- Three years ago, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) made its author the most famous economist in the world. The book caused a sensation by highlighting rising income and wealth inequality in the United States and Europe, especially in its jarring claim that inequality is just as bad today as it was a hundred years ago. Piketty writes: “The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910. Basically, all the middle class managed to get its hands on was a few crumbs.”
These two sentences sum up a profound irony—the central contradiction of modern progressives. They do not believe in progress. A century ago, America’s first progressives believed very much in the power of their reforms. Theodore Roosevelt was proud to protect the environment. John Dewey was busy promoting universal education. Alice Paul was busy fighting for a woman’s right to vote. They succeeded. Today, neo-progressives would have us forget all that, and maybe it’s because economic hindsight is anything but clear.
- How much money would you demand to give up modern public goods such as highways or emergency fire and ambulance services? How much is air conditioning worth to you? What about penicillin? Entertainment of any kind that is not live? The ability to travel to Australia from Minneapolis in a day’s time for the price of five men’s suits? Recorded music, movies, and cable television? How much would you have to be paid to surrender the Internet for a month? No Facebook. No Netflix. No email. No Google searches. No Google Maps.
These are Piketty’s crumbs. Here are some others.
These two sentences are the start of a contradictory four paragraphs. Here's more of the quote: None of this is false, and it is essential to be aware of these things: the historical reduction of inequalities of wealth is less substantial than many people believe. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the limited compression of inequality that we have seen is irreversible. Nevertheless, the crumbs that the middle class has collected are important, and it would be wrong to underestimate the historical significance of the change. A person who has a fortune from 200,000 to 300,000 euros may not be rich but is a long way from being destitute, and most of these people do not like to be treated as poor. Tens of millions of individuals - 40 percent of the population represents a large group, intermediate between rich and poor - individually own property worth hundreds of thousands of euros and collectively lay claim to one-quarter to one-third of national wealth: this is a change of some moment. In historical terms, it was a major transformation, which deeply altered the social landscape and the political structure of society and helped to redefine the terms of distributive conflict. It is therefore essential to understand why it occurred. Piketty's argument in Capital was not that "it's all pointless, fuckin' waaaah" it's that wealth naturally accumulates unless checked by policy. Because that's when the data started getting good and repeatable and comparable to modern data. Dude blows like a chapter explaining this. Say what you will about Piketty, but the dude shows his work. The rest of it has fuckall to do with Piketty, but is instead an archetypal Commentary Magazine paean to how things were better when the HUAC was running America.And the poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010 , just as in 1910. Basically, all the middle class managed to get its hands on was a few crumbs: scarecely more than a third of Europe's wealth and barely a quarter of the United States. This middle group has four times as many members as the top decile yet only one-half to one-third as much wealth. It is tempting to conclude that nothing has really changed: inequalities in the ownership of capital are still extreme (see Table 7.2).
Why 1910? He could have picked 1960 or 1800, I suppose, but the year 1910 seemed to float in the back of the mind like a silent paradox.
I haven't read Piketty, but Google Books allowed me to read a few pages to make sure that quote wasn't taken out of context. So I agree that "None of this is false," but I question the value of measuring welfare by asking what percentage of the total someone holds, rather than more direct measures of life quality, like food, shelter, and health. I also agree that wealth naturally accumulates unless checked by policy. That is precisely why "The target of reducing extreme poverty rates by half was met five years ahead of the 2015 deadline."
You should read Piketty. He wasn't measuring welfare by any stretch of the imagination - he was measuring capital flows and the function of owned capital in wealth generation. Fact of the matter is, he basically points to the massive redistribution of wealth during WWII as the engine driving the post-war economic expansion without once saying the words "jew" "holocaust" "crystallnacht" or "ghetto"; I'm guessing because it would have opened up exactly this sort of bullshit argument. More than that, "extreme poverty" isn't even vaguely a focus of the work. It's entirely about the top two deciles and how they compare to the middle six deciles historically and why. He even burns a few pages about how historically, the poor aren't even counted so it's difficult to find any metrics about them. He focuses on the middle class and the wealthy because that's where the data is. Yet in your linked article, it forms the justification for some dude in a suit to go "look - it's not so bad as it was during the dust bowl." NO SHIT. How offensive is that? "Could be worse, you could have cholera." Fuckin' A - if we're taking "a reasonable expectation that the advances of modern science will raise the quality of life for all participants in society" off the table I'ma start gettin' strident.
Here's a nice graph of that data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/declining-global-poverty-share-1820-2015
So today's crumbs are yesterday's loaf. Does that mean it's okay that most people live only on the scraps of the few? It seems to me that even if life is better - and in many ways maybe it's not? - that doesn't somehow mean that the current situation is hunky dory. So someone pointed out that wealth inequality is the same today as it was a century ago, and that this is a Bad Thing. But then this guy says, well actually, even if wealth inequality if just as bad, our lives are way better because we have cars and smartphones and HD televisions, which is a Good Thing. I feel like both of those things are true, but they don't negate each other anyway. I mean, this basically reads as a justification of said wealth inequality - I don't think a comparatively higher standard of living really does justify that.
Without reading the article, I can't argue for the author, but I want to mention that you're restating the fundamental difference between two moral systems. Consequentialism and deontology answer your question in opposite ways.So today's crumbs are yesterday's loaf. Does that mean it's okay that most people live only on the scraps of the few? It seems to me that even if life is better - and in many ways maybe it's not? - that doesn't somehow mean that the current situation is hunky dory.
Hi. Person who knows very little about either of these. Where to start? Wikipedia? Not Wikipedia?Consequentialism and deontology answer your question in opposite ways.
Don't overthink it. Consequentialism: "the ends justify the means." Deontology: "It's the principle of the thing." Consequentially: it's okay that "today's crumbs are yesterday's loaf" because a loaf is a loaf. Deontologically: It's not okay that "today's crumbs are yesterday's loaf" because crumbs are crumbs.
Or oversimply. Deontology is about rules. You've got your 10 commandments or your categorical imperative or your wiccan rede or... and if you do what your rules say to do you're doing the right thing. This can get silly. Consequentialism is about results, but isn't quite the same as utilitarianism; the Libertarian what's-good-for-me-is-good school of ethics is consequentialist as well. This gets silly too, but I'm not linking to trolly problems or Ayn Rand because I like you guys.Don't overthink it.
I'm interested in comparing proto-progressives directly with their modern counterparts. That's a neat angle that I haven't seen before. Not sure it's worthwhile to bring Piketty into the equation, or necessary. Will read this and find out. (Maybe, also, everyone means something different by 'progress'.)These two sentences sum up a profound irony—the central contradiction of modern progressives. They do not believe in progress. A century ago, America’s first progressives believed very much in the power of their reforms. Theodore Roosevelt was proud to protect the environment. John Dewey was busy promoting universal education. Alice Paul was busy fighting for a woman’s right to vote. They succeeded. Today, neo-progressives would have us forget all that, and maybe it’s because economic hindsight is anything but clear.
How about the air conditioning, that helps us sleep well and be alert at work? The penicillin and ambulance services, which reduce the consequences of health problems? The poor spend money on entertainment and leisure as well. More options, and more affordable options, benefit everyone. If the poorer half today do in fact hold "5 percent of total wealth" and this is the same percentage as 1910, they are not "as poor today" as then, they are far wealthier because total wealth has grown. But "the rich get richer, the poor get richer" doesn't sell as many books.
So, I’ll tell you what. I’ve had this argument so many times over the past decade because it’s something that hits uncomfortably close to home, both for me individually as well as for so many people I know. So I’m just gonna make my statement and leave the conversation, because in all honesty, I'm not going to let myself have an aneurysm over this. The problems that affect the poor today are the same problems that affected the poor yesterday. Unaffordable housing, unaffordable health care, unaffordable childcare, sub par educational opportunities, subpar job opportunities, subpar legal representation, tenants rights, labor rights, and on and on and on. To say that the poor are “better off” because now they can afford a single time purchase of an X-Box here or an I-Phone there is to go beyond trivializing the challenge they face due to poverty. It’s a a bait and switch. You bring up air conditioning. That’s awesome. What about other living conditions such as privacy, clean water, working plumbing and electricity, fair rent rates, safe neighborhoods, and on and on and on? Just because cheaper air conditioning is available, that doesn’t mean good, affordable housing is available. You bring up penicillin and ambulatory services? Awesome. Penicillin is just one small part of the picture when it comes to healthcare. What about pre-natal and post-natal care? What about diseases like mental health, diabetes, etc.? What good is an ambulance when health insurance is beyond affordable for so many people, even with shit laws like Obamacare, and a single visit to the doctor’s office is unaffordable and an emergency room visit or a necessary surgery is all that’s needed to throw a family into crippling debt? You can’t say “Oh, people have more options available now so obviously things are better” if so many of those options for people are still out of reach. You can’t say “Oh, these cherry picked items are affordable now” when said cherry picked items have very little to do with the big picture. The argument framed as it is, is bullshit. Plain and simple. To even pretend otherwise is so disingenuous it really brings into question the credibility of people who want to use it.
This is a straw-man argument well beneath your rhetorical skills. Maybe it isn't your fault - the article you link deliberately mischaracterizes an argument in order to launch on its own wild flight of strawmannery - but there's a world of difference between "economic security" and "well-being." The poor who worked in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle had, by Piketty's estimation, about the same level of "economic security" as the poor who worked in Molly Ivin's Foster Farms investigation. However, Ivins' crew mostly worked hard at a shitty job. They didn't face imminent mutilation like Sinclair's did. Piketty didn't even make an argument that inequality had stayed the same - he made the argument that the top and bottom deciles hadn't changed much from a quantity standpoint. And he made the argument as evidence for the fact that they'd gone up towards WWII and had come back down. The argument was not that things stayed the same, it's that policies prior to the '70s had improved the standard of living of the poor and policies that began in the '70s were putting it in steady decline.
I am doing my level best but don't follow your side. The patronizing tone doesn't help; can we focus on the subject instead of my rhetorical skills? When Piketty writes "The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past" I think a typical reader would get the impression that the material welfare of the poor has not improved. But I agree with you, based on my reading of that chapter Piketty is not measuring material welfare. He is interested in share of total wealth. And he uses a moving yardstick, comparing the poor of the past to the rich of that era, and today's poor with today's rich. The article points out that, despite this description of static share of wealth (which I do not see disputed) there are good reasons to celebrate improvement in material welfare, like highways and ambulances and A/C and penicillin, and also cable TV and Facebook. rd95 summed up this list as merely "convenience in entertainment and leisure," in my view, a clear instance of straw man. I didn't want to irritate him by citing logical fallacies; bringing "ad hominem" and the rest never helps a discussion. But, regrettably, he seems disgruntled anyway. I would love to investigate all the issues he mentions, "privacy, clean water, working plumbing and electricity, fair rent rates, safe neighborhoods, and on and on and on" and see what the data show the trends are. We might start with the photo in the article depicting the family of 13 living in a converted chicken coop. I expect that the trends are generally positive and beneficial to people at all income levels. Piketty might agree with all this, I don't know. If it's true that many poor are materially better off now than before, by absolute measures, I think we should celebrate that and look for ways to continue and expand the trend, and not worry so much about relative measures.
I won't patronize if you make a good-faith effort to address the question at hand rather than deflecting. The quote: Your arguments: Set aside for the moment the fact that air conditioning primarily changed the lifestyles of the south and southwest such that they were habitable and people could work. Air conditioning doesn't keep a roof over your head, nor does it put food on your family. Set aside for the moment the fact that penicillin and ambulances don't keep a roof over your head nor put food on your family. Neither of these are available to you if you're poor. You think they are, but what happens is you get sick, you go to the hospital, you get treatment, you can't pay, and they garnish your wages. Assuming you have wages. There is a powerful financial disincentive against the consumption of healthcare that the middle class and upper class do not experience. Not only that, but you miss a couple days at Dunder Mifflin, you take it out of sick leave. You miss a couple days at the gas'n'sip, you ain't gettin' paid and you might be on your ass. Set aside for a moment... A movie ticket in 1913 was seven cents. That's the equivalent of a $1.72 today. Meanwhile, movies cost between $8 and $15 depending on where you live. In 1929, you could see the Yankees play for a dollar, or the equivalent of $14. The average now is $34. On the other hand, first class on the Titanic was $4350, or the equivalent of $107k. And although Cunard is sold out of first class transatlantic voyages this year, midships is under a grand. So although your argument isn't quite "let them eat cake" it shares some traits. But none of this gets to the matter at hand: does static wealth inequality matter? Piketty, at least, addresses the issue as a reason to not address the issue. The article you linked essentially says "never mind all that, the poor have refrigerators now." rd95 is arguing that having a refrigerator does not guarantee your ass won't be sleeping on a park bench a month from now and you said "how about air conditioning?" HERE is a libertarian argument: - If the poor today have experienced an equivalent boost to quality of life over yesterday's poor that the rich today have experienced over yesterday's rich, then the fact that today's poor are just as poor as yesterday's poor doesn't matter. But you didn't make that argument, Piketty didn't make that argument and the author didn't make that argument. You want to focus on thirteen immigrants living in a chicken coop. If you're going to do that, we could drag stuff like this out: ...and I'll point out that the 3 bedroom house next to my old apartment that had fifteen illegal Chinese immigrants in it. The question is not "are the poor materially better off now than before." That's an obvious yes. The question is "are the poor comparatively better off now than they were before" and Commentary magazine don't give a fuck. rd95 does.In short, convenience in entertainment and leisure do not necessarily mean widespread economic security.
How about the air conditioning, that helps us sleep well and be alert at work?
The penicillin and ambulance services, which reduce the consequences of health problems?
The poor spend money on entertainment and leisure as well.
Perhaps rd95 should post somewhere more relevant.a good-faith effort to address the question at hand rather than deflecting
The question is not "are the poor materially better off now than before." That's an obvious yes. The question is "are the poor comparatively better off now than they were before" and Commentary magazine don't give a fuck. rd95 does.
Stop engaging with the Right!