I just discovered that somebody called Piketty wrote a huge volume that is being universally lauded as the biggest recent achievement in political economy and which proves that
“there is no inherent drive in markets toward income equality.”
This tells me I totally need to patent my breakthrough discovery that now is April.
Is this why the invisible hand of the market gave me a back hander?
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Next someone will be coming up with the notion, “God is dead!”
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Oh! My! God! It appears today that the sun rose in the east. I have to patent this before anyone else catches on.
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*mic drop*
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I heard a discussion about this book on NPR. Apparently the idea that economic inequality decreases over time in free market systems has been considered an uncontroversial “fact” in the field of Economics since the 1960s. This is interesting mostly in that it explains why so many things in our society are so fucked up.
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Economics is as useless and silly as a field as sociology, it seems.
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Yeah, it’s ‘controversial’ because it goes against mainstream economic orthodoxy; what economists ‘know’, is rather different from what your average person knows. It’s apparently common for intro to economics courses to start by saying ‘Everything you know about economics is wrong,’ except, increasingly, it looks like it wasn’t.
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It does? In my experience most people who defend the idea of a free market don’t believe income equality is a goal worth having.
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“In my experience most people who defend the idea of a free market don’t believe income equality is a goal worth having.”
– I’m not sure if everybody noticed that it isn’t equality, it’s “income equality.” This was achieved to a degree in the USSR and we all know what the cost of that was. Does anybody really honestly believe that “income equality” is a good thing?
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Only very ignorant ideologues. I think you’ve pointed out before that not even Marx believed in total income equality?
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People too American to understand equality can’t, in the vast majority of times and places, be bought for love nor money, I guess. I watched some US fool argue for the abolition of money a few months ago – their motivation was that wealth is deeply inequal and that people should focus on developing personal relationships instead. This was a very intelligent (if not very well educated) activist, mind – they still thought power-based-on-money leads to more inequality than power-based-on-relationships tho.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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