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The money they saved arrived back in India through the imperial postal system. Letters carried promises of families reuniting and making America their home. But the California Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited immigrants from buying land. A 1920 report from the California State Board of Control described Indian workers as unfit for association with American people. Three years later, the Supreme Court ruled that Indian men were ineligible for naturalized citizenship.
man
One muggy evening, I realized the time had come to say goodbye. I asked Harjinder to remove the oxygen mask and leave the room. My mother and sister sat on the edge of the bed. I opened my father’s mouth and gave him the first dose of morphine. Over the next few hours, I poured into him all the morphine I had.
The air in the room grew thick. Each breath sounded like a sea roaring for an eternity. He was slipping, he was drowning, and at times he appeared to be resisting. Tears flowed from his eyes until all the air left him and his body sank.
The power went out. The entire house fell into darkness. It felt timely; we didn’t have to see each other’s grief-stricken faces.
wow
As Solow remarked when he received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1987, “One of the achievements of growth theory was to relate equilibrium growth to asset pricing under tranquil conditions.” In other words, private investment and distribution goals could be made objects of indirect planning if capital markets sent meaningful signals about social priorities. But “the hard part of disequilibrium growth is that we do not have — and it may be impossible to have — a really good theory of asset valuation under turbulent conditions.” High securities prices might signal that a corporation or municipality was satisfying public wants through its provision of sales or services — or that it had been thrown on the betting table or the chopping block. Profits and profitability in the capital market, it turned out, no longer told us anything about what kind of products and services the public wanted to consume and how. Maybe they never had.
When economists aggregate all the various types of capital into a single quantity — corporate paper, equipment, patents, real estate, et cetera — they make it impossible to know whether the right tax incentives will channel this abstraction into labor income, productivity, or growth. Most often, liberated capital flows into asset bidding, more debt, corporate stock buybacks, dividends, and idle cash to be hoarded. You might call it wealth, but you’d need the right education to believe it.
Historically, the tendency in American economics has been to conflate investment talk with trading talk, which opens the door to the argument that cutting tax rates for large savers will increase the funds available for starting businesses and creating jobs, rather than for taking bets and protecting status. Since high rates of return should mean available investment opportunities, the confusion leads people to oppose any limits on profits. This makes it difficult to determine what type of social activity our financial institutions are sustaining — increasing the income of ordinary workers or safeguarding hoarded wealth. The devastating effects of this confusion are now self-evident, and they cast a shadow over the Clinton and Obama Administrations.
[...] Yale Law professor David Singh Grewal asks how our theory of history changes when we see capital as a “social relation” rather than “simply a stock of assets, whose equilibrium rental price may be established through conventional supply and demand considerations.” Grewal argues that the ability of the state to “limit — or buttress — the prerogatives of capital” is rooted in the legal distinction between a government constitution and a government administration. In this analysis, it is the law, rather than productivity, that determines the distribution of income. Conflicts that emerge between a new administration and constitutional law — as with the campaigns to abolish slavery, to institute the graduated income tax, or to establish a federal minimum wage or universal health insurance at the state level — “are only to be overcome, if at all, in extraordinary moments of popular constitutional lawmaking.” [...]
capital should definitely be seen as a social relation
[...] As Naidu writes, financial markets and labor relations are both arenas in which state power plays the determining role; both are shaped by the contingencies of government interference or lack thereof. When values collapse and debts go unpaid, or when a strike threatens the health and safety of the community, it falls to the courts and the police to decide which groups will come out ahead. If we follow this line of thinking, property values represent more than expectations about social desires; they represent confidence that ownership will continue to carry influence and power. Property rights are best understood as “the ability to call on the government to secure the promised flow of income.”
As Steinbaum writes with startling frankness, income and wealth “tend to diverge because the ideological commitments of capitalism prohibit policies that would check divergence.” If there is a formula here, it is about power and ideas, not a purely economic understanding of r>g. The state produces inequality by ensuring a constant rate of return to capital, even when growth is slowing.
this is great
[...] Art objects critical of their own status as assets are still assets. Contemporary art has shaped the world like any other market. Freeport art storage is just a new take on the Swiss bank, housing millions of artworks in tax-free and mostly extraterritorial storage zones. In “If You Don’t Have Bread, Eat Art!” and “Is Art a Currency?” Steyerl argues that art is an alternative currency, “a networked, decentralized, widespread system of value,” and that its industries “trigger trickle-up effects which are then flushed sideways into tax havens.” But it is not a common currency available to all. As Steyerl writes, “Contemporary art is just a hash for all that’s opaque, unintelligible, and unfair, for top-down class war and all-out inequality.”
This was a new kind of toaster, a toaster that took orders, rather than giving them. [...]
this is a great way of thinking about technology, and it reminds me of Neal Stephenson's essay about linux vs apple. it ultimately comes down to power: how much control do you have over your device, versus how much does it control your life?
"The elevators work. They just give priority to the market-rent side. You'll get an elevator when none of these folks need one."
Salima grasped the system and its logic in an instant. The only reason she'd been able to rent in this building was that the developer had to promise that they'd make some low-income housing available in exchange for permission to build fifty stories instead of the thirty that the other buildings in this neighborhood rose to. There was a lot of this sort of thing, and she knew that there were rules about the low-income units, what the landlords had to provide and what she was forbidden from doing.
But now she saw an important truth: even the pettiest amenity would be spitefully denied to the subsidy apartments unless the landlord was forced by law to provide it [...] the logic of a mulish child who wanted to make their displeasure known.
the writing style is heavy-handed but this system is cool (in a chillingly realistic dystopian way)