but they are free on amazon, and its certainly better then the "traded bitcoins for a month made money, buy muh book" shit, although at times its a little too technical.

Edit: here it is http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Money-like-Informational-Commodity-Bitcoin-ebook/dp/B00MEAO7XK/ref=la_B00BYONZTE_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408408559&sr=1-1

To be fair, my evidence is more than anecdotal (at least as far as the estate tax goes) My argument here is more or less lifted from Pickety. (https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617)
Or at least the historical trends of ratio of income to wealth. A consumption tax would realllly make this significantly worse (IMHO). I contend that having vast differences in the amount of wealth inequality is bad. Income inequality, much less so, as that is income earned by a person, and in theroy, that money is related to the good for society.

I'm not sure how to answer this one. My main problem is that most definitions of communism describe a state or framework, not a testable system.

I'm not convinced that there couldn't be a functional/effiecient system that matches some basic definition of a communist society (e.g. commonly owned means of production), but I haven't seen a satisfactory answer to the basic economic questions, i.e. how do we organize work and distribution of goods and resources.

'Central planning' and/or SoEs are usually the go-to response(s), but that's like a Hollywood plot about solving the great problem with a big-ass computer (with no discussion of its archtecture or OS). How would the central planners operate? What priorization scheme would be used to make the necessary trade-offs that the market solves by comparing ask/bid?

Once we get into calculation models, expected utility and the whole philosophy of what constitutes value in the first place, the issue becomes so huge and unwieldy that I'm not sure anybody can actually understand it, so people just insert their own assumptions to simplify the issue. I think that's borderline fallacious.

> Have you seen any other analysis, sources, or books that suggest viability may be dependent on levels of technology and productivity?

I wish. Parecon discusses allocation of work and resources, but backs down when it comes to calculation and conflict resolution. I think there's a lot of opportunity in alternative economics, just not much work being done beyond the x-th re-interpretation of Marx or Ricardo. (If anybody knows of anything interesting in this area, do let me know)

this? https://smile.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

One of the useful stats I recall from Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century is that a salary (for the US) of $135k puts you in the top 10% of earners. Considering the way that distribution goes the top 1% earn substantially more than the top 10%.

My point is that top 10% income is good enough for FI/RE if you control your spending.

Nah, a good world war can equalize things nicely, too. Really, no joking, that's exactly what has reduced wealth disparity in the past.

There are no examples of the poor being made not-poor by war, but plenty of examples of the rich being ruined.

Source: Capital in the 21st Century

Picketty explains wealth distribution inequality very well

I learned about it from the data presented and studies cited in this book https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Ice-United-States-Converging/dp/0143014234

Not to dissuade you from Halifax - heck, I live here - but your impression of Alberta a "the most socially conservative part of Canada" might be factually correct but it is completely different from the socially conservative parts of the USA. For example if you take the book Fire and Ice out of the library, you will see a decade's worth of polling and statistics showing that, not only are the values of Canadians and Americans measurably diverging over time, but that the values and ideas of the most conservative parts of Canada (Alberta & Saskatchewan) are more socially liberal than even the most socially progressive parts of the USA (New England). Plus, the values of the average Canadian, even in Alberta, are much more akin to the values of US millennials than they are to the average American, so you would theoretically be somewhat (socially) comfortable with attitudes and ideas of people around you even if you found yourself in Calgary.

So I wouldn't worry too much about it.

For questions 1 and 2.

1. If you are packing the loans into a CDO, they are being sold on the open market. Once it achieves a AAA rating, as most did even though they were mostly subprime, alt a, or arm, it is sold and shipped off the originator's books (While the originator of the CDO collects X% in fees)
   
   Basically how the originator makes their money is by X amount of CDOs they sell. There was no incentive to pick and choose the best borrowers to sell a loan to because how the CDOs were sold they achieved the best rating regardless of the borrowers credit risk.
   
   Due to this model, people are going to try and get as many people into the homes and sell the CDO asap. This caused questionable lending practices to result, NINJA (no income, no job, no assets) loans, manipulating borrowers income, assets, etc.
   
   Things that could be changed to help not have this occur again:
   
   a) Feds monetary policy was pretty meh during this period, due to low interest rates the banks had pretty much an endless supply of money and when all the reasonable ventures dried up they had to explore other opportunities to lend.
   
   b) Ratings agencies need an overhaul in how they receive their commission, preferably they should be being paid by the investor not the person issuing the security. This will help to eliminate the bias that results.
   
   c) Having X% (2-5) remain on the institutions books who created the CDO will help to make them responsibly lend. This is because if they are required to have it remain on their books, they will make better longer term decisions in who to lend to.
   
   I'm pretty sure all of these issues are discussed in Nouriel Roubini's book Crisis Economics
   
   Another Great book already mentioned in this thread is by Michael Lewis The Big Short
   
   If your interested in the European Crisis Michael Lewis also just came out with Boomerang

Counter point.

I have not read the book, only a review of the book. I would be interested in hearing someone with an actual factual background in econ discuss the practical implications of both in a Canadian context.

Marx's theories were highly speculative, based on some historical examples, and some contemporary examples. He had limited access to data. His most important idea was that wealth inevitably accumulates in the hands of a few. He reasoned that such a system is not sustainable in the long run because eventually one person would hold all wealth and everybody else would be wage slaves. Accordingly, he concluded, revolutions are inevitable.

The idea that wealth tends to accumulate in the hands of a few can be tested empirically. Some philosophers are sympathetic to empirical philosophy, others are doubtful. Thomas Piketty has made a very serious attempt to test the suggestion that wealth inevitably accumulates in the hands of a few. It looks like Marx's main idea might be right. Hence, Bernie Sanders. Of course, controversy remains.

A little off topic, but of possible interest.

I'd be interested to hear what /u/HealthcareEconomist2 has to say in regard to Thomas Piketty's new book.

Just sayin... I suspect the wholesale adoption of neoliberal economic policy from the mid 70s onwards might be somewhat more responsible for the erosion of the western middle class than television.

A couple of books give pretty compelling evidence of this:

https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey/dp/0199283273

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499813570&sr=1-1&keywords=capital

Oh that's cute. You linked me Sowell. Now try reading a big boy economist: https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496878948&sr=8-1&keywords=Capital+in+the+Twenty-First+Century

I know the math looks really hard but trust me, it won't be so bad.

What are your thoughts on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century ? I haven't read it yet but have been encouraged to.

Capital - Thomas Piketty

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454194050&sr=1-1&keywords=thomas+piketty

Debt - The First 5000 Years - David Graebner

http://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454194089&sr=1-1&keywords=debt+david+graeber

There are no books that can adequately cover British politics to the extent that you're asking. Also, politics and economics are intertwined to the point that you cannot understand one without the other. Freakonomics, for example explains how the two cannot be meaningful separated and is an interesting place to start any political journey.

Depending on your background knowledge 30-Second Politics can give you a grounding of what all the different terminology means and Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box provides useful insight as to the difference between how politics is preached and practiced. Also, The Plan is essential reading to understand our current government.

You've already mentioned Douglass Murray's Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, which I would also thoroughly endorse. Further to that I'd recommend Thomas Pikkety's Capital in the 21st Century which although about economics is so closely tied to current political thought that it really is extremely useful reading

Holy crap.

The amazon reviews are hilarious.

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/product-reviews/067443000X/ref=dpx_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1

There's mostly 5-star reviews, but then a bunch of 1-star reviews from right-wingers who don't seem to have read anything more than the blurb. Sure looks like brigading.

'hurr durr communism has never worked' 'you'll all be equally poor' 'commie bullshit' etc etc (paraphrased quotes, sorry)

Ah well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXWzQW0jV3o Ain't Done Nothin' If You Ain't Been Called A Red

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/product-reviews/067443000X/ref=cm_cr_dp_qt_hist_one?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0
My favorite review says "Stalin would be proud."

> What other alternatives of (good) economic development did China have after they dropped central planning?

There's a recent JEP symposium on the Chinese economy. From what I've read, local officials in China are given benefits (I forgot what benefits they are) if they reach the growth rate target of their area as part of the nation's Five-Year Plans. It's certainly an interesting incentive that I've never heard before. It has some problems though which one of the articles mention.
 
> Also, what are some good books to read on development economics/the economics of "poor" countries?

Are you looking for a textbook about development economics or a book about the economics of developing countries?

If you're looking for a development economics textbook, then my professor made us use Todaro & Smith's

If you're looking for a book about the economies of many developing countries, I'd suggest How Asia Works which focuses on East Asian and Souteast Asian economies. I'm not sure how good it is and how it is received by economists but Tyler Cowen likes it.

If you're looking for a book about a particular developing country, then my professor also made us use this book to study the Philippines.

>We would not expect to see that pattern if people were voting for a living.

Unless the wealthy are voting for their living

Hi, u/Jkirk3279,

Thanks for your response. I'm going to try to go point by point and address your concerns.

---

> You’re demented. You believe these Conspiracy Theories

The fact that the U.S. has shifted toward a financial oligarchy is not a “demented” conspiracy theory. It is the professional opinion of many economists and political scientists. And their conclusions are backed up by data. A recent co-study by political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern University confirmed it: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

And here are a few other sources which cover this topic well I think:

• www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105
  
  
• www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/11/us/politics/2016-presidential-election-super-pac-donors.html
  
  
• www.salon.com/2015/12/09/robert_reich_america_is_now_a_full_scale_oligarchy_partner/
  
  
• www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/?single_page=true
  
  
• www.the-american-interest.com/2011/09/28/oligarchy-and-democracy/
  
  
• www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491534656
  
  ---
  
  > you ALSO believe that a minority unable to get enough votes to nominate their candidate can "dismantle" the Democratic Party.
  
  I think I get what you’re saying here (but let me know if I’ve misinterpreted) — How can a group that wasn’t effective or powerful enough to win a convention believe they could be powerful enough to do an even more dramatic and seemingly more difficult task of dismantling a party? If you can’t do the little thing, how can you do the big thing?
  
  What I’ve suggested is sort of unknown territory, so I can’t say how things would shake out. But I can say two things.
  
  a) We are not a tiny group. We’re close to half the party. More, if you count Independents. We don’t have to storm the capitol, stage a military coup, or do anything other than simply walk out en masse. If we walk away from the party, it loses half its constituency and either implodes, disbands, and re-forms quickly, or it limps along for a while as a very different party. It loses its reach. It becomes almost purely corporate, and loses much of its claims to authenticity. And given that the party has alienated and made feel unwelcome an entire generation of voters (well, really almost everyone under 40) – who were intended to eventually take the reins – it’s just a waiting game. It’s simple math. If you don’t replenish your numbers, you go extinct.
  
  b) This campaign has solidified a social network among groups that were not really connecting before. It has excited and engaged a huge number of people who were not participating in the past. It’s set up a social infrastructure that is not going to just disappear. This group, in the past, was a disparate and dejected wash of people. But as an energized and organized group – and one that has a distinct identity (“Not me, us”) – we are a considerable threat. If we aren’t courted HARD and incorporated into the party, we’re going to form our own. And we’ve already got many of the tools and voter data that we need.
  
  ---
  
  > You didn’t have enough votes to win at the State Convention, you claimed the Democratic Party cheated you
  
  If you'd like to debate any of the individual points presented above by /u/duder9000 , I'd be happy to discuss. Which of them did you disagree with?
  
  ---
  
  > and now you’re predicting BOMBINGS.
  
  I’m not suggesting that someone is going to bomb the convention in November. What I am saying is that if the Party continues to take obvious moves to silence and stop us… riots seem like a predictable eventual result. And at that point, the Party could respond one of two ways — either backing down, opening up the circle, and saying “OK, let’s listen to their concerns and see how we can win them back” (de-escalating) or by digging in and cracking down harder (escalating). If they respond to riots with escalating actions, I’m simply suggesting that the tension and responses would escalate.
  
  ---
  
  > WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?
  
  Given that you’ve come to a Sanders-specific sub-reddit, made zero attempts in your post to establish any common ground or connect on any level, but simply to insult me and say, in essence, “You’re so stupid and insane on every level and we won’t ever agree” — I’m just trying to figure out what you’re trying to do?
  
  Did you come here to insult a group of people thinking that would change their minds? Did you know that you wouldn’t change minds (so didn’t attempt to establish any credibility or kudos or ethos with us), but just decided that you would get some pleasure purely out of the act of hurling insults, regardless of its uselessness? Are you here because you’re being paid as a employee of the Clinton campaign’s Correct the Record group and you’re at work? Are you just a troll? What’s your goal? Why are you here? I know that it's really unlikely that you'll respond sincerely, but, I figure it's at least worth a try.
  
  ---
  
  Edit: formatting

>Sorry but this isn't high school economics where consumption is everything

No, but 800 pages of data.
http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491534656


What's your opinion on how libertarian policies fit in with the coming automation of massive number of jobs, doctors and lawyers included?

http://m.imgur.com/a/q2SNN

Well, I would highly recommend renting some textbooks on American politics, American political history, and American political theory. Perhaps start here and work your way up: http://www.amazon.com/Logic-American-Politics-Samuel-Kernell/dp/1568028911

If you find textbooks too dull, then here is a good list of books to get you started:

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Federalist-Anti-Federalist-Papers/dp/1495446697/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453181599&sr=1-1&keywords=federalist+and+anti-federalist+papers

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-America-Penguin-Classics-Tocqueville/dp/0140447601

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ideological-Origins-American-Revolution/dp/0674443020

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Reconstruction-America-1860-1880-Burghardt/dp/0684856573

http://www.amazon.com/The-Nine-Inside-Secret-Supreme/dp/1400096790

http://www.amazon.com/Congress-Electoral-Connection-Second-Edition/dp/0300105878

http://www.amazon.com/What-Should-Know-About-Politics/dp/1611452996

http://www.amazon.com/The-Race-between-Education-Technology/dp/0674035305

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491534656

*If you actually take the time to read these, you will be better informed than 99 percent of the voting public. <-- And after you read these, that sentence will terrify you because you will realize each of these books is just an introduction, and the world is being run by technocrats. JK, but not really.

Edit: But really.

I suggest you (and anyone else interested) have a gander at the book "Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values". It's a fascinating portrait of social trends in both countries and how we differ.

Interesting, though this seems it's not exactly a new message for Michael Adams. For over a decade, he's been writing opinions and books about it. Still, it's interesting to see the latest numbers and the actual polling data that shows the shift in attitudes, catching stuff like

>a mild backlash against feminism among Generation X men at the ages of 25 to 44 (foreign-born and Canadian-born alike).

that anecdotally, I see playing out. It's also striking to see that the regional spread in America is 69% to 42%, while in Canada even our highest regional rate (in Alberta) is 26%.

Have you even bothered to read some of the most basic analysis?

> I do think both share a lot of bad traits that Austrian economic theory doesn’t suffer under...

The fact that Austrians reject empirical analysis of complex systems makes their entire project completely bunk.

Thanks for answering my question!

That's interesting what you say about the business cycle. Have you looked at Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian by Wolff? He orientates an introduction to those schools of thought by discussing their theories of the business cycle, and contrasting them.

Is there any reason you thought the Austrian theory was the best?

For more advanced readers I recommend New Departures in Marxian Theory. The book is essentially a formulation of their life project. I'm currently working my way through it and I have nothing but positive things to say about it.

> Over the last twenty-five years, Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff have developed a groundbreaking interpretation of Marxian theory generally and of Marxian economics in particular. This book brings together their key contributions and underscores their different interpretations.

> In facing and trying to resolve contradictions and lapses within Marxism, the authors have confronted the basic incompatibilities among the dominant modern versions of Marxian theory, and the fact that Marxism seemed cut off from the criticisms of determinist modes of thought offered by post-structuralism and post-modernism and even by some of Marxism’s greatest theorists.

For beginners who want more than Youtube videos, I recommend their outstanding textbook Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian.

You can check out /r/communism101 and /r/socialism to start, the former of which has a lot of great information in the sidebar just to start.

Economics Professor Richard Wolff has written a few books on the current and future crises of capitalism - right now I'm in the middle of this one.

There's also Capital in the Twenty First Century, and The ABCs of Socialism (PDF link).

That should be enough to get you started!

A decent starting econ text is Carbaugh's Contemporary Economics. It's intended for a college course that covers both micro and macro. It's a short but reasonably good text.

From there, you could move on to Contending Economic Theories by Richard D. Wolff. It covers the differences between and pedigree of Keynesian, Neoclassical, and Marxist theories.

Yeah, they really are. I don't see any path for them that is not full of pain.

Since you liked it, I thought I'd mention that that article was part of a series, which was compiled in the book, Boomerang

I think the entire book, via individual articles is available online. The one on Iceland is a good read. Well, so far, I've only found:

Wall Street on the Tundra

TX, I recommend Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective. The most current book and a summation of many other books on different topics. I highly recommend it.
https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/046509676X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474818906&sr=8-1&keywords=wealth+poverty+and+politics+by+thomas+sowell

Maybe another way to think of it is in terms of return on capital vs return on labor. If producing a certain good takes equal units of capital and labor, but the capital is rewarded 90% of the value of producing that unit, then the "return on capital" is significantly higher than the return on equally priced labor. Hence the providers of capital benefit much more than the providers of labor, even though both "input" the same value.

Here's where I've got the idea from:

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

You're looking for this: Capital in the Twenty First Century

As long as those with money make more off of interest (money earned by having money) than the rest of us can through labor, money will coalesce near the top.

r > g

How about Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty?

How do you burn through kindles???

It's a solid profile. There's a couple areas you could tweak by replacing generalities ("Interesting problems to solve") with specifics ("I do the Sunday crossword while standing on my head"). Replace "I'm always doing side projects" with what the side projects are. You could also get rid of your digressions, like:

> I used to read a lot of pop-sciencey books of the Malcolm Gladwell ilk but started to find them lacking in sound scientific backing (lots of generalizing from anecdote).

I agree with your point but it's not really great dating-profile material. How successful would a message to you about Malcolm Gladwell be? Probably not successful; ergo, take it out.

One of the places that could do with the most improvement is your self-summary. I don't get a sense of you, it might as well not be there. It's definitely one of the hardest paragraphs to fill out but it's also the most important because it's top. Try out some different things, make it punchy, and make it you.

Finally, book suggestion: you should read Piketty if you haven't.

>I started to think that I had nothing left but to start drinking again.

And then, you will really have nothing left. Congratulations on making it through another day.

>I'm seriously taken advantaged of in my job.

This is generational and macro-economic, not personal. The vast majority of people your age are in this position. It is more acute in first-world countries than it has been in nearly a century, because of the transition toward income-inequality, birth-based status and eventually if it's not stopped, hereditary aristocracy. You might want to get a hold of this book if you're (like me) the type that enjoys socio-economic issues.

I know, let's not start a side topic about economics and global politics - I just wanted to encourage you to be less hard on yourself about your economic and employment situation. You are caught up in a global flow cycle. Being underemployed and unable to do much about it is no more a sign of your personal failure than being able to support a family, a house and two cars on one income was a personal sign of superiority in the 1950s and 60s.

3% housing stock owned foreign non resident. I could be misremembering the exact number but it was pretty small. Capital in the 21st Century

Actual investment is much higher of course, but that doesn't remove housing stock from circulation.

> if interests on equity were not higher than the gdp growth, investing wouldn't make sense at all and we'd still live in an subsistence economy

That is a magnanimous misstatement.

When return on investment is greater than GDP growth than the enormously wealthy entrench their generational wealth and we have created a new class society. When your life's wealth is determined more by your inheritance than by your work you discourage creative and entrepreneurial growth and a lot of that energy and ideas get lost. The entrenchment of wealth is counterproductive to the wealth of a nation.

But don't take my word for it, browse through the book of an economist who has been actively researching this topic for over a decade

> So we need an army of accountants to go trough everyone's stuff every year. Not impossible, but excessive.

No - just people with > $1M in assets excluding primary residence. And almost all of those have accountants anyway. Certainly all of those with > $10M.

> So lets say it's grandmas old painting that she was given by some guy Picasso after a short romantic affair. Or grandmas old summer cottage. Or veteran car. Or whatever. People have sentimental stuff that has a high market value.

A. So? Pay for it or sell it. Or sell it now for less, with physical handoff when you die.

B. This is a straw-man argument, since you're describing incredibly rare events, when the current tax system is badly broken for most people.

> The family owned businesses will get out-competed by publicly traded businesses then.

Why?

> I mean, I get that that's good in your book

Didn't say that

> Wealth is a lot easier to hide than income. Income involves two people by default. There's a transaction that can be traced.

As does the change is wealth. People keep reporting income, and this is compared to the change in wealth.

> > Non-issue. Wealth is no more private than income.
> I see clear reasons for why it should be.

So state them, and we'll see if they hold water.

> I think you could be a bit more humble here. There's no big conspiracy. There's a reason for why wealth taxes aren't mainstream.

This is reddit. I'm supposed to know better than anybody else.

But also, Piketty.

> I think your tax rates are really optimistic: you should at least double the rates

We'll need detailed distributions of wealth for the top 10%, with a lot of detail above 99%. And I couldn't find it. But I think $1.5T should be enough - you're not replacing all Federal income (~$3.5T), just personal and corporate income tax and capital gains.

> That actually wasn't really discussed in the book.

Oh I must have misread the chapter titled: Extreme inequality of wealth: a condition of civilization in a poor society? No wait, that seems to be a chapter about extreme inequality and the negative implications.

Or the Amazon synopsis of the book:

"The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. "

http://www.amazon.ca/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

>what i think about politics hasn't really come into this conversation much.

Sorry if you took it that way! It was just a critique of the notion in general; not pointed criticism.

--

Anywhere here is some information for you:

--

• Income gains comparing real family income increases between 1947 and 2012.
  
  --
  
  
• Income gains, as a percent of real after-tax income since 1979, by income group.
  
  --
  
  
• Share of total before-tax income flowing to highest income families from 1913 to 2012.
  
  --
  
  
• Wealth concentration has risen to near prewar levels.
  
  ^Longer ^report ^on ^the ^above ^subject ^and ^sources ^here.
  
  
  --
  
  
• Average share of income, and change in income by income bracket since 1979.
  
  --
  
  
• Cumulative change in real annual household capital income, by income group, from 1979 to 2007.
  
  --
  
  
• Average income by income group, accounting for distinction between 0.01%, 0.1%, and 1% from, 1970-2012.
  
  --
  
  Lastly; below are two articles:
  
  Timothy M. Smeeding is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Public Administration and the Director of the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University.
  
  --
  
  Emmanuel Saez is Professor of Economics at University of California at Berkeley.
  
  --
  
  And a book recommendation.

Practically everything I know about politics and economics is from reading the newspapers, Reddit and the odd book, over the course of the past few years.

It takes a long time to get a deep understanding of the way the world works, and schools (in my day, at least) barely try. They'd rather teach you about the Magna Carta and Henry VIII (in my experience) than the history that affects you and I today.

I recommend the /r/UKPersonalFinance subreddit - read it every day, ask questions about the stuff you don't understand (full disclosure, I'm now a mod there), and I highly recommend the NPR Planet Money podcast.

A good reading list might be Richard Wilkinson's book The Spirit Level, Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism and Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

There's a lot resentful language in this sub towards the old, and towards certain categories of voters, but it's important to remember that few are malicious - many are just poorly educated, as I used to be. IMO the only think you can do is educate yourself and embrace evidence-based policies, even when they go against what you believe.

A better (contemporary and with more hindsight) battle would be Sowell vs Piketty.

https://smile.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674979850/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519230254&sr=8-1&keywords=pikkety

If you are interested in learning more about this topic the book Capital in the 21st Century is quite informative. Pretty long and sometimes dry, but a thorough analysis of capital throughout history.

I'm going to over simplify this. Jews have a evolved as a diasporic nomadic people. No land. No weapons. Because they had no land and no weapons they needed to develop another way to defend and attack. Therefore jews spent 2000 years developing a myriad of skills and techniques: usury, intense tribalism, weaponized victimhood, secret societies, specialization, universal high level literacy, nepotism, matriarchy, intense rule following, intense rule bending, miscegenation without losing group identity, business guilds/trade secrets, subversion, d and c tactics, host culture erosion, mandatory civic participation, espionage, fanaticism, theatrics, sex industry specialization and the list goes on and on.

When industrialization happened academics, literacy, specialization, capital and banking became a lot more prized than it was during the agrarian age. (I have a pet theory that Every age 'vaults' a certain type of human. The dark ages vaulted builders. Antiquity vaulted a blend of raw strength and courage and brains.) This industrial and later information age vaulted jews into significantly higher status and wealth than other lower IQ nomadic groups like gypsies that didn't breed their people to value academics and literacy as highly as other traits.

Blood and soil nationalism type people are now under the thumb of this vaulted merchant class.

Roles are basically being flipped because of how quickly capital gets concentrated in industrial capitalist societies.

Culture of Critique covers this in more detail. If you want to learn more about how capital pools I'd encourage Thomas Piketty's book Capital (not an easy read though).

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674979850

Read Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century and get back to me on the estate tax!

You're a bit off the mark there, who says someone with a mortgage is living beyond their means? Or someone who has paid it off worked super hard, maybe they're just older and have accumulated more wealth? The new homeowner with a mortgage likely has simply accumulated less wealth, likely because they are younger. Remember, property tax is a proxy wealth tax, and taxing wealth is very good and efficient means of tax collection because it's not regressive, as those with wealth have a much lower marginal propensity to spend. If you want to think critically instead of mindlessly brushing off very well accepted and influential work in the fields of wealth and income inequality because of some ideological red scare in your mind that has no basis in reality, I would suggest

https://www.amazon.ca/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674979850/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1525630837&sr=1-1&keywords=Capital+in+the+Twenty-First+Century

this book will give you lots of context and reasoning supported by empirical data.

Actually it is just as easy to write down a model where there is economic growth exactly equal to the rate of population growth. Acemoglu's Introduction to Modern Economic Growth has a pretty accessible discussion of the topic if you can do multivariable calculus.

I regret losing it. I don't know how I did it, but I lost my 1000 page book. I was about 5/7s done too, after about a year of study.

[this](Marx's 'Capital' https://www.amazon.com/dp/0745330169/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_o25Eyb7KNJZTD) is a helpful companion or refresher for those interested.

There's a lot of information out there. Marx's capital is very dense but well worth the read, and I recommend reading it in chunks then branching out and researching the topics to get a deeper understanding.

Don't be afraid to look at classic material: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, etc.

Consider starting with this book

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0745330169

http://revolutionarycommunist.org

http://monthlyreview.org/


http://www.workers.org/

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/wisiw/basic_marxismleninism_study_plan/

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/pi9l2/resources_for_marxist_political_economy/

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/wiki/index#wiki_previous_communisms_of_the_day

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/2pwxm5/the_debunking_anticommunism_masterpost/

Sahel belt in Africa has accumulated 20 million people suffering from food insecurity and the numbers grow. Spike in food and fuel prices can turn the region into massive famine/refugee that spreads south. Unrest in the area is partly war against hunger, because armed groups are the last to suffer from hunger and poverty.

Most industrialized Asian countries had successful land reform before their economies started to gain traction and build up manufacturing and export. Countries who didn't (who followed colonial model) were left behind. Joe Studwell on How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region, the book: https://www.amazon.com/How-Asia-Works-Joe-Studwell/dp/0802121322

It's per household. And now that I think about it, it might be even lower. $112k. I'll have to double-check the book when I get home.

Either way, I don't know anyone who falls into that category that would consider themselves to be rich or even upper-middle class. So it's sort of weird thinking about it in those terms.

Here's a link: https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Hoarders-American-Leaving-Everyone/dp/081572912X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520544380&sr=8-1&keywords=reeves+dream+hoarders

This reminds me of another book that's similar called The Dream Hoarders. He puts the top 9.9% at the top 20%. But the principal is the same. There was an interview with the author on OnPoint and the anger it produced was incredible (by those at the top).

https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Hoarders-American-Leaving-Everyone/dp/081572912X

Military jobs will be lost, new and better jobs will be gained. The redistribution of wealth to build a larger middle class will have the effect of making those military guys better off.

I'm sorry if my statement about you being mislead feels insulting, but I'll say two things.

One, being mislead means that someone is lying to you -- not that you are stupid. The fact that I've researched this stuff more than other people doesn't make me smarter than these other people. But it does mean I've become aware of how the lying/misleading process works.

The second thing I'll say is that I can't apologize for telling you the truth. Republican leadership is misleading you. Democrats aren't perfect, but they are more honest about the state of the economy. I would strongly encourage you to pick up a book called "Capital in the 21st Century" : http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491534656

Here's a PDF to the full book: http://dowbor.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/14Thomas-Piketty.pdf

Or if you don't have time for that, here's a Wikipedia article that summarizes the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century

https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/154164560X

Don't be sorry, that was great! Sorry it took me so long to get back to this. There was some uhh...drama, that kept me away for a spell.

I understand a lot of the points you are making and I'm sorry that my reply is going to be LONG. If I may, I'm going to respond to snippets -- not as rebuttals per say but as "yes...but!" -- if only so my comments have more context to what I said already. I don't think we can maintain an ongoing discussion and partly because my formatting and editing can be scattershot, so i apologize for that but want to thank you for having taken the time to compose a thoughtful reply. I wrote this first part last, so the tone might shift later. It's getting late so I just gotta send it.

+++

WRT your link about employment: Have you read Sowell's work on discrimination types? In absence of other information, people in positions to hire will try to hire someone they think they identify with. So if John and Mary are hiring someone, naturally they will select for a Catholic sounding name first -- all else being equal. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, it just is. Take for instance, hiring by personality type is a newish thing and this is leading to its own discrimination pattern within workplaces, for ex Google and big techs left-leaning systemic biases.

WRT to school punishment: I would argue much of that problem is representation. I used to scoff at this as a racial notion thinking as an adult and projecting that onto kids. But for young kids I think there is something to be said, much less so with adults voting for candidates that look like them. But I came to understand this issue as a man when I learned the difference with how boys are treated.

Christina Hoff Sommers discusses this quite well. She doesn't say this but I take her points and would also add that young boys would be more disciplined with more male teachers in elementary. Especially since the rate of black single moms is so high, those young boys need positive male behavior modeling in their lives, and early. I hope you understand I bring this point up because I don't want that problem to perpetuate.

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>By your comments, it sounds like maybe your views of racial inequality is that it is insignificant in america today to validate a cultural movement towards seeking equality, but correct me if i'm wrong there.

We have to be honest: is the inequality and racism today as bad as 100 years ago? No. 50? No. 20? No. It's not insignificant, but I think we are reaching the point of diminishing returns.

Many of the outcomes we see today are the vestiges of the inequalities of the past. Of which, the oft contributing factors in culture are somewhat responsible for perpetuating those outcomes. That is to say: Yes, there has been (and sometimes continues to be) inequalities of enforcement and opportunity, but there has also been a culture that has exacerbated the problem. That's my "but" answer.

+++

Let's speak specifically to those two groups I might have mentioned earlier. American blacks (not derogatory, just a descriptor I've seen commonly used) have had a culturally enforced anti-academic culture. There are slurs they use to police behavior that don't need to be repeated here, but you can imagine what impact this will have on personal drive. Which, actually is a symptom of all poor communities. People that live in poverty can often be toxic to people who are striving to achieve. It can be seen as an uncomfortable threat that the people not achieving tend to feel. Shame, I guess.

Contrast that American Poor attitude (not exclusive to the AB group, but emblematic of an exacerbating condition for a group with historical barriers and troubles) with that of high drive immigrants, specifically Jamaican/Barbados blacks. Of course, the immigrants that come here will usually be higher status in their home countries but they promote academic and commercial achievement and the families tend to stay together. As such, their crime and outcome statistics are better, in general.

+++

Given that, how much more can society be adjusted for to make opportunity equal to all -- but when outcomes between groups differ, how much of that do we recognize as differences in culture and/or ability?

For example, the Scandinavian countries are often cited as an example of cultural egalitarianism between the sexes. Yet there are disparities in chosen industries. Are these countries crypto-sexists still? Or are people making their choices as they see fit when free to do so?

Now, for a terribly rough segue: People aren't prone to crime by dint of birth, but a subculture of resentment will foment more criminality. So is the outsized idpol attributing everything to the white patriarchy helping or hurting? I'm glad we agree they can go too far, it's just a matter of where we all draw the line.

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On idpol, I've heard it argued that the original sin lies with white people because of racist western science and scientists in the 1800-early 1900s. I don't think we can retroactively apply our moral concept of race to the past since everyone was more tribal back then. Not a cop out, just that we have a different moral matrix that didn't exist then. Just because western literature shows our history, warts and all, doesn't mean that white westerners were the only racist/tribalists then. And no, I don't think everyone is a racist today, unless you stretch that definition paper thin to encompass all incidents of ingroup preference. At which point, the critique is moot.

>The struggle that people of color face is a struggle that disadvantage whites face as well, and should be a rallying cry for solidarity.

I'm more on board with the unification by class than anything but I don't see social stratification as a bad thing in of itself (too much is bad, and we may arguably be at that point but global poverty rates are way down which says something). Only when people on top hamper and try to immobilize the economic opportunities of the poor and working class, that gets my goat. This is most often done through corporatism and state enforced mechanisms that violate free market principles. That's obviously a broad topic but that's just my quick take on it as I see it.

>the fact of the matter is that POC are generally more oppressed, so in an effort to fight overall oppression, we must address the concerns of those who have it worst

I can't agree with that definition only because each group has differentials that makes them not the same, so I find the POC term erroneous. I also think it's taken it's current form to "Other" white people. Again, broad topic. Let's table that for now.

Natives have different concerns from American Blacks, from Latinos, etc. It is not for me to dictate what they need, I'll listen, I'll help where I can, I certainly won't impair their striving for a better life, but I won't be dictated to about how I go about that. I despise the Peter Singer model of Effective Altruism and consequentialism that influences many left leaning, and especially idpol circles. Partly because I used to have many sanctimonious vegan friends and the people who criticize others for not doing enough encourages nothing but narcissistic grand-standing, cannibalism (figuratively) and purity spiraling.

I and most white people are not inheritors of wealth or beneficiaries of out-sized privilege. Other than the privilege any majority member gets in the circumstance they are born to (ie Japanese people benefit the most in Japan). These are the consequences of history, and we are not guilty of the sins of the father and so on -- and most of human history was brutal with people just barely making it day to day.

Why do poor nations not succeed when given free cash, infrastructure, food, and medical aid? Innumerable. But one thing is certain: “Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.” ― Robert Heinlein

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You don't have to agree with me on anything, but if you can understand why I said these things based on my references, without moral impugning (not that you in particular would) -- then I'd say we had a good row. Mistaken Identity piqued my interest, even if I'm reticent of leftism at the moment, thanks for sharing this because I may have to check it out!

Discrimination and Disparities

If you are looking for books, you might want to read this:

http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Money-like-Informational-Commodity-Bitcoin-ebook/dp/B00MEAO7XK

I recommend Thomas Sowell's "Discrimination and Disparities" (https://www.amazon.ca/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/154164560X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1550347311&sr=8-1&keywords=thomas+sowell+discrimination+and+disparities). He's an African-American ex-Marxist, by the way.

Discrimination and Disparities https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541645634/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_VzjRDbH2X5YQB

The logical flaw is that it automatically assumes that intolerance will occur societal wide, there is no evidence for it. Especially not when societal discrimination is more often required by government force than it is by free markets.

NAZIs had to force anti-Jewish measures on the German population, the South had to use the government to require segregation. Same with South African and Jews and Christians in many ME countries.

EDIT:
I also forgot to show the logical flaw. Popper’s argument is that we must be intolerant of the intolerant.

The logical flaw is that violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.

A!=non-A

So you can’t be intolerant of the intolerant without at the same time being intolerant.

Perhaps they read this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Anatomy-Money-like-Informational-Commodity-ebook/dp/B00MEAO7XK

Actually, I'm pretty sure the idea of Inheritance is a relic from our days under the Crown. Many of the founding fathers were against Inheritance.

Almost any coherent defense of capitalism at some point hinges on "market forces", "merit" and "optimal distribution of resources".

Inherited wealth contradicts all tenets of capitalism.

Inheritance is not a feature of capitalism: it is directly and very obviously a feature of pre-capitalism; when we were given a plot of land by the king and paid dues for protection.

Inherited wealth is based on the same logic as inherited Monarchy: because your father did something, you must be better than other people: better as nobility or as money).

That is fundamentally opposed to the principle of meritocracy or even democracy.

You cannot claim that wealth is purely a result of merit, and then distribute it without regard to same. Put another way, allowing unlimited wealth to be given to heirs is like allowing unlimited power to be given to heirs.

The Founding Fathers understood that clearly: they believed in success on merit, not on success by inheritance, and they opposed both inherited wealth & inherited aristocracy.

---

>"A State divided into a small number of rich and a large number of poor will always develop a government manipulated by the rich to protect the amenities represented by their property" -- Harold Laski, political theorist (1893-1950)

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P.S. Im pretty sure Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are also opposed to inheritance


--

I don't know if you read books, but Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty is a good read.

--
Edit: Weird, I was debating with someone yesterday about how I have never heard someone wanting to go back to the feudal ages but was fighting for a theocratic form of society. I suppose I was wrong, I guess some people would like to go back to the dark days of Kings and Queens.

i decided this when i've read this book

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

>pretty much. cut corporate taxes and raise income tax to offset. Ultimately, if the concern is executive pay, just tax executive pay more. populist motivation for corporate taxation just seems to be motivated by a dislike and distrust of corporations.

This doesn't happen though. It NEVER happens. Republicans want ALL taxes cut. Point to where any have suggested raising taxes on the wealthy. And the wealthy dont even make the vast majority of their wealth through income, its through investments. You want to speak to raising taxes, raise them on the wealthy where they might feel a bit of a squeeze. The lower and middle class has been the ones that have been squeezed to offset the recklessness of corporations and banks. How much wealth was lost after 2008? Those bailouts of the banks werent paid for by the rich. And im not here to demonize those at the top, thats just stupid. Hard work can lead to wealth, sometimes. But just like in the past (like pre-1970s), those at the top did pay substantially more in taxes, and both they and the country did much better. Ill just defer to Piketty who explains this much better than me.

>If Republicans see right through the minimum wage increase issue, then where are the Republican success stories with their approach

Ultimately, I'm just asking where have Republicans put forth their economic ideas and have them work? What cities or states?

Actually not. When you compare individuals equal in education, current experience, hours worked, and equal skill sets gender makes no difference in pay. There are in fact areas where women are paid more than men. You only achieve the $.78 for every $1 figure if you total all income for each gender and divide by total in each gender, thereby comparing a part time waitress with a doctorate level physicist.

The sad part is that this was known as far back as the 70's. Thomas Sowell even wrote a book on it.

Karsh

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ascentofmoney/featured/the-ascent-of-money-episode-1-from-bullion-to-bubbles/44/


https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

He used to be quite the fan, still follows the space. He wrote a survey of the area in 2014 trying to work out if there was anything to this stuff (which I have on my tablet and haven't read yet). I follow and recommend his twitter.

I recommend you take a read of The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism. This book and Capital in the 21st Century helped clarify things for me.

>Unsustainable because 1) workforce is ageing, 2) low birth rates, 3) strict immigration policy.

This doesn't support your argument, as Norway owns the foreign asset equivalent of 100% of domestic capital stock collectively (ignoring domestic capital stock ownership held in common).

Unless the entire population is going to die off, Norway is in a much better position than other ageing countries.

>not to mention the scale effect of inefficiencies when expanded for a larger country

It's actually the other way around, Piketty (in Capital in the 21st century) demonstrated rather convincingly that;

r>>g, and
r for large asset pools > r for small asset pools.

The return on the collective stock of capital that can be held by a state doesn't shrink as the asset pool grows, it (judging by time series data) actually increases.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a good place to start. The magnum opus of a celebrated economist.

He's French though, and it's a book, so I understand if you don't want to read such a "hoity-toity liberal" thing.

I recommend a really good book on the broader subject called Life After Capitalism if you're really interested in the economics behind it, the author puts forth several implementation models.

Sure thing. Parecon (Participatory Economics) is a resource based economy, that ties into the idea of Techocracy. I would add more of my own, but it is rather late, and the linked information should be enough to get you started.

http://www.technocracy.org/technocracy-simplified/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics

http://www.amazon.com/Parecon-After-Capitalism-Michael-Albert/dp/185984698X

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vonsa3EO9rA

The non cliff notes is 800 pages. Rate of return on capital > growth isn't good for anyone. Especially the middle class though.

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

>Do you see how illogical that is? You are questioning the preferences of millions of people and instead trying to put your preferred value on somebody's labor.

Markets don't just exist sui generis and are also prone to failure, sometimes in surprising ways. A CEO's salary isn't just determined by his "skills" or by supply and demand; information assymetries; leverage; tax policies; and societal norms and customs also play a role. In the U.S., the average CEO makes 354 times more than the average worker. In Israel and Japan, two countries home to some of the world's more dynamic economies, the gap is 76 and 67 times respectively. Do you think that supply and demand and the skill gap explain the entirety of that disparity?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/the-pay-gap-between-ceos-and-workers-is-much-worse-than-you-realize/?utm_term=.7094064afc74

>Skill disparity. The further back in time you go, the simpler an economy was and the skill disparity between the most and least was less. The supply for the skills required at the time was higher and the price was lower. The more complex the economy gets, the more skills will be required for many of its positions and the higher that pay disparity will be.

I agree that skill differentials can help explain some of the disparities in income we see today. But I also think your argument offers a more compelling explanation for the differences in wages we see between now and 1850, not now and the 1970s. Do you think doctors have all of a sudden become vastly more skilled now than they were back then? As I said in my earlier comment, I think that tax policy, globalization (which you could certainly make a good argument has exacerbated the skill differential problem you cite), and the evisceration of unions explain the decline in workers wages relative to CEOs far better than just "the market." Put in other terms, markets don't exist in a vacuum, and each of the factors I've cited above had important influence.

>Source? If you bring up top marginal rates as your answer then I'd like to facepalm in advance. I'd like to see the source accounting for deductions and the income brackets of those marginal rates. I'll answer this one for you: you're wrong. Either way, how is this relevant to your point?

In 1953, the effective tax rate on income for the wealthy was 70 percent. The average effective tax rate, including capital gains, was 49 percent. Today, it's 29 percent.

Source:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-01-02/1950s-tax-fantasy-is-a-republican-nightmare

I get where you're going though, and I totally agree that the most effective way for the government to gain more revenue may not be to raise back income tax brackets back to where they were in the 1950s. We probably need a VAT, especially on luxury goods, and also to more aggressively tax obvious negative externalities (carbon emissions, cough cough).

>>The economy grew faster

Source: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth-annual

If you put in a trendline, you'll see that GDP growth in the U.S. has trended downward from over 4% in 1950 to about 2.5% today. My point is that there's very little evidence that higher taxes on the wealthy lead to slow economic growth, despite what supply siders think.

>They still do. Real wages may not grow as fast, but total compensation does. Compensation is a lot more than just the salary.

Source? About what about real compensation? Real compensation per worker? By most measures, real incomes for the middle and lower classes have stagnated or decreased for the past forty years, while incomes of the wealthy have skyrocketed.

>>Absolutely. The way to do that is to vote and get involved, isn't it? Most money in public policy by the wealthy and corporations isn't used to get some advantage, its used to prevent encroaching regulations on their activities which is what government has been doing aggressively since around WW2.

If you include "attempting to accumulate market power" in your definition of "preventing encroaching regulations," I'd agree with you. Most modern corporations don't really exist in a competitive free market - they're either oligopolies (Google, Facebook, etc), local monopolies (the telecom industry), or directly dependent on the government to keep their businesses competitive and afloat (defense industry, agribusiness). Many "encroaching regulations" are designed to shield companies from competition.

For excellent further reading on how the wealthy use their wealth and their power to make themselves wealthier and more powerful that will answer virtually all of your arguments more eloquently than I possible could, please read:

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner Take All Politics
https://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer-Turned/dp/1416588701

Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

Anthony Downs, "An Economic Theory of Political Action in Democracy" :
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1827369?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Feel free to check out any of his books which cite his work.
https://www.tsowell.com/
https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1541645634


Although, the more I do my own electronics technical research, the less weight I put on the peer-reviewed system. Most papers I find lack enough information to duplicate the work, or typos are so abundant, making it impossible to do so.

Literally just read this book and you will come to find me (and others like me) much less of a thought-enemy than you once did. https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/154164560X/ref=nodl_

No, the goal of the post was to persuade people that "not giving up" is all it takes to be a part of the "1%", and that's bullshit. Check out this book: https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

Ouch. I guess that you have an issue with that phrase. I guess I should provide some links for the data/statistics crowd.

Middle class is shrinking
http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/26/middle-class/

Productivity vs wages
https://aflcio.org/2015/1/15/five-causes-wage-stagnation-united-states

Household debt vs savings
http://www.alt-market.com/articles/1104-false-prosperity-through-debt

Impact on the middle class because of globalization (elephant chart)
http://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/get-ready-to-see-this-globalization-elephant-chart-over-and-over-again/wcm/c8b93ceb-197b-46fb-8aec-21961adaced3

Unions membership vs income share of top 10%
https://whistlinginthewind.org/2012/07/29/the-benefits-of-unions/

Total wealth (Bottom 90% vs 0.1%)
http://progresoweekly.us/us-wealth-inequality-top-0-1-worth-much-bottom-90/

2/3 of Americans aren't contributing to a 401K
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-21/two-thirds-of-americans-aren-t-putting-money-in-their-401-k

Decline in defined pension plans
https://squarelyrooted.com/tag/fun-with-charts/

33% has $0/56% has less than $10K in their retirement funds
http://time.com/money/4258451/retirement-savings-survey/

The rate of growth of capital is greater than economic growth.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

Take all these charts in consideration and you get the rise of Trumpism. (Mark Blyth)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm2Vfj42FY

Now...maybe it shouldn't be described as "widespread inequality". How about just inequality that is increasing?

Racism in America was on life support until a few years ago. It is still very weak and nothing compared to the 1950s.

Those studies show nothing contradictory to my point—just because black people are more likely to be pulled over does not in and of itself prove racism was the cause.

In fact, the NYPD is majority-minority and pull over, frisk, arrest, etc blacks at similar rates of other areas with majority white officers.

The banking study is garbage too. Leftists like to point out that black families have $1 of wealth for every $13 a white family has...well maybe thats why banks in predominantly black areas require higher minimum deposits as well as credit screenings for loans.


Again I know racism exists, but it is not one iota as prevalent or consequential as you claim.

You would like this book:
https://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwiJsrWdqI3iAhXFRIYKHf8eA48YABAHGgJ2dQ&ae=1&sig=AOD64_1MYjSLVAfZ5CeuGXFFEjbHj6_L4Q&ctype=5&q=&ved=0ahUKEwiM66ydqI3iAhWxo1kKHXNIBucQwg8IMQ&adurl=https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/154164560X/ref%3Dasc_df_154164560X/%3Ftag%3Dhyprod-20%26linkCode%3Ddf0%26hvadid%3D312025908234%26hvpos%3D1o1%26hvnetw%3Dg%26hvrand%3D11099025303217042655%26hvpone%3D%26hvptwo%3D%26hvqmt%3D%26hvdev%3Dm%26hvdvcmdl%3D%26hvlocint%3D%26hvlocphy%3D9008191%26hvtargid%3Dpla-447243434080%26psc%3D1

You are completely right to ask. I will try to dig some up later when I have a chance. In the mean time, a good book focused on comparative values studies between Canada and the US is Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values.

This appears to be running against the course of history and social movement.

The gap between Canadian values and American ones is wide and growing wider, claims this author, pollster, and social researcher

http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Ice-United-States-Converging/dp/014317035X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372506875&sr=1-1

Have you read Fire and Ice?

Richard Wolff's "Contending Economic Theories" would probably be a better start. It compares the three major economic schools, neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian, and studies each economic model in depth. It even gives the mathematical models used by economists in each school (but in no way is it math heavy at all). After it looks into each school in depth it analyzes late neoclassical thought, oscillations in the systems, and some of the philosophical premises behind each system. Wolff is a prominent Marxian economist, and the book undoubtedly spends the most time with and favors Marxian economics, but it's a great source to gain an extensive knowledge of each system.

For the second half I'd recommend Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici as a good starting point. It's going to respond to a lot of other thinkers, including Marx, so it can be a good starting point for further investigation on all the subjects I mentioned.

The first half isn't going to be the thesis of any works that I know of; but more of a truism that appears throughout a ton of works. I'll respond in part with an explanation and recommend some basic readings that might flesh out the ideas more.

The word "economy" comes from the Greek "oikos" meaning "home" and "nomos" meaning which refers to the function of it. It's very similar to the word "ecology" which is the combination of "oikos" and "logos", or the logic of the home. As a result, for the ancient Greeks, "economy" referred to the functioning of the household. The house and surrounding land in Athens was referred to a "demo" and constituted a single economic unit run by a single family. A government built with these units was called a "democracy", or a nation of "demos". You can read more about this in The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges to understand the basic terms and theories going into the structures of our society today, which are based heavily on the ancient Greek language and understanding of the world (as the article above indicates as well).

A fun book that discusses the theme of economics and the formation of society is Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. It's not full of references or citations, but more of a thought experiment on the subject that I think lays some good groundwork for understanding some of the motivations for the creation of a society. A more specific analysis on the goals and aspirations of an economy can be found in the general cannon, like Smith's Wealth of Nations and the critical response from Marx in Das Kapital. These are both introductory texts on the subject and a little outdated of course. If you want a more contemporary understanding of economic systems and what they do today, I'd recommend Wolff's Contending Economic Theories. These books aren't about why economies come first in society (other than the Genealogy of Morals), but they are a knowledge foundation as to why societies are organized in order to create an economy.

>I know there is something huge going on there, but I don't know what.

The Greek people were incredibly greedy after joining the Eurozone, and spent themselves into bankruptcy on the strength of the German economy which props up the Euro. And now the free-money-faucet's been turned off and THEY WANT MORE FREE STUFF!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.amazon.com/Boomerang-Travels-New-Third-World/dp/0393081818

Here is Sowell's book. I highly recommend it.

Books:

Capital in the Twenty-First Century: http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

Player Piano: http://www.amazon.com/Player-Piano-Novel-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/0385333781

Manna: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: http://hpmor.com/



Videos:

Martin Gilens & Benjamin Page: http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/kj9zai/martin-gilens---benjamin-page

Not a stupid question at all. You - quite delightfully - observed something many social scientists have been tracking for some time. A common Sociological perspective is that it isn't gender equality pushing women into the economy. Rather, it is the economy pushing women for increased labor equality. The common term for this phenomenon is 'economic determinism' and you may find terms in "Feminist Theories."

In the US after WWII, for example, households had made a lot of money, so there needed to be only one breadwinner. This was in large part, as Piketty's "Capital" describes, because the rest of the world was pretty much devastated. Money for goods and services flowed to the US. Essentially, Americans made a lot of $$ from simple jobs so there needed to be only one income.

When the rest of the world starts catching up and competes with the US, single income wages started declining. This was because international competition drove wages down. Therefore, in order to maintain a certain lifestyle and purchasing power for the people and for businesses to produce more than its competition, the economy required women to have jobs. More people in labor force = increased profits = maintain standard of living.

So what you're seeing is that the economy did not accommodate the new members of the labor force as you wrote. It's the opposite. The labor force is accommodating the economy's needs for more labor participation (caused by global competition). Prices aren't going higher (necessarily) because of increased demand with more streams of income, but the streams of income is a response to declining purchasing power. (Economically speaking, prices of things has actually gone down in the long term! The difference is that our 'purchasing power' has been either stagnant or declining, making things seem more expensive.)

Hope this helps!

I thought the report would be a lot shorter... Bugger. ;)

The report is critical of Neoclassical orthodoxy in academic study and in the profession as a whole.

It suggests moving towards a multidisciplinary approach, allowing other sciences and subjects to contribute. Social theory, behavioural theory and biological underpinnings of microeconomic activities should be defined by other disciplines. Not based on the assumptions of how people behave made by economists. Big data and quantitative method should be the cornerstone of informed economic theory.

Further to this, the INET group is working towards a discussion-based approach to theory presentation. It talks about what policy was implemented in various real world situations, the results and discusses them both with the focus on many different subjects to explain the outcomes. This builds a breadth of understanding as well as teaching historical context.

This breadth of understanding is converted into critical thinking when approaching economic problems, real or imagined. Again, a restatement of the idea that knowledge of many subjects is important.

This train of thought runs through the entire critique of Manchester's Economic syllabus, and is gently applied to the subject in both academic and professional circles. The evidence is compelling and Picketty's treatise on economic equality should stand on it's own as a good example of unorthodox economic thinking - unorthodox in that it is based in reality.

I'm just finishing my degree and honestly, I feel ignorant of many aspects of economics. Perhaps my disengagement is down to studying so many theories that have literally zero grounding in reality - interesting but unrealistic. It's exciting to read that so many fresh eyes will be able to contribute to pushing it forward into a broader, more robust and cohesive discipline. It's a shame it'll take a couple of decades before the fruits of this endeavour come to bear, but better late than never!

> Macro-economics has a major problem in that it cannot conduct proper experimental studies with a control group.

Are there any computer models that you are aware of that do, or may do in the future, a good approximation of the real world?

Also, everything you have described is, I'm sure you are aware, a kind of bottom-up intelligence. There are patterns in society, across both space and time, that influence us far more it seems than any top-down approach the we believe to be steering this ship.

> Economics is complicated and we shouldn't reduce it to hero worship of some past figure who "proved capitalism wrong". A recent book that focuses on the injustices of economic inequality with a far more sophisticated treatment is Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty.

I'd like to second this too. I've only just bought it but it sounds an amazing, thoroughly researched book. Can't wait to start reading it this weekend. There's a brief review here that includes a link to a lengthier review in the first sentence.

I wouldn't put so much blame on just those two. Yes, they've contributed and promoted the process of corporatisation of America.

But look at the broader trend. Check out Thomas Piketty's book, "Capital in the 21st Century". The short of it is -- this has been a trend for over a hundred years, easily. We can't just put 100% of the blame on two guys for a huge trend.

Clinton has promoted corporatisation as much as any politician.

Link for the lazy:

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=zg_bs_books_1

I've been reading some works by Piketty and Fukuyama and both seem to be looking at Europe prior to the revolutions of the 18th and 19th century and drawing parallels to our current stagnation. They point out that powerful elites had dominated both the royals families and the populous in their countries squeezing the monarchs on lowering taxes for them and their ilk shifting the burden onto the people. This caused a kind of death spiral where wealth became concentrated and the balance of the bond between monarch and subjects became strained, kings and queens had in years past a symbiotic relationship with the people because both gave the other power to keep the landed gentry in check. When this balance was undermined by the successful nobility that undermined the fabric of their countries civil order and finances creating both vulnerability from without, the invasions of Hungary, and strife from within, the revolution in France. They point out that this financial situation is not unlike what is driving the current economic problems ala tax expenditures to big business including property tax abatements and other sweeteners governments provide to take free rides from local and state governments.

It should be noted that these two economists, Piketty is French and an advisor to the British Labour Party and Fukuyama has been called a Neocon and was an advisor to both Reagan and Bush. They could not be politically farther apart really and yet they come to very similar conclusions. I think their prescriptions for ensuring a more fair distribution of wealth are different but it is notable that they come to very similar conclusions. I would also add that since the 70s businesses are paying roughly half of the taxes they would have paid since the disco era. They seem to also be predicting a certain amount of unrest as the consequence of concentrating so much wealth.

Oh, it's very much economics, but not the stuff they teach in neoclassical universities. Power shapes markets, with theory racing to come up with an "in universe" explaination. Cite

>a very complex issue is summed up in a 500 word report

Yeah, you probably need about 600 pages to get the full shebang.

It was a low quality application of Piketty's thesis and he didn't even have the courtesy to credit his source.

>Who has it been validated by?

Stiglitz backed the Labour manifesto at the last general election, a Nobel Prize winning economist. If you do a search on an academic database, you will find many more articles in support of the type of platform pushed by Corbyn.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/07/austerity-britain-labour-neoliberalism-reagan-thatcher

>How does it?

Above.

>So you keep saying. Without any evidence.

If you have access to academic journals, then do a search, and read some of the results. If not, buy some books on the topic. It's as if you want the knowledge that comes with reading, without actually putting in the work. I've spent thousands of hours reading about topics such as this one over the past few years, a lot of effort and hard work has gone into constructing my political outlook, if you're not convinced by it, then all I can do is point you in the direction of academia, the same place I learnt about politics.

>I don't. And I also don't see you explaining exactly how he is tackling them.

I've explained multiple times. At this point you're rejecting it for the sake of rejecting it. If not for Corbyn, the Labour party would still be towing the line that austerity is an economic necessity. Corbyn is challenging the neoliberal common sense of how to run a countries political economy. I feel that you must not have a very good understanding of politics if you don't understand how Jeremy is responding to the problems i mentioned above.

Though, at this point, I'm fairly sure your just an anti-Corbyn shill that is trying to waste my time. You have not projected a coherent argument over the past few days, and the very few political claims you yourself have made, completely fail to withstand the criticism you appear to be holding my opinions to. Claiming you supported Corbyn at the start, but now you don't know what he's doing to solve the problems i mentioned above, as if this has changed.

No, it doesn't make sense I'm afraid. I doubt you ever supported Corbyn, and claiming you don't know how he's responding to the crises I mentioned, after claiming you've read the manifesto, either means you're not intelligent enough to understand basic politics, or you're being disingenuous, but either way, I've wasted enough time on you.

My advice, if you are a real person that doesn't particularly understand politics very well, buy some introductory books in the area of political economy, and you should soon see how and why Corbyn's platform is different to the Tories, Blair, and all the other political parties and politicians that accept the neoliberal parameters brought to this country by Thatcher.

Gonna block you now, because this conversation is going nowhere, and it won't go anywhere until you actually read about the subjects you're attempting to talk about. I will leave you with a few books, a good jumping off point.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Price-Inequality-Joseph-Stiglitz/dp/0718197380

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=TC0MC2C9DQ8NXVW7MSR0

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neoliberalisms-British-Politics-Christopher-Byrne-ebook/dp/B07HGGT4NT

https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Way-World-Neoliberal-Society-ebook/dp/B00J209OFQ/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=neoliberalism+world+order+dardot+and+laval&qid=1550859195&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-fkmr0

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey-ebook/dp/B005X3SA74/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=a+brief+history+of+neoliberalism&qid=1550859270&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-fkmrnull

Capital in the 21st Century, for reference.

>LMAO where have I heard this before??

I have attempted to explain how each author has presented a false understanding of Marxian value or the nature of social production. I have given in Marx's own words and my own attempts to explain these concepts. If you are struggling I am happy to try again. Dusty's essay in particular is just mind-boggling in terms of how closely it mirrors Marx and then seems to ascribe to him all of this 'intrinsic axiologist' stuff that is literally contradictory to the Marxist conception of the human species.

>Except there is no real difference in the real world.

Yes there is. Water may have a multitude of use values. It may have a multitude of exchange values in relation to any given object. It may be present in such a material condition as to hold no value whatsoever, it may be present in such a material condition as to be the most valuable thing an individual could possibly want. A man dying of dehydration in the desert does not care for water's utility as a solvent or cleaning agent. A man drowning in the sea is not currently looking for a refreshing spigot to drink from. No one object holds some singular intrinsic or objective use value, this is a socially and subjectively derived phenomena. No one object holds some kind of set exchange ratio with another object outside of a given relational context which ultimately stems back to the material conditions within which the exchange takes place. My knowing how much a bottle of water sells for in central London relative to a bottle of Diet Coke does not tell me how much water I am going to need to turn an area of dirt into mud for the making of bricks. These values are distinct and separate.

>This didn't clarify anything.

Well again, see above. You have an appallingly bad understanding of the Marxian conception of society, which is why you are repeatedly presenting these quite shoddy arguments and then pretending like no one is giving you any kind of answers. The answer lies deeper than you want to look because you have not challenged some very basic presuppositions about our understanding of the material world around us. Like I said, I did not want to address what you said so much as critique the places you are clearly getting these ideas from. If you want to raise where you are struggling to understand or feel I am not making sense, I am more than happy to make another attempt in a more specific and detailed manner.

>We hate Mondays because we don't like working.

Except people will spend hundreds of hours working on whatever hobby satisfies them? Labour is not simply the act of going to work for your employer or engaging in market activity. As per Dusty's essay that you shared to support your position -

>Value-judgements and actions on them do not spring from a vacuum and can not float away and apart from the axiological lattice binding all values as instruments to a standard or ultimate value...It is the constant conditionality of the form of life that gives rise to the need of values and to the need of acting to secure and keep things instrumental to an organism’s preservation.

So when we say forced to work, as the video makes clear, we are talking about being forced to work in a manner in which we are unfree to determine how to allocate our own labour, rather than simply the need to labour in and of itself. In fact the need to labour freely is, again as mentioned in the video, part of Man's intrinsic nature without which we become alienated from both ourself and the society in which we exist. We hate Monday's during the work-week because it signals a resumption in which the majority of our time is spent working in a manner in which we have little to no control over.

>No one is forced to work for a capitalist.

Yes, you are free to go to the woods and build a mud-hut and die of starvation a few months down the line. Well, not really because most land is privately owned, but in principle. The reality is of course that we are social beings and we are talking about social labour. Your ability to engage in social labour under Capitalism without engaging with the market is... not really possible. Hence you are always going to be reliant on some form of Capitalist or Capital in order for your labour to actually meet your basic needs for survival, let alone the needs required to enjoy a social existence.

>Capital also does not concentrate or accumulate into fewer hands.

There's a big door-stopper book published on just this not that long ago. It is worth a read, but it can be a bit exhausting! The accumulation of Capital historically since the 18th century has only been curtailed by an anomalous period of political restraint on the activity of Capital during the mid-20th Century.

>They are not "deprived" of anything to not get paid.

I mean... Yes you are? Time? Freedom to be doing things with that time? The money assuming you have signed a contract judging your labour-time to hold a certain agreed value between yourself and your employer and are not some slave-labouring illegal immigrant?

>Your life is not owned by someone else.

Well, yeah it is. Again back to the last example. Yes theoretically I can go out and make myself a farmstead and live off the wheat I grow. In reality there isn't the public land to be doing that, and realistically you're not going to get those materials to even do that without first exchanging your labour-time for money.

>Bosses are not unaccountable. Bosses do not control more of your life than dictators.

I would have preferred he used Capitalist or Employer over bosses. I chalk it down to English as a second/third language. But where was he incorrect? What dictator on the planet could hope to have 8 to 12 hours a day in the lives of each of their subjects in which they control the minutiae of their actions, dictate when they are free to take breaks for essential biological functions? What do you mean bosses cannot force you to work for free, you've never done unpaid overtime?

>I'm 3 minutes in...

Good to know one side can sit through three long-form essays of absolute trash and come out with 10,000+ words of argument, while t'other feels more knowledgeable despite being unable to sit through 3 minutes of a video before getting too emotional to continue :) If its trash then you can put together the same kind of argument against on a point-by-point basis as I have tried to do and we can discuss onwards from there.

Interesting phrasing. "As productivity increases, labor is likely to receive a significant share of the benefits."

Automation/Globalization doing exactly the opposite to labor's share of wealth/money. They have got lesser "benefits" in lower cost goods (not Health/Housing/Education though).

Thomas Piketty advanced strong arguments for why this is happening (see Capital in the Twenty-First Century )

This just seems like a rosy counter claim with no evidence.

>Smaller countries with freer markets have net immigration.

Depends on the country, and we were specifically discussing migration of labor, not general privatization on this specific tangent.

>It was a model for meeting state demand.

In the short term, with no planning for long term because Hitler's long term plan was for Germany to become 'too big to fail'. They rapidly burnt through their warchest and raided resources because it's a poor strategy for the longterm.

It seems you've abandoned trying to equate nazis with socialism, but just in case you still internally believe in that nonesense, I recommend these articles:

"Betting on Hitler: The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany" , by Thomas Ferguson and Hans-Joachim Voth. Goes into detail how Hitler had been the choice of german capital, and jow they were lavishly rewarded for doing so.

http://www2.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/wpol/schumpeter/pdf/Voth.pdf

"Capital in the Twenty-First Century", by Thomas Piketty, which compares the share of national income that went to Capital in US & Germany, from 1929 to 1938.

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

"Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in the 1930s", by Germà Bell, which demonstrates how the third reich went against economic mainstreams in systematically privatizing swathes of publicly owned utilities.

https://coreyrobin.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/bel-2010-nazi-privatizations1.pdf

Actually, the development of private property rights is strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly associated with improvement of quality of life for the poor. I have yet to see any data suggesting there is any credible alternative to the market if your interest is a healthy and wealthy society.

On inequality I think Piketty and Piketty and Saez are probably about right, but there isn't that much variation across societies where "ownership of assets" varies. I'm prepared to argue that North Korea might stand as the world's most unequal society however (perhaps asymptotically so?), even though we lack for real data on the subject.

If your interest is in reducing inequality, you should probably be thinking more about taxing the stuff that the rich earn rather than eliminating the social construct of the rich owning stuff.

I prefer beating the dead horse of reading 1 star amazon reviews of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Has anyone here read the book Capital by Thomas Piketty?

That's a good one, have you read it?

Here is another one:
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674979850

>Of course there are flaws in capitalism, every system has flaws

True

>we fixed all the major flaws with capitalism durring the tail end of the industrial revolution

False

>Im not arguing NO regulation, Im arguing for minimal regulation as we dont live in an ideal, we live in the real world. Anything but the absolute barest regulation stifles growth.

Okay? No one is arguing for needless overregulation. As it stands, there are problems both with over regulation as well as under regulation in this country.

>And that profit maximization tactic always ends up gutting the company.

False. Tell that to Apple, or Nestle or any other large multinational.

>Yes but people die and when they die their assets spread amongst their children. It takes 3 generations on average for the wealth of an ultra rich person to be spread so thinly it disappears in america.

There are so many problems with using that as a defence against the empirically obvious increasing concentration of wealth. The most obvious being that theis study looked at the rich and not the super rich. The second being that many super rich don't keep their citizenship and/or move their money offshore, as well as avoid taxes by any means possible. I don't know why I would bother responding further to this when there is literally a widely available research publication devoted exactly to the topic:

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674979850

It's probably available on torrent if you can't/don't want to afford it. Read up.

Following your logic, moral entrepreneurs like Steven Pinker and Bill Gates who promote Roser's data are incredibly naive regarding world history, colonization, and imperialism. Jason Hickel is attempting to bring these historical factors into the conversation of global poverty in order to contextualize relationships between the global south and global north, something that often gets lost by economists simply "presenting the data".

Following Picketty: “To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.”

I mean there is an argument to be made "economically" that having to many small banks is not that good for the economy as the well being of some of them might rely on geographical considerations. Canada has 6 large banks for the whole country and arguably besides some credit unions these are the only banks you deal with.. I read a paper discussing the optimal number of banks (for competition) etc and the banks in Canada are arguably just upward sloping side of the LRAC but not to far from the optimum, so Canada could probably do with one or two more banks but any more and you would be getting optimal economies of scale.

American is a bigger (population) country so they would arguably need more banks but having 20 big banks would arguably be better for the American economy. First off regulating 20 banks is easier to do then regulating 1000s of small banks your regulations might actually be effectively enforced. If something happens geographically your bank would not collapse and FDIC would probably be in a better position. If you ever read about the theory of banking is that in the end of the day the bank is giant netting institution and source of capital having 1000s of banks makes this job more difficult. Also American banking technology is well behind the rest of the world on a retail front and one of the problems comes from there being to many banks.

If you want to read about American Banking History you should get a book called Fragile by Design. https://www.amazon.ca/Fragile-Design-Political-Origins-Banking/dp/0691155240/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511054017&sr=8-1&keywords=fragile+by+design

I would highly recommend Fragile by Design, by Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber.

It really puts it into perspective how much of a game changer Bitcoin really is.

Well, just go read it yourself dumbass. See Saad-Filho and Fine, Marx's Capital. They're both actual Marxist economists and explicitly point out how his version differs from other classical economists.

I agree with Wage, Labour, and Capital and it was actually among some of the first books I suggested for here. It has the added bonus of being freely available as an audiobook. I had originally thought we'd be a group for more "advanced" Marxist writings but I think we have such a varied group that covering some "basic" texts will be very useful. I agree with your assessment of Capital. I've read it (and WLC) myself and as I've said elsewhere we'd have to have a group of posters/"teachers" and a sizeable amount of commenters/"students" willing to stick with it.

I'll look into your suggestions. I've definitely been wanting to read some Gramsci. Another thing I was thinking of getting and suggesting is Ben Fine's "Marx's Capital" which attempts to summarize and explain all three volumes.

Hace poco terminé una vuelta más a How Asia Works, que es uno de mis favoritos. Ahora estoy releyendo The Elusive Quest for Growth y empezando con Stages of Economic Growth

Since 1980, US lawmakers have redistributed income from the poor to the wealthy on a massive scale. For example Judge Judy makes $47 million a year ($900,000 per work day) She lives in New York with her husband, who used to sit on the New York Supreme Court. The first week of every month, she flies to California where they shoot those shows for however many hours a day for a week, then she flies back. She only works 12 weeks a year, or about 60 days.


A new article in The Atlantic, which apparently borrows heavily from a new book by Richard V. Reeves, claims that the real problem is not the rich, but the upper middle class, defined as the 9.9%, meaning those members of the top ten per cent in wealth who are not members of the top 0.1%. Matthew Stewart, the author of the Atlantic piece, argues that the 9.9% constitute a new American aristocracy.


If poor people knew how rich the rich were, they would be rioting in the streets.......... Chris Rock

Take a look at the book Dream Hoarders

https://www.amazon.com/dp/081572912X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_6tYPAb2EYP2P0

I base my opinion on Capital in the 21th century, Why nations fail and this IMF note and few others that I didn't save the links for.

City of Stairs. Pretty standard fantasy fare -- humans kill gods, bad things happen. But it was well written and I enjoyed it.

The last serious book I read was Capital in the 21st Century. Dry, but quite interesting.

Ireland fell from the seduction of cheap credit which allowed them to overextend themselves into oblivion. Does that sound familiar? For a more detailed understanding I recommend you read this. It's an excellent book. Instead of asking me to defend my position why don't you show me one instance where Keynesian economics has been right in the long term? The cyclical nature of real world economics will make that task difficult for you. What you seem to not want to see is that by every measurable metric the system has failed, and that it is a system predicated on Keynes ideas.

I'm going for that walk now where I will explain to a 3 year old in great detail that you can't turn one acorn into two using fractional banking, and hopefully I can make the lesson stick.

LOL do you not know how to read? I didn't say "IN 1720s France," I said "SINCE 1720s in France," meaning there's enough data points to go back 3 centuries, making the resulting calculation of 4-5% that much more accurate. Go to r/research and learn something about modern quantitative methods.

EDIT: Source.

I haven't read it so I don't know if it applies but I've heard good things about Capital in the 21st Century.

Thomas Piketty would have a word

That is wholly insufficient response, specifically what did hitler do that was socialist but not related to war time production. the primary argument i see in the comments is that hitler centralized and nationalized some industries, by that logic the WPB, and any form of Rationing, Price control, general central planning related to conducting a world war would make a nation socialist.

In truth the cartel act of 1923 allowed german industry to centralize and cooperate in a central manner all germany did was take control for conducting a war. he privatized social programs, suggested privatization of public transit.

Hitler might have called himself a socialist but he had a fundamental fear of communism, this was listed multiple times in Mien Kampf, 203 he specifically says

"In the years 1913 and 1914 I expressed my opinion for the first time in various circles, some of which are now members of the National Socialist Movement, that the problem of how the future of the German nation can be secured is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated." (Hitler P. 203)

To claim Hitler was a socialist is akin to saying the DPRNK is a democracy because it's in the name.

some further reading

Capital in the 21st Century, https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674979850/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526865050&sr=8-1&keywords=capital+in+the+twenty-first+century

Against the mainstream: Nazi privatazation in 1930s Germany, https://coreyrobin.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/bel-2010-nazi-privatizations1.pdf

Mien Kampf, http://www.greatwar.nl/books/meinkampf/meinkampf.pdf

The German Dictatorship, https://www.amazon.com/German-dictatorship-structure-national-socialism/dp/B0006C06H4

Im seriously interested in where the logic comes from, can you point me to some source that claims and defends the position: Nazi germany was closer to Communism than Capitalism

CRA investments came into swing under Clinton, whose administration used is as part of the third way campaign in which housing and wealth standards could be raised without raising any additional taxes or creating any on the budget programs. The Clinton administration pushed for these types of loans to be given out, lowering capital requirements for banks that lent under this program and insuring their safety through Freddie mac and Sallie mae. Then once Glass-Stegall was repealed and bank mergers began to happen, bigger banks would make these sorts of loans to please community action groups such as ACORN who would then testify on their behalf in front of the Federal Reserve review boards that the banks who were doing the buying were building up communities that were traditionally ignored by most banking operations, and that therefore they should be allowed to buyout smaller local banks. This is the argument made by Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber in their book "Fragile by Design". It continued to pick up steam as the likes of Wachovia and other mortgage originators started to make boat loads of money by making high -risk loans for cheap and then selling off the mortgages. Human pressure and greed kicked in from there and others took started to do the same thing in order to keep up with their competitors.

>What statistical averages are you speaking of?

Things like taking the average income of a group of people. So because blacks earn X% on average and whites earn Y% on average, therefore the value of X-Y% is due to racism. There are plenty of other examples.

You have to actually demonstrate that non racist factors have no influence before you can conclude that the primary factor is racism. Thomas Sowell wrote a book on the topic that thoroughly debunks this notion.

Holy shit do you really not know how to fucking read? You're responding to a post that says:

>This is what Piketty's Capital is about. I'm kind of surprised you didn't hear about one of the most groundbreaking works of economics to come out in recent years: it was a major news story. Piketty was a guest on every TV show from CNN to the Daily Show.


https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

Check out this book to learn why.

You'll have to ignore some of Piketty's disgusting liberal sensibilities (a particularly irksome comment being that no Europeans suffered more in the mid 20th century than the wealthy), but it does a great job explaining how capital was accumulated and concentrated across the 19th century, then lost during the war years, and then began to concentrate again. He essentially shows you why that chart is the way it is, and it has nothing to do with any type of generational antagonisms.

I wanna know the books YOU read. Have you read these economics books? https://www.amazon.ca/Modern-Political-Economics-Making-Post-2008/dp/0415428882/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1523985014&sr=8-6&keywords=yanis+varoufakis

https://www.amazon.ca/Contending-Economic-Theories-Neoclassical-Keynesian/dp/0262517833/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523985080&sr=1-6

[Might be worth a read] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X)

Yeah, the same response comes form every regressive after saying something racist/sexist/etc.

These people are the fucking worst, they hide behind economic orthodoxy to not admit that their ideology and economic predictions have failed, they mock people on starvation wages, mock them for wanting a fair share of their productivity, mock them for wanting true equality of opportunity for their children, all the while ignoring economic studies that contradict their unregulated marked fanatisem, in favor of what is thought by econ departments with conflicts of interest, funded by Koch backed groups.

Economics has been ideologicalised and fails to live up to scientific scrutiny. I really recommend anyone to read this book https://www.amazon.de/Economism-Bad-Economics-Rise-Inequality/dp/1101871199

or this one https://www.amazon.de/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

Even if they were right, if unregulated capitalism with no minimum wage, no public healthcare etc were the best way, if people working in slave like conditions all over the world and in privat prisons were the only way, and it is not, what does it say about the people in that sub mocking people for wanting a bit more than that?

This is a subject where any humor is just spitting in someones face

Looks like you've got some reading to do.

But that is not due to free trade but due to industrial policy. In fact ironically all the countries you cited used industrial policy to develop infant industries as Joe Studwell https://www.amazon.com/How-Asia-Works-Joe-Studwell/dp/0802121322/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485438792&sr=1-1&keywords=joe+studwell and Robert Wade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaxdPb6LZZY so astutely point out.

...said the pot to the kettle.

Look again. Hey, here's some more evidence (note the timing of major income/wealth inequality changes). If that's still not enough economic data to satisfy your interest, I hear Thomas Pikkety's book, "Capital in the 21st Century" is full of data. Too soon?

If you want details, I'm sure a competent economist, like yourself, will have no problem locating the data to substantiate the economic elements pointed out.

Political history is notoriously data deficient. Special interest groups and politicians like it that way, but there's another data trail that's quite revealing if you'd like to go there too...it's called political contributions. The Academic community has it's own data trail that can be quite enlightening as well (i.e., endowments, research grants and speaking engagements). Much to the chagrin of some ideologues, money leaves a data trail in life as it does in economics.

Feel free to provide data which refutes what has been pointed out. I would love to see it.

> Until the place across the street doesn't want "your kind" in there either.

Do you know how stupid that is? A lot of segregation laws concerning businesses (like separate restaurants) were created because business owners cared more about making money than the minority of racists in the region and would happily accept black customers.

Sorry but greed trumps ideology 99% of the time. If it didn't people wouldn't bitch about the corruption in congress and campaign finance reform.

https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/154164560X

Go read it. Clearly explains why regulating businesses in regards to discrimination is a bad thing with data and statistics to back it up.

> Allowing discrimination only serves to dehumanize people.

So I assume you live in the hood with gangs and are completely fine with it?

If not, then shut up cause you're clearly discriminating against the hood by living someplace "nicer" (i.e. less colorful).