The latest bestseller in economics has done a great deal of service to progressives in highlighting the imperative of shared wealth. But given the social and ecological limits to economic growth, this emerging conversation on global sharing has to get a lot more radical.
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Thomas Piketty’s, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a sensation–an economics textbook, translated from the French, that has been on the New York Times best-seller list. It is an important work. If you ignore more than one hundred pages of notes, it is still a long but easy read.
Tuesday we were looking at the nexus of democracy-destroying avarice and the outsourcing of public services to private companies. I saw a report from our friends from Americans for Tax Fairness that reveals how WalMart was able to get around $104 million in taxes by handing out lavish "performance-based bonuses to top executives. How's that for a sound use of tax payer money?
Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the 21st Century, has almost had the effect of a tsunami on economic thinking here in the United States after its translation from French into English washed up on our monoglot shores. In France itself it has been treated as more or less just another economics book– no big deal.
Tonight at 8:30 (5:30 PT), MoveOn and HuffPo are broadcasting a dialogue between Senator Elizabeth Warren and author Thomas Piketty from Boston's historic Old South Meeting House. I wonder how many other Members of Congress, or how many candidates for Congress, have read Piketty's high acclaimed new book, Capital In The Twenty-First Century. I did an unscientific survey and found that no one had.
The wave of super-charged economic inequality-- spurred by uncontrolled greed and avarice and abetted by sold out politicians-- isn't just drowning the American middle class. This week, the British are being told to get ready for a grim future, with no chance for the vast population to "claw their way out of a hand-to-mouth existence."
Thomas Piketty’s book Capitalism in the Twenty First Century is all the rage, notably for its 700-page rationale of a very simple formulation: r >g. In this formula, “r” stands for return on capital and “g” stands for general economic growth.
For more than a decade, radical analysis has provided reams of studies revealing the political and economic dominance of an increasingly narrow sector of the U.S. and European corporate and financial elite. However, the warnings and political implications of this domination have received little attention beyond radical and left circles.
Here is one perspective on what the future has in store for us:
We have already returned to the levels of income inequality of the 1920s, and the concentration of wealth is heading toward the ratios of the 1890s. The social relations of the future, writes Piketty could resemble Jane Austen’s world, in which a tiny group of the wealthy employed vast armies of poorly paid servants.
