by
Ryan Avent
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We might not care so much about these inequities if the digital revolution were reducing the costs of all the many things the typical household wants to buy, from steak dinners to adequate housing to a top-flight university education. But cost reductions have so far been highly uneven: massive for some things, such as digital entertainment; completely absent for others, such as homes in nice neighbourhoods.
And so stagnant wages end up mattering an awful lot. Low pay for the great mass of workers is distributionally unfair. It undermines support for the market-based economic system that enables sustained economic growth. Low pay also reduces the incentive to invest in technologies that boost the productivities of less-skilled workers, or which substitute [...] it is an enormous problem; continued productivity growth is ultimately the route to lives of greater comfort for all of humanity: it is how humanity contrives to produce more from less, so that all can have more.
this is the crux of the problem right here
ofc, he never gets anywhere near the real solution; he just wants to keep up the illusion
the last line is good but he doesn't say how we can get there!!
[...] Many of the world's richest cities are choked by inadequate infrastructure. Given rock-bottom interest rates, it seems absurd that places like New York, London and San Francisco aren't receiving extraordinary new investments in that infrastructure [...]
perhaps it's the prevailing political/economic ideology which discourages government investment in public services???? just a thought
capitalism does not allocate resources efficiently & we KNOW this, does he honestly not
The rich world could shepherd the global economy towards that ideal outcome by allowing lots more immigration from poorer places. Immigration would enable richer places to 'export' their strong social capital to poorer places (by bringing large shares of the populations of poorer places into countries where strong social capital dominates). That would naturally deepen social and financial capital per human worker. Global savings could also be mobilized to invest in additional infrastructure in the rich countries accepting new workers. The appetite for safe, rich-country government debt is nearly insatiable.
I mean the rich world SHOULD allow lots more immigration but not for this reason, this is a dumb fucking reason
also he touches on overaccumulation here but never really gets into it (it's just assumed as a shallowly-analysed background phenomenon)
[...] In labour organizers' dreams, that cooperation becomes a class consciousness--a solidarity--which would provided a coherence to a labour political agenda. [...]
so he seems to support organised labour to some degree (esp at a centralised level, so they dont resort to insider/outsider divisions and protectionism)
[...] it is easy for all the participants in the economy to convince themselves that their participation is what matters, that they are the authentic creators of value, that their effort is what ought to be rewarded most handsomely. And everyone has a point. But while we can rely on economics to do some of the work of sorting out who deserves what, we are kidding ourselves if we think the invisible hand can be trusted to handle the whole job. Left alone, the invisible hand is simply the thudding fist of the powerful. [...]
this is a good paragraph and almost had me convinced that he got it
but ofc if he REALLY got it, he wouldn't have said a lot of other stuff he did about between-country inequality or structural change
[...] The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn't rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.
That is not a radical statement. People take what they can take, and it is only the interplay of countervailing forces and the tolerance of the masses that limits that impulse--that works to create institutions that limit that impulse.
[...] People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the creation of economic value, a very large chunk of which the founder can them capture for himself.
ugh this glorification of entrepeneurs are "very brilliant" even while pointing out the degree of luck
[...] Is there any reasonable story available which explains how it is that poverty in developing countries, or in the ghettos of disadvantage in rich countries, is a necessary part of the system that provides us with smartphones and luxury cars and enriches a relative handful of executives and financiers? Is it really the case that one can't be got rid of without threatening the system that provides for us the other?
Of course not. The worst inequities of industrial history were never a necessary accompaniment to the march towards greater prosperity. [...]
I mean yes, this is necessary under capitalism to some degree
like who is assembling these smartphones? or mining the minerals needed for all electronics? getting to a fairer distribution of responsibilities & wealth requires changing the balance of power capitalism, which, in some sense, is threatening "the system that provides for us"
But we should also realize that those societies do not belong to us. If we are lucky enough to find ourselves within them, we can argue credibly that we are contributing to them and therefore deserve a share of the benefits that flow from them. But the fact that we are lucky enough to be within them and contributing to them does not confer on us the exclusive right to such a position. If anything, it confers on us the responsibility to try and make the society as robust as possible, so that its membership can be extended to as many people as possible. No one deserves to be poor. No one deserves to be arbitrarily rich. Rich societies can find ways to justify their great wealth relative to others: their members can tell themselves stories about the great things they did that others could not have done that made them wealthy beyond imagination. Alternatively, they could recognize the wild contingency of their wealth, cultivate human empathy, and do what they can to extend the wealth of humans to everyone.
this is good
just which he could see that the economic system he worships isn't compatible with this idealism
[...] the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? These questions can be posed in a psychoanalytic register — if we are not who we think we are, what are we? — but they also apply to the forces governing capitalist society. Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.
What is the weird? When we say something is weird, what kind of feeling are we pointing to? I want to argue that the weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.