wasoxygen has previously argued that the growing wealth gap has financed the leaps forward in technological advances, and that our lives are much the better for it. Other people around here seem to regard the advances in technology as inevitable and are generally dissatisfied with the current trends in wealth consolidation. It's an interesting debate. wasO, I tagged you because there's a very good chance I've bastardized your logic, as I'm known to do. :) I'm pretty sure I read this in a comments section, it's not tagged as #OC in my brain, dunno what the source is: Do you guys think an economic landscape where mobility tends towards 50% is the most "fair"? Is that even possible? Has it ever happened?It's hard to compare modern times to the situation of the '40's, when a western country arising from a depression goes on to win WWII while also managing not to have itself bombed back into medieval times.
The role of culture in dictating the future is something I've relegated to the realm of the unknowable, and I probably frowned, when I decided that. But damn, that is another fine Graeber piece. I think he's right. Confirmation bias, sure, but the bit about how we logically require massive bureaucracy for extremely complex projects is my favorite. When people don't understand why it costs so much to do these little science projects, that's because they don't understand what we do. Every single time. To fully grasp it, someone's going to need to sit down with a dry erase board and go one-on-one for a little while. And that's not happening. I mean... thanks.
It was a link knee deep in this: Which was knee-deep in something else even more abstract that I've forgotten. Your addendum addresses the Golden Age of Capitalism which is kind of... So... part of the problem is that most of our big economic thinking these days is based on studying this particular era. Chicago school? All Golden Age of Capitalism. What's the alternative? Austrian school... which was all about the former Prussian empire as Kaiser Wilhelm ramped up to start WWI. Anything else? Fringe economics. But historically speaking, economics doesn't look like a big pre-war or post-war economic boom. Historically speaking, economics is just one dimension of "nasty brutish and short." I don't think it's a coincidence that economists started noticing the Austrian school again right about the time the OPEC crisis hit, stagflation blew up the world and Reagan started calling for Morning in America. I harp on Piketty a lot but fuckin'A if the dude didn't do the math. And while he didn't explicitly say "the postwar economic boom is entirely due to the redistribution of the wealth of Jews", he made a pretty good case. Tony Judt made that point explicitly about Europe, Richard Pipes made the same about the Soviet Union. Violent wealth redistribution is pretty good for the middle class; you could damn near make the same argument for Henry VIII's confiscation of papal properties and for the Lutherans' reign of terror. Kill the guys with the money and suddenly there's more money to go 'round. But there isn't the kind of data you'd like to really make the study. Piketty did his best. Problem is, the further back you go, the fewer unbiased sources you're likely to find. Losers don't get to write history.
Yeah, sorry about that. Neurotic lately, but with decent results. Not on Hubski though. Any means that quells the Rage of The People will usually help society return to a more functional state, I guess. The Rage can be a reaction to anything, real or perceived. Scary, in this intellectual landscape. Public opinion has become increasingly hostile towards elites, but is not yet trending towards any tipping point, imho. Most people are still content to blame others only marginally lower or higher than themselves on the socioeconomic ladder. The only required signal, across perhaps 85% of society, invoking what I would sometimes classify as a primal response, is the R or the D next to a name (the recent campaign to affiliate "D" with "dick" being a conspiracy executed by the occult group of your mom, I saw it on YouBoob). I think we should still try to fight the extreme party loyalty mentality, even if you're goddamn sure that you've made the better choice. As a stupidly naive child*, I'm entitled to think that demonstrating moderatism/tempered scientism in my daily life could help hasten the onset of the inevitable class warfare. I fuck up a lot, but hey, it's a conscious goal. Like I've ranted elsewhere around here all too recently, I'm of the mind that it's best to confront existing problems before they grow even larger, so that's why I whine. I sincerely hope that it doesn't require a cataclysmic event to jolt the middle class awake. But it looks like we're headed that way, somehow or another, and I haven't found many people to disagree on that; only on what the disaster will be and who to blame. The People will eventually and inevitably turn against the elites, I agree. It's difficult to imagine what form the battlefield might take, because it's difficult to predict when it will happen. * My sister recently went from saying, "I'm just a child, how could you hold me responsible??..." to "If you would just step back and leave me alone, I'm a mature adult, very well capable of my independence..." within the same argument. I thought that was fantastic, so I'm stealing it. And it's OK, to steal things, when you're such an old, old guy, like me.Your addendum
Violent wealth redistribution is pretty good for the middle class
Piketty
I think the fact that we got through the depression without too many shots fired (Upton Sinclair be damned) is an indication that we're still in a place where gradual, gentle change can accomplish everything we need. And by "gentle" I mean "nobody gets their lives rekt." Trump wants to knock that 40% down to 15%. It makes the counterproposal of kicking it back up to 65% seem damn near reasonable by comparison. That top rate? It applies to people earning more than $400k. Trump wants to save 'em $100k (minimum) a year. Kicking it the other way would cost 'em $200k (minimum) a year. Yeah - larcenous. Yeah - confiscatory. But fuckin'A son you still got $200k a year.
I'm trained to read the captions before clicking on a figure, I guess, and when I read "Trump wants to knock that 40% down to 15%" below a thumbnail'd line plot, my first instinct was that you were talking about his approval rating. Before I could realize that I'd made a mistake, my kneejerk reaction was "ha, YEAH he does", and I figured that you were about to build a decent case for it. lol. I had no idea the wealthy were taxed so heavily during/after the great depression. Obviously, they found some tax loopholes and were able to make sure the trickle down effect was still going on, otherwise we would've failed to recover. Reductionism bundled into a joke, hilarious. Higher estate taxes for the extreme upper echelons, anyone? Seems like a no-brainer. Nobody needs to wake up one day with 100 million more dollars, that seems kinda stupid*. Unless the estate was worth, say, 10 billion dollars. Even then, it's kinda weird to me. And Trump's new tax plan eliminates the estate tax, of course. * of course, I would be willing to make exceptions, but fuck all of this Cayman-island-Swiss-bank-wealth-hoarding bullshit.