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Several issues with statements in this article. Example: "In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for dem

Several issues with statements in this article. Example: "In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for democracy." This statement is not explained, just made as a de facto truth. It's a pretty sweeping statement that I find difficult to accept based on what I understand it to mean. So I am thinking I don't understand it, but there is no explanation. "Once a complex manufacturing process could be supervised from afar" true one can 'order up' a production run of a million units, however, many small and mid-sized companies have failed simply because they could not make this work. Pleo being the first example that comes to mind: The CEO flew between the US and their Asian mfr 20 times in a year, couldn't get the product built and wound up selling the company to the manufacturer. Apple successfully operates with distributed manufacturing, but still requires many (thousands?) of engineers to shuttle between the US and Asia-based factories in order to ensure that base materials, components, quality, design, lead time, and many other aspects of manufacturing are done per their requirements. It turns out that the dance between design engineers and the manufacturing team is much more involved than companies realized and the challenges of communicating all of that across an ocean has been the death of many products. "A lot of what Americans think of as valuable service-sector know-how is actually mere prestige." It's not know-how. It's 'know customer'. Americans are great consumers but to sell to them you have to know what they want and how they want it delivered. The non-US companies that succeed are the ones that tap into US-based design for things like, um, cars. Many foreign products are designed in LA. Moreover, innovation is the true source of value. Nations that are more innovative will ultimately prevail. That is where one should focus in order to understand where the threats and opportunities are.

abandonliberty 9y ago
Our democratic structure doesn't work in a society with vast wealth differences. Over the last 10 years, has the prosperity and freedom of average Americans increased or decreased? Increasing wealth inequality in the long term is almost a guarantee of a broken democracy because who wants to be less prosperous? That statement does expect some background in this. Potential resources include the Iron Law of Oligarchy on wikipedia, rules for rulers, or google :)
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  Exactly. Wealth disparity results in disparity in political representation, and that is inherently undemocratic.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Denzel 9y ago
  Is that a rhetorical question with a foregone conclusion? As an average American, whether prosperity increased or decreased, I feel grateful and prosperous every day. I can walk outside without fear of bombs dropping from overhead; I can run, bike, drive, or fly anywhere within this vast, beautiful land without encumbrance; I have uncensored access to the internet at-large; I get to watch some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world build amazing things; I can communicate and interact with any one of the 300 million+ people here; and I can make money as I please when I please without anyone blocking me. And I can start doing all this with a minimum wage job (like I did). That's just to name a few things. No one is owed anything except for equality of opportunity. Are we wishing for equality of outcome? On its face, I can't understand why that would ever make sense. Do I think we're fully at equality of opportunity yet? No. But I feel that's what we should be working on. That's what we should be protecting. I don't give a hoot who made $10B as long as I have the opportunity to as well.
  - BenchRouter 9y ago
    > No one is owed anything except for equality of opportunity. Are we wishing for equality of outcome? On its face, I can't understand why that would ever make sense. I hear this frequently, but it's sorta missing the point. Nearly all people want equality of opportunity, and not outcome. What people are concerned about is: 1) The bad outcomes don't need to be Kafkaesque or medieval (e.g. "too poor to be sick" doesn't need to be a thing). 2) If bad outcomes are becoming more and more frequent (as we see with e.g. wealth inequality becoming more pronounced), it's a smell that something systemically bad is happening. It's probably a sign that equality of opportunity is being reduced over time. > Do I think we're fully at equality of opportunity yet? No. But I feel that's what we should be working on. That's what we should be protecting. As I noted above, if outcomes are becoming more and more polarized over time, it's a likely sign that equality of opportunity is ceasing to exist. Outcomes are the dependent variable we kinda have to use for measuring equality of opportunity, because we don't really have anything else to measure.
rrggrr 9y ago
> innovation is the true source of value. Nations that are more innovative will ultimately prevail. Really? Because the upside (spread) for innovation and productivity gains is much higher for developing nations (eg. China) than it is for developed nations (eg. USA). Every tic up in productivity in the US only exacerbates the existing underemployment and declining wage problems the United State already faces. Whereas, innovation and productivity gains in China are reinvested in new Chinese capacity, albeit more horizontally or vertically spread than would have been seen 5 years ago. In sum, you are wrong.
- Animats 9y ago
  Piketty says that industrializing countries can develop at a rapid pace until they catch up. Then they're stuck at a max of about 5% growth, reflecting technological progress.
roymurdock 9y ago
"In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for democracy." The author expands on this further in the piece: Do businessmen have an obligation to ensure that their neighbors get first crack at the job opportunities their enterprises generate? Should businessmen deny such obligations, are lawmakers justified in imposing them? High and relatively egalitarian compensation served a number of social purposes. Society owed a debt to modest workers who steadied the constitutional compact in peace and shed blood for it in war. The “family wage” that many corporations paid reflected that debt. It also partially compensated the at-home work of wives and mothers that made it possible to reproduce the society. Corporate executives giddily discovered, once they got to Mexico or Southeast Asia, that they no longer had to think about such things. They were now dealing with a workforce to whom they didn’t owe jack. Viewed this way, the “prosperity” of globalization is just a transfer. It rests on a broken implicit contract. Globalization seems to have delivered up to private parties hard-won competitive advantages that were really the common property of American society. Some are quantifiable things like taxpayer-funded research and development, of the sort that the Carrier air conditioner company benefited from before it announced it was moving jobs from Indianapolis to Mexico. Others are advantages that can be grasped only conceptually, like economies of scale. The process of Western Bloc globalization that began in the 1990s differs in degree but not in kind from the contemporaneous Eastern Bloc looting of state assets. Globalization comes to seem a con game. AKA the old formula for democracy, sharing the wealth and economic gains among the inhabitants of a geographically contiguous region that pooled funds to build the infrastructure (military, social, and utilities) necessary for the generation of that wealth, no longer applies.
- specialist 9y ago
  It's more simple than that. Growing inequity damages democracy. Some of the major causes of inequity: Excess labor pushing down wages. Increased productivity leading to increased profits. Taxing income more than assets. Runaway housing, healthcare, education costs. Blah blah blah. Any serious discussion of releveling the Capital vs Labor playing (battle) field has to tackle this list.
  - 9y ago

abandonliberty 9y ago

Our democratic structure doesn't work in a society with vast wealth differences. Over the last 10 years, has the prosperity and freedom of average Americans increased or decreased? Increasing wealth inequality in the long term is almost a guarantee of a broken democracy because who wants to be less prosperous? That statement does expect some background in this. Potential resources include the Iron Law of Oligarchy on wikipedia, rules for rulers, or google :)

enraged_camel 9y ago
Exactly. Wealth disparity results in disparity in political representation, and that is inherently undemocratic.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Denzel 9y ago
Is that a rhetorical question with a foregone conclusion? As an average American, whether prosperity increased or decreased, I feel grateful and prosperous every day. I can walk outside without fear of bombs dropping from overhead; I can run, bike, drive, or fly anywhere within this vast, beautiful land without encumbrance; I have uncensored access to the internet at-large; I get to watch some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world build amazing things; I can communicate and interact with any one of the 300 million+ people here; and I can make money as I please when I please without anyone blocking me. And I can start doing all this with a minimum wage job (like I did). That's just to name a few things. No one is owed anything except for equality of opportunity. Are we wishing for equality of outcome? On its face, I can't understand why that would ever make sense. Do I think we're fully at equality of opportunity yet? No. But I feel that's what we should be working on. That's what we should be protecting. I don't give a hoot who made $10B as long as I have the opportunity to as well.
- BenchRouter 9y ago
  > No one is owed anything except for equality of opportunity. Are we wishing for equality of outcome? On its face, I can't understand why that would ever make sense. I hear this frequently, but it's sorta missing the point. Nearly all people want equality of opportunity, and not outcome. What people are concerned about is: 1) The bad outcomes don't need to be Kafkaesque or medieval (e.g. "too poor to be sick" doesn't need to be a thing). 2) If bad outcomes are becoming more and more frequent (as we see with e.g. wealth inequality becoming more pronounced), it's a smell that something systemically bad is happening. It's probably a sign that equality of opportunity is being reduced over time. > Do I think we're fully at equality of opportunity yet? No. But I feel that's what we should be working on. That's what we should be protecting. As I noted above, if outcomes are becoming more and more polarized over time, it's a likely sign that equality of opportunity is ceasing to exist. Outcomes are the dependent variable we kinda have to use for measuring equality of opportunity, because we don't really have anything else to measure.

rrggrr 9y ago

> innovation is the true source of value. Nations that are more innovative will ultimately prevail. Really? Because the upside (spread) for innovation and productivity gains is much higher for developing nations (eg. China) than it is for developed nations (eg. USA). Every tic up in productivity in the US only exacerbates the existing underemployment and declining wage problems the United State already faces. Whereas, innovation and productivity gains in China are reinvested in new Chinese capacity, albeit more horizontally or vertically spread than would have been seen 5 years ago. In sum, you are wrong.

Animats 9y ago
Piketty says that industrializing countries can develop at a rapid pace until they catch up. Then they're stuck at a max of about 5% growth, reflecting technological progress.

roymurdock 9y ago

"In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for democracy." The author expands on this further in the piece: Do businessmen have an obligation to ensure that their neighbors get first crack at the job opportunities their enterprises generate? Should businessmen deny such obligations, are lawmakers justified in imposing them? High and relatively egalitarian compensation served a number of social purposes. Society owed a debt to modest workers who steadied the constitutional compact in peace and shed blood for it in war. The “family wage” that many corporations paid reflected that debt. It also partially compensated the at-home work of wives and mothers that made it possible to reproduce the society. Corporate executives giddily discovered, once they got to Mexico or Southeast Asia, that they no longer had to think about such things. They were now dealing with a workforce to whom they didn’t owe jack. Viewed this way, the “prosperity” of globalization is just a transfer. It rests on a broken implicit contract. Globalization seems to have delivered up to private parties hard-won competitive advantages that were really the common property of American society. Some are quantifiable things like taxpayer-funded research and development, of the sort that the Carrier air conditioner company benefited from before it announced it was moving jobs from Indianapolis to Mexico. Others are advantages that can be grasped only conceptually, like economies of scale. The process of Western Bloc globalization that began in the 1990s differs in degree but not in kind from the contemporaneous Eastern Bloc looting of state assets. Globalization comes to seem a con game. AKA the old formula for democracy, sharing the wealth and economic gains among the inhabitants of a geographically contiguous region that pooled funds to build the infrastructure (military, social, and utilities) necessary for the generation of that wealth, no longer applies.

specialist 9y ago
It's more simple than that. Growing inequity damages democracy. Some of the major causes of inequity: Excess labor pushing down wages. Increased productivity leading to increased profits. Taxing income more than assets. Runaway housing, healthcare, education costs. Blah blah blah. Any serious discussion of releveling the Capital vs Labor playing (battle) field has to tackle this list.
- 9y ago