Comment by stjeanluc

View Single Comment

stjeanluc
March 27th, 2014 at 8:35 pm

Some good reviews of Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2014_03/against_the_meritocratic_theor049601.php

Conservatives have benefited for decades from the claim that they are the champions of a meritocratic view of economic incentives providing the most efficient—and most morally defensible—distribution of resources. But this position should become increasingly untenable when “merit” is associated with birth privilege, “talent” with power, and “hard work” with success as its own justification.

So far, the rise of America’s 1 percent has mainly been driven by executive salaries and bonuses rather than income from investments, let alone inherited wealth. But six of the 10 wealthiest Americans are already heirs rather than self-made entrepreneurs, and the children of today’s economic elite start from a position of immense privilege. As Mr. Piketty notes, “the risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism.”

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/03/31/140331crbo_books_cassidy?

Eventually, Piketty says, we could see the reëmergence of a world familiar to nineteenth-century Europeans; he cites the novels of Austen and Balzac. In this “patrimonial society,” a small group of wealthy rentiers lives lavishly on the fruits of its inherited wealth, and the rest struggle to keep up. For the United States, in particular, this would be a cruel and ironic fate. “The egalitarian pioneer ideal has faded into oblivion,” Piketty writes, “and the New World may be on the verge of becoming the Old Europe of the twenty-first century’s globalized economy.”

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/1171.html

Perhaps I am a creature of the conventional wisdom of my day, but I want to tell it strong. It is not those who advocate, but those who prevent, stabilizing transfers of purchasing power, who are the true Marxists. These self-styled capitalists do not espouse Marx’s theories, but they do something much worse: They perform them. They behave in precisely the way that Marx expected capitalists to behave. They cripple the American system’s greatest strength — its ingenuity, flexibility, adaptability. They prevent the sort of collective action through which earlier generations proved that capitalism could made be consonant with decent, stable, and broadly prosperous societies. In doing so, they risk proving Marx right.

That really seems like the book to read…