7 ms·

I'm a bit surprised to see this at the top of HN. Maybe the US is still asleep, and the Friedman fanboys have not read that yet. This look like a good book and

I'm a bit surprised to see this at the top of HN. Maybe the US is still asleep, and the Friedman fanboys have not read that yet. This look like a good book and I am likely to buy it. From a systems standpoint it is quite obvious that capitalism tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of those who already own capital. Piketty showed the historical data agree with that: as long as growth is less than capital rewards, wealth concentrates. We need a systemic solution to that, and that can't happen with représentative democracy. We need direct control of the means of production by those who make them work. This means stronger unions, but also platform régulations, as users are unpaid knowledge workers giving away their data in exchange for a service, an exchange so one-sided and highly beneficial to the platforms that states are losing their sovereignty to the platforms. See bratton's The Stack to know more.

abigail95 3y ago
The article has a pretty good example of what happens if you let a bunch of people seize the power to do that. Representative democracy is a powerful check against a lot of bad things. I don't care if you feel you aren't being paid for your data if it means I'm allowed to vote on whether I'm allowed to start a business or not.
mjburgess 3y ago
Wealth concentrates because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment -- it has nothing to do with "capitalism" -- an era which contains historically unprecedented periods of comparative wealth equality. The only processes known to make substantial impacts on this process involve mass death. Write a simulation yourself, it's relatively trivial. You'll find PA a force of nature which little can overcome. 2x0 is still 0, 2xbillion = 2billion And thus from equal starting points and equal chances inequality becomes ever more extreme. Rutheless redistribution on the scale of a small tribe might, within that tribe, work for a time. But wars between tribes fix this 'temporary reprieve' -- since tribal power follows PA. There is no known policy, at least none i'm aware of, which can preserve the tiny populations needed for equalising redistribution which at the same time prevents them from preferetnailly attaching to each other.,
- Alpha3031 3y ago
  "Preferential attachment", to the level of detail that you have specified, is an observation that a thing occurs, not a mechanism, a reason or a force, or even an estimate of the rate. Modelling a process by circularly assuming that is how the process will work provides exactly zero information, and is how one comes to conclude that heavier objects accelerate under gravity faster than those lighter, or more analogously, the impossibility of aerostats, satellites and hyperbolic trajectories. Instead, I would like to encourage those interested to consider and discuss the similarities and differences between capital income taxes and wealth taxes, between taxation and non-voting ownership of an asset, and between voting and non-voting ownership. What is the average rate of return on capital and what is the volatility? What is the difference between the CPI basket and that of the implicit GDP deflator and why? Those are all interesting questions to ask and answer.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    Sure, but the level of abstraction "anti-capialist" ideologues are operating at isnt one where a non-pareto distribution of wealth is a necessary consequence of any system in which wealth accumulates simpliciter. All policies which affect the wealth distribution do so by moderating the gini coef, ie., the specific shape of the power-law -- they do not make it normal, uniform, etc. or however the ideologue would wish it to be. The "natural mechanism" of "fair procedures" in the case of systems wherein parts attach to other parts based on their current size (, success, etc.) is spiriling inequality in the extreme. All sane policy conversation is about how extreme. That bigger things get bigger isn't "capitalism's fault", as far as anything could be said here, all modern systems of economics and government seek to make the concequences of this process less extreme, rather than more. Eg., in the case of capitalism, it is essentially a mechanism for managing the extreme impact of risk (via limited liability companies), and a mechanism for addressing intergenerational rent-seeking (the historical way pref. attachment was "fought").
    - Alpha3031 3y ago
      > All policies which affect the wealth distribution do so by moderating the gini coef, ie., the specific shape of the power-law -- they do not make it normal, uniform, etc. or however the ideologue would wish it to be. Again, you are assuming your conclusion, and you do not even do us the favour of stating premises, which is hardly conducive to a productive discussion (or, any, really). On the other hand, it is quite fundamental to welfare economics that under a few assumptions, some unrealistic and some less so (namely: perfect information, fully internalised externalities, absence of market power, local nonsatiation and convexity of preferences and production) it is possible to reach any point on the Pareto frontier. The policies required to reach a desired point in such a toy model is left as an exercise for the reader. Now, the actual juicy questions here are how things like market power, externalities and imperfect information affect this? Is the model still a good approximation? To what extent are we able to correct things, and do we even want to? If we do, how best to do it? > The "natural mechanism" of "fair procedures" in the case of systems wherein parts attach to other parts based on their current size Again, you assert that it's "natural" and "fair" as if the result is a foregone conclusion. If it is inevitable that dx be a f(x) ~ x then yes, that's an exponential. Why would it be unnatural or unfair for dx to be instead a function of y, some other factor that has no proportionality to x? You are stating as a conclusion and premise that financial wealth experiences preferential attachment unconditionally, that is in essence, circular reasoning. What is the actual mechanism, the force, and how irresistible is it really? Would resisting it simply divert its effects to something else, for example, concentration of political rather than economic power? Quite frankly, the dismissal of everything outside of a frankly ridiculously narrow space, where your model with an unspecified mechanism (which does achieve the results that you say it does) clearly must be an accurate reflection of the real world in all circumstances... Well, it gets old quite fast. If you really must use that model, describe and justify the accuracy of your proposed mechanism at least, if you please.
randomcarbloke 3y ago
Piketty's historic data is falsified though, this has been reported to death.
- epups 3y ago
  What exactly are you referring to?
  - slibhb 3y ago
    Piketty hasn't been "falsified" but he has been challenged in various ways: 1. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-rise-in-the-net-capital-share/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-... (Piketty underestimates the extent to which inequality is due to real estate) 2. https://davidsplinter.com/AutenSplinter-Tax_Data_and_Inequality.pdf https://davidsplinter.com/AutenSplinter-Tax_Data_and_Inequal... (uses different -- more accurate -- methods to estimate inequality in the US since 1960 and finds that Piketty and co. overestimate the growth of inequality)

abigail95 3y ago

The article has a pretty good example of what happens if you let a bunch of people seize the power to do that. Representative democracy is a powerful check against a lot of bad things. I don't care if you feel you aren't being paid for your data if it means I'm allowed to vote on whether I'm allowed to start a business or not.

mjburgess 3y ago

Wealth concentrates because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment -- it has nothing to do with "capitalism" -- an era which contains historically unprecedented periods of comparative wealth equality. The only processes known to make substantial impacts on this process involve mass death. Write a simulation yourself, it's relatively trivial. You'll find PA a force of nature which little can overcome. 2x0 is still 0, 2xbillion = 2billion And thus from equal starting points and equal chances inequality becomes ever more extreme. Rutheless redistribution on the scale of a small tribe might, within that tribe, work for a time. But wars between tribes fix this 'temporary reprieve' -- since tribal power follows PA. There is no known policy, at least none i'm aware of, which can preserve the tiny populations needed for equalising redistribution which at the same time prevents them from preferetnailly attaching to each other.,

Alpha3031 3y ago
"Preferential attachment", to the level of detail that you have specified, is an observation that a thing occurs, not a mechanism, a reason or a force, or even an estimate of the rate. Modelling a process by circularly assuming that is how the process will work provides exactly zero information, and is how one comes to conclude that heavier objects accelerate under gravity faster than those lighter, or more analogously, the impossibility of aerostats, satellites and hyperbolic trajectories. Instead, I would like to encourage those interested to consider and discuss the similarities and differences between capital income taxes and wealth taxes, between taxation and non-voting ownership of an asset, and between voting and non-voting ownership. What is the average rate of return on capital and what is the volatility? What is the difference between the CPI basket and that of the implicit GDP deflator and why? Those are all interesting questions to ask and answer.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Sure, but the level of abstraction "anti-capialist" ideologues are operating at isnt one where a non-pareto distribution of wealth is a necessary consequence of any system in which wealth accumulates simpliciter. All policies which affect the wealth distribution do so by moderating the gini coef, ie., the specific shape of the power-law -- they do not make it normal, uniform, etc. or however the ideologue would wish it to be. The "natural mechanism" of "fair procedures" in the case of systems wherein parts attach to other parts based on their current size (, success, etc.) is spiriling inequality in the extreme. All sane policy conversation is about how extreme. That bigger things get bigger isn't "capitalism's fault", as far as anything could be said here, all modern systems of economics and government seek to make the concequences of this process less extreme, rather than more. Eg., in the case of capitalism, it is essentially a mechanism for managing the extreme impact of risk (via limited liability companies), and a mechanism for addressing intergenerational rent-seeking (the historical way pref. attachment was "fought").
  - Alpha3031 3y ago
    > All policies which affect the wealth distribution do so by moderating the gini coef, ie., the specific shape of the power-law -- they do not make it normal, uniform, etc. or however the ideologue would wish it to be. Again, you are assuming your conclusion, and you do not even do us the favour of stating premises, which is hardly conducive to a productive discussion (or, any, really). On the other hand, it is quite fundamental to welfare economics that under a few assumptions, some unrealistic and some less so (namely: perfect information, fully internalised externalities, absence of market power, local nonsatiation and convexity of preferences and production) it is possible to reach any point on the Pareto frontier. The policies required to reach a desired point in such a toy model is left as an exercise for the reader. Now, the actual juicy questions here are how things like market power, externalities and imperfect information affect this? Is the model still a good approximation? To what extent are we able to correct things, and do we even want to? If we do, how best to do it? > The "natural mechanism" of "fair procedures" in the case of systems wherein parts attach to other parts based on their current size Again, you assert that it's "natural" and "fair" as if the result is a foregone conclusion. If it is inevitable that dx be a f(x) ~ x then yes, that's an exponential. Why would it be unnatural or unfair for dx to be instead a function of y, some other factor that has no proportionality to x? You are stating as a conclusion and premise that financial wealth experiences preferential attachment unconditionally, that is in essence, circular reasoning. What is the actual mechanism, the force, and how irresistible is it really? Would resisting it simply divert its effects to something else, for example, concentration of political rather than economic power? Quite frankly, the dismissal of everything outside of a frankly ridiculously narrow space, where your model with an unspecified mechanism (which does achieve the results that you say it does) clearly must be an accurate reflection of the real world in all circumstances... Well, it gets old quite fast. If you really must use that model, describe and justify the accuracy of your proposed mechanism at least, if you please.

randomcarbloke 3y ago

Piketty's historic data is falsified though, this has been reported to death.

epups 3y ago
What exactly are you referring to?
- slibhb 3y ago
  Piketty hasn't been "falsified" but he has been challenged in various ways: 1. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-rise-in-the-net-capital-share/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-... (Piketty underestimates the extent to which inequality is due to real estate) 2. https://davidsplinter.com/AutenSplinter-Tax_Data_and_Inequality.pdf https://davidsplinter.com/AutenSplinter-Tax_Data_and_Inequal... (uses different -- more accurate -- methods to estimate inequality in the US since 1960 and finds that Piketty and co. overestimate the growth of inequality)