Re:Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)
by cletus on Sunday March 31, 2019 @12:32PM
(#19536451)
We are in some ways victims of the Long Peace.
There hasn't been a large-scale war since WWII. Obviously there have been numerous conflicts since but these haven't occurred in the developed world and have largely been contained geographically.
Obviously those conflicts are bad for those stuck where they occur and it's good there hasn't been such a conflict, particularly now we're in the nuclear age. But war and revolution served a peculiar economic purpose too: they were the ultimate form of wealth redistribution.
It's why the Patricians of Rome don't own the world today.
The public is also increasingly apathetic. The French Revolution redistributed the wealth of the French aristocracy. But we now live in an era where people don't care enough to vote or they limit their "activism" to liking an image deriding the latest Trump scandal on Facebook.
Some like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have committed to not handling $100B+ to their descendants but it doesn't take many to essentially establish a permanent ruling class in all but name.
Unfortunately we live in an era where the ultra-wealthy are increasingly unwilling to pay for the infrastructure and political stability that made and continues to make their wealth possible.
It's easy to see a dystopian future that results from nothing more than local optima of the ultra-wealthy minimizing their own tax liability because there's apparently a difference between having $70B and $75B.
I'm not sure you can (or should) appeal to economists humanity to make them care about income inequality. It's perhaps better to argue that income inequality has limits. At some point, no one can afford anything and the whole system grinds to a halt or war and/or revolution "solves" that inequality and it's in the long term interests of pretty much everyone to avoid that.
There hasn't been a large-scale war since WWII. Obviously there have been numerous conflicts since but these haven't occurred in the developed world and have largely been contained geographically.
Obviously those conflicts are bad for those stuck where they occur and it's good there hasn't been such a conflict, particularly now we're in the nuclear age. But war and revolution served a peculiar economic purpose too: they were the ultimate form of wealth redistribution.
It's why the Patricians of Rome don't own the world today.
The public is also increasingly apathetic. The French Revolution redistributed the wealth of the French aristocracy. But we now live in an era where people don't care enough to vote or they limit their "activism" to liking an image deriding the latest Trump scandal on Facebook.
Some like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have committed to not handling $100B+ to their descendants but it doesn't take many to essentially establish a permanent ruling class in all but name.
Unfortunately we live in an era where the ultra-wealthy are increasingly unwilling to pay for the infrastructure and political stability that made and continues to make their wealth possible.
It's easy to see a dystopian future that results from nothing more than local optima of the ultra-wealthy minimizing their own tax liability because there's apparently a difference between having $70B and $75B.
I'm not sure you can (or should) appeal to economists humanity to make them care about income inequality. It's perhaps better to argue that income inequality has limits. At some point, no one can afford anything and the whole system grinds to a halt or war and/or revolution "solves" that inequality and it's in the long term interests of pretty much everyone to avoid that.