4 ms·
"... capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies
by apsec112 13y ago
"... capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based."
Whatever else you might say about inequality, "unsustainable" is an obvious falsehood.
Roman civilization, for example, lasted two thousand years. Eight times as long as the United States. Think about that. One hundred generations of men lived and died as Romans. And the Roman Empire featured radical inequality, of the sort that we could never have in modern America, no matter what the Gini coefficient was.
On one side was the Emperor and his soldiers, who could have you and your entire family tortured to death, purely on a whim (see Caligula). On the other side were slaves, who had no human rights at all and were treated as property. And between them, countless peasants starved to death every time there was a bad harvest, while countless aristocrats taxed their lands to fund lavish banquets. (In the Roman tax system, tax collection was outsourced; the tax collector was responsible for finding a certain amount, and anything above that he could keep for himself.)
That's some serious fucking inequality right there. And I'm certainly not saying it's a good idea, or that we should try to emulate them. But it was, as a raw historical fact, extremely sustainable, lasting eight times as long as the US has so far.
- kaa2102 13y agoLength of life and quality of life are very different things.
- teebs 13y agoI think the difference between now and ancient Rome is that we're used to a higher standard of living, and technology and information are more accessible to all. I think by "unsustainable" he means that we would be likely to have a violent revolution. This is not unrealistic. Revolutions have happened because of inequality before. I'm no history expert, but I think you could argue that both the French and American revolutions were related to inequality of power and wealth.
- judk 13y agoThe American revolution was upper class vs upper upper class, quite different from the French or Russian revolutions. The USA didn't change much due to the revolution. The US Civil War was a much greater inequality-related upheaval
- jamesaguilar 13y agoAccording to Wikipedia, only twelve centuries, but your point is still well-taken.
- infinity0 13y agoClearly, you have no idea about the difference between $5 billion and $0.01.
- infinity0 13y agoI challenge my down-voters to argue convincingly that Caligula held 10^12 times more power than the lowest slave.
- msluyter 13y agoI would agree with the gist of your comment, which is that autarchy can be a stable equilibrium. However, I don't read Piketty as saying that inequality itself is unsustainable. Rather, inequality tends to undermine democracy. Thus, "unsustainable" here should be read to mean "unsustainable in conjunction with our commonly held egalitarian, democratic values."
- steve_benjamins 13y agoRome was not capitalist. He is arguing that the inequality capitalism generates is unsustainable.
- joeclark77 13y ago"Capitalism" is just a made-up word meaning the natural state of human affairs, in which people own property, do work, buy, sell, and trade with one another. The word only became popular in the past couple centuries as socialists and fascists tried to present capitalism as "just another -ism", just another "option" that society might choose or not choose.
- steve_benjamins 13y ago(1) That is not at all a conventional theory of "capitalism" (2) It is most certainly not what Piketty means by capitalism ... which is what we are discussing here.
- joeclark77 13y agoThe falsehood in the claim that capitalism is an "ism" can be demonstrated by the fact that no nation or culture has ever "imposed" capitalism upon its people. All forms of socialism, fascism, redistributism, Keynsianism, etc, are imposed by government taking deliberate action against the natural economic choices of their people. What you call "capitalism" is just the absence of such interventions. Capitalism is just a word to describe the natural economic life of man.
- shoo 13y agoRegarding sustainability, Charles Stross has a fun thought experiment over here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designing_society_for_posterit.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designin... > We humans are really bad at designing institutions that outlast the life expectancy of a single human being. The average democratically elected administration lasts 3-8 years; public corporations last 30 years; the Leninist project lasted 70 years (and went off the rails after a decade). The Catholic Church, the Japanese monarchy, and a few other institutions have lasted more than a millennium, but they're all almost unrecognizably different. > So. You, and a quarter of a million other folks, have embarked on a 1000-year voyage aboard a hollowed-out asteroid. What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror?
- nraynaud 13y agothe argument is that modern day USA actually has more inequality than old Rome. There might be technicality on the economic points of view since slaves were not people but goods.
- gregsq 13y agoI think you'll need to adjust for speed of data transfer and population density when attempting such analogies. A peasant from Gaul for example could not travel to say Alexandria unless as a slave via Roman galley, and had no information of interest generally unless related to insurrection. Roman legions on roman roads operating from the hub of power, Rome, controlled information at a minuscule fraction of today's rate, but it served as a topological monopoly on transfers. The Romans spent centuries withholding the northern tribes of Europe, like Picts and Teutonic peoples, the barbarians from the gate. But after adjustments to modern propagation speeds, the northern wars were much like a flash revolution in Egypt I would suggest.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y agoSo I think it's probably worth pointing out that, depending on how you count, these numbers don't really work, and that's hurting your argument. There was about 700 years of the Roman monarchy (thru 509BCE) and Republic (thru +/- 44BCE), then another 500 or so of the Western Roman Empire (thru 476CE) and a thousand or so more years after that of the Eastern Roman Empire (thru 1453CE) It's totally disingenuous to make claims as if there was some kind of "true" and eternal Rome.
- StandardFuture 13y agoRome's empire was based on their devotion to imperialism and not anything else. So having sustainability was militaristic more so than anything else. The Roman Empire spent a heck of a lot of money and effort on their people though. Don't forget that in those times you could give a f*ck less about being royalty. If you were in the protected zones of the Romans you were already winning. To Romans living inside the protected lands, the 'outside world' looked cold, harsh, and barbaric. So, you could put up with inequality as long as those aristocrats were making sure that there were roads, aquifers, and soldiers! :P Also, slaves could eventually attain freedom and citizenship. So, while it was not a good life it still had potential to become a decent one. Now, there were uprisings against the Romans by people who benefited from years of Roman protection and decided later on 'to plot their own course'. But that story is old/new. Happened to the Brits, Persians, Mongolians, etc.
- nitam 13y agoSimilarly to the first world vs the third world countries today ?