This article in the Washington Post examines the alarming increase in inequality as a small number of billionaires take control of the economy and the future. The article does not mention the billionaires’ political efforts to gain control of state and local school boards so as to destroy the public schools by replacing them with privately managed charter schools.
The article mentions the deep concern of Seth Klarman, a hedge funder in Boston, but fails to note that he was a Dark Money contributor to the 2016 referendum in Massachusetts that was intended to add 12 charter schools every year wherever they wanted to open. Teachers, parents, unions, and civil rights groups combined to defeat the billionaires—not only Klarman, but Bloomberg, the Waltons, and others.
My comments are in BOLD.
”PALO ALTO, Calif. —A perfect California day. The sun was shining, a gentle breeze was blowing and, at a Silicon Valley coffee shop, Rep. Ro Khanna was sitting across from one of his many billionaire constituents discussing an uncomfortable subject: the growing unpopularity of billionaires and their giant tech companies.
“Realizing people hate your guts has some value,” he joked.
“For decades, Democrats and Republicans have hailed America’s business elite, especially in Silicon Valley, as the country’s salvation. The government might be gridlocked, the electorate angry and divided, but America’s innovators seemed to promise a relatively pain-free way out of the mess. Their companies produced an endless series of products that kept the U.S. economy churning and its gross domestic product climbing. Their philanthropic efforts were aimed at fixing some of the country’s most vexing problems. Government’s role was to stay out of the way.
“Now that consensus is shattering. For the first time in decades, capitalism’s future is a subject of debate among presidential hopefuls and a source of growing angst for America’s business elite. In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.”
Something is terribly wrong, and even the billionaires know it. Some might want change, but they want to control the change.
“The 2008 financial crisis may have revealed the weaknesses of American capitalism. But it was Donald Trump’s election and the pent-up anger it exposed that left America’s billionaire class fearful for capitalism’s future.
“Khanna was elected in 2016, just as the anxiety started to spread. In Europe, far-right nationalist parties were gaining ground. Closer to home, socialists and Trump-inspired nationalists were winning state and congressional elections.
“Conversations of the sort that Khanna was having with Larsen were now taking place in some of capitalism’s most rarefied circles including Harvard Business School, where last fall Seth Klarman, a highly influential billionaire investor, delivered what he described as a “plaintive wail” to the business community to fix capitalism before it was too late.
”The setting was the opening of Klarman Hall, a new $120 million conference center, built with his family’s donation. “It’s a choice to pay people as little as you can or work them as hard as you can,” he told the audience gathered in the 1,000-seat auditorium. “It’s a choice to maintain pleasant working conditions . . . or harsh ones; to offer good benefits or paltry ones.” If business leaders didn’t “ask hard questions about capitalism,” he warned that they would be asked by “ideologues seeking to point fingers, assign blame and make reckless changes to the system.”
No, no, we don’t want anyone making reckless changes to the system!
“Six months after that speech, Klarman was struck by how quickly his dire prediction was coming to pass. Leading politicians, such as Trump, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), were advocating positions on tariffs, wealth taxes and changes in corporate governance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
“Klarman wasn’t opposed to more progressive taxation or regulation. But he worried that these new proposals went much too far. “I think we’re in the middle of a revolution — not a guns revolution — but a revolution where people on both extremes want to blow it up, and good things don’t happen to the vast majority of the population in a revolution,” he said.
Too bold no one asked Klarman why he wants to undermine public schools, one of the few institutions that billionaires don’t own.
“He wasn’t the only one who felt a sense of alarm. One of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, home to the next generation of Fortune 500 executives, was a class on “reimagining capitalism.” Seven years ago, the elective started with 28 students. Now there were nearly 300 taking it. During that period the students had grown increasingly cynical about corporations and the government, said Rebecca Henderson, the Harvard economist who teaches the course.
“What the trust surveys say is what I see,” she said. “They are really worried about the direction in which the U.S. and the world is heading.”
As Giriharadas says, the billionaires want to drive any changes in the economy, proclaiming their deep concern for the millions left behind by their success. Never forget that any changes they control will protect them and their billions.
”The billionaires in Khanna’s district, meanwhile, were consumed by a different worry. Mixed in with the valley’s usual frothy optimism about disruption and inventing the future was a growing sense that the tech economy had somehow broken capitalism. The digital revolution had allowed tech entrepreneurs to build massive global companies without the big job-producing factories or large workforces of the industrial era. The result was more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.
“As technology advanced, some feared things were only going to get worse. Robots were eliminating much factory work; online commerce was decimating retail; and self-driving cars were on the verge of phasing out truck drivers. The next step was computers that could learn and think.
“What happens if you can actually automate all human intellectual labor?” said Greg Brockman, chairman of OpenAI, a company backed by several Silicon Valley billionaires. Such thinking computers might be able to diagnose diseases better than doctors by drawing on superhuman amounts of clinical research, said Brockman, 30. They could displace a large number of office jobs. Eventually, he said, the job shortages would force the government to pay people to pursue their passions or simply live. Only Andrew Yang, a long-shot presidential candidate and tech entrepreneur, supported the idea of government paying citizens a regular income. But the idea of a “universal basic income” was discussed regularly in the valley.
“The prospect was both energizing and terrifying. OpenAI had recently added an ethicist — Brockman sometimes referred to her as a “philosopher” — to its staff of about 100 employees to help sort through the implications of its innovations.
“To Brockman, a future without work seemed just as likely as one without meat, a possibility that many in the valley viewed as a near certainty. “Once we have meat substitutes as good as the real thing, my expectation is that we’re going to look back at eating meat as this terrible, immoral thing,” he said. The same could be true of work in a future in an era of advanced artificial intelligence. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was so crazy and almost immoral that people were forced to go and labor in order to be able to survive,’ ” he said.”
What kind of future are the billionaires imagining for the other 99.9%?
Income inequality continues while government representatives continue to pander to them. Many people resent billionaires more under Trump since he passed his massive tax cuts for the 1%. The Gilded Age set the stage for unionism. We are seeing the same backlash in the Red for Ed movement. In this case workers are not trying to get a union. They are trying to keep their right to have a union as well as improved working conditions, better wages and benefits.
Believing that the super rich are going to solve our problems is naive. The billionaires are more interested in serving themselves. They may throw a bone to regular people now and then, but they cannot replace the function of a democratic government. Watching the billionaires’ manipulations, I see them trying to suppress democracy, not support it. Our country cannot afford to depend on the “kindness” of billionaires. Our government should be of, by and for the people. Our system needs to be overhauled. We need to tax and regulate the billionaires and corporations so that we serve the interests and needs of all the people, not just the 1%.
Believing that the rich are going to solve our problems is naive, and also flat out childish. Our citizenry needs to grow UP.
Yes….WE are collateral damage in their war. It seems that corporate Dems and Republicans are no different from one another except in party name. It is this reason that many people didn’t vote or didn’t want to vote for HRC. WE the PEOPLE are tired of corporate Democrats and greedy Republicans. There really isn’t any middle ground anymore in either party. WE have lots of taxation and not much representation. I’m feeling the Bern again!!
In the US, according to the Economic Policy Institute, since 1973, productivity has risen by 77 percent, while wages have grown by only 12.4 percent (in inflation-adjusted dollars). So, a lot more value is being created, but that value is being realized, mostly, by the ownership class.
There are further complications: According to the US Census, since 1960, real wages have increased by 18 percent, while rents have increased by 64 percent. According to David Stockman, former OMB Director under Ronald Reagan, since 1975, the cost of a new car has more than doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars, and the cost of a house has increased by 29 percent. Since the year 2000, the cost of food has increased, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 53.22 percent. So, while wages remain almost flat, the costs of basic necessities are skyrocketing.
To make matters worse, almost all the increase in wages has gone to higher-income workers. Since 1980, wages for middle income people have risen by only 6 percent, while wages for lower income people have declined by 5 percent.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump promised huge infrastructure programs to put “forgotten Americans” back to work but hasn’t delivered them, though he did deliver a huge tax break to the wealthy and to corporations. He has been able to forget his campaign promises there because the economy is in fairly good shape right now, as we are in an uptick of the business cycle for which he, of course, claims credit.
So, why are billionaires like Gates and Buffet and Dimon and Dalio and Bloomberg and Schultz calling for more steeply progressive taxes? They know that if things continue in this way, they will break, and then it’s not going to be pretty for anyone.
I take it with a big grain of salt when Gates advocates for progressive taxes. The state he lives in has no income tax at all. I haven’t heard him lobbying the legislature for any income tax, but I do know that he lobbied hard to dedicate the lottery money to charter schools and won it.
Not a grain of salt. A salt mine.
Can you quote the numbers on the rising cost of a college education? I read them somewhere recently, but I wasn’t really sure if the number were correct (it rose over 450%?). You seem to be honest and factual. Thanks in advance!
The average for all four-year institutions comes out to $26,120 per year. This brings the total cost of attendance to an astronomical total of $104,480 over four years. The comparable cost for the same four-year degree in 1989 was $26,902 ($52,892 adjusted for inflation). This means that between the academic years ending in 1989 and 2016, THE COST FOR A FOUR YEAR DEGREE DOUBLED, even after inflation. [caps mine]
–Maldonado, Camillo. “Price Of College Increasing Almost 8 Times Faster Than Wages.” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/07/24/price-of-college-increasing-almost-8-times-faster-than-wages/#f00a40466c1d. Figures from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Peter Greene has a guest post from a former excellent student that did everything right. She still cannot go to college debt free. It clearly shows that the numbers do not add up for young people trying to get an education. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/04/guest-post-true-cost-of-college.html
Folks might be interested in the net cost of attending college. This is a bit dated, but there is a good tool here: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/30/444446022/what-youll-actually-pay-at-1-550-colleges
Americans owe 1.5 TRILLION dollars in college loan debt. It now exceeds credit card debt, which is very high.
I think the corrupt US autocratic oligarchs with too much money and not enough brains want to turn everyone else into debt slaves that live in fear because that want the working class to always be one paycheck away from homelessness and no medical care until the only escape is to die.
The power-hungry, arrogant, corrupted billionaires and multi-millionaires don’t know they are sealing their own fates. Today, they think they are safe because they have all this tech and the internet to spy on us and identify the threats ahead of time. Oh, how wrong they are.
The only time the working class wants the blood to flow and rebels to overthrow tyrants like Trump, Devos, Gates, Koch, Walton is when life gets so bad it’s worse than death. Then the country and maybe the world becomes a ticking bomb and all it takes is one tiny match flame to set it off.
People have already been turned into debt slaves. Because of the fractional reserve system, banks can lend out 10 times what they have in reserves. Poof. this creates money out of nothing except the promise to deliver to the bank one’s future earnings.
And since G. W. Bush signed the legislation that changed the bankruptcy laws for working people, bankruptcy is no longer an escape hatch from this scam. From what I’ve read, there is no way to escape the debt anymore unless you die.
It is instructive to look at the details of student debt. I have found a couple of sources that look at the distribution of the debt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_debt and https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-student-loan-debt). If they are approximately correct, the majority of students who borrow owe less than $25,000 dollars, and 4 out of 5 have less than $50,000 in debt. These levels are about the size of a new car loan.
There are a small number of students with very large debt levels of over $150,000. Here it i useful to look at debt levels of graduate students: https://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/post/trends-in-graduate-student-loan-debt
Here we see that medical doctors who take out loans are accruing a large amount of debt, lawyers a little more than half the amount of medical doctors. These are likely to be the students with the high levels of debt.
The PhD (non-education) who are taking out loans included in these figures is, I think, a relatively small number. Universities generally guarantee five years of support for PhD students so students do not have to take out loans.
Elizabeth Warren says there is more than $1 trillion in student debt. Was she wrong?
College tuition used to be far less than now. Community colleges originally were tuition-free. But states decided to shift the burden to students.
“These levels are about the size of a new car loan.”
As usual, you are trying to say “What’s the big deal”. Fine, we know that’s your opinion about everything that is going on in this countr (which is the richest in the world). Why do you feel like echoing it all the time?
The interest on a new car loan is usually close to 0%, unlike on a student loan, which, in case of my son is 8%. Also, most people, especially fresh graduates, don’t buy a $50K car.
Fresh graduates cannot buy a car because they have to pay back their student loans. In this country, car is a must, unless you live in places like Chicago or NYC, but then you are struck with rent.
It’s ridiculous that they have to spend a decade or more to pay back college tuition, instead of being able to start a life.
Also, tuitions (hence loan amounts) increase very fast, at least 5% each year.
“because the economy is in fairly good shape right now”– but clearly not for the great majority of workers, as illustrated by the stats you cite. The stats pols use to call this a fairly good economy benefit few. Record high stock market help only older upper-middle-class workers with 401(k)s building since the ’90’s or before. The other stat they like is “full employment,” but that means little given the sobering salary stats, which hobble both saving and spending for most.
Full employment, not counting the underemployed part-time workers and the discouraged workers and the workers who have used up all their unemployment benefits. LOL.
We no longer have real capitalism. What we do have is monopoly capitalism supported politically by national socialism in the form of the Republican Party and the lobbyists of the plutocrats. They don’t mind Socialism as long as the wealth is flowing to them including public school dollars.
The articles at Stanford Social Innovation Review mostly written by the staffs of billionaire- funded foundations tell us what the richest 0.1% want to control and their schemes to accomplish it.
You are correct. I am a subscriber and the review keeps me sober about expectations for the future. There is a lot of Oh My about social issues with one grand solution. Make a proposal for a solution and turn that into a financial product that investors will love because it promises a high return on investment. One of the biggest and most morally corrupt promoters ( in my opinion) is the Nobel economist James Heckman. who thinks it is wonderful and profitable that the value of children can be monetized. Some produce a higher return on investment than others.
The (James) Heckman Equation will estimate the probable returns of investments in pre-school programs and related “social impact” financial products. These financial products (Social Impact Bonds or SIB’s and Pay for Success Contracts) are being marketed as if a better option than any gov’ment run program to address social problems
See for example https://heckmanequation.org and metrics for the investment value of other social programs in NYC (where the value of a high-quality preschool program is calculated at $50,650 per child). https://robinhoodorg-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/04/Metrics-Equations-for-Website_Sept-2014.pdf
Here is a press release for a new social impact program in education. http://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/lumina-robin-hood-salesforce-impact-launch-impact-investing-alliance
Wall Street’s concentrated wealth makes the sociopathic money people desperate, like starving cannibals. They scheme to take a rake of money intended for pre-schoolers.
Another person who funded the Mass. charter school push was Robert Kraft, owner of the NFL Patriots. He’s been charged in Florida, related to a “spa” and Chinese women servicing men.
Bob’s data is very helpful. I use these materials in class as research background, starting with Warren Buffett’s 2006 declaration: “There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich, who are making war and we’re winning.”(Stein, NYT, p. BU6) Diane’s comments above exactly right: “Never forget that any changes they [the billionaires] control will protect them and their billions…What kind of future are the billionaires imagining for the other 99.9%?” In Sunday last NYT, Joseph Stiglitz argued for “progressive capitalism,” a quiet version of Bernie’s social democracy. The 0.1% may reluctantly tax themselves as little as needed to calm the pitchfork rebellions erupting left and right. Getting far more than they will release and reimagining school and society after their rampage has been contained is the big job ahead, which is why at the moment folks like Bernie and AOC have to push and be pushed as far as possible, and education is now central to the campaign.
When Buffett says the stuff he says it’s for show- The Phoenix New Times wrote an exposé about the family on Jan. 13, 2019. The reporter should get a Pulitizer. Remember how Buffett claimed he wouldn’t give money to his kids? He gave their foundations $60,000,000. And, he gave money to the Gates Foundation to spend.
Error- $600,000,000 from Warren Buffett to his kids in 2012.
Ira, the libertarians would accuse you of pro-socialist propaganda. It is not propaganda when presenting data to students and asking them what they think about it. It is critical thinking which is essential in a democracy. The right wing does not want students to think for themselves. They prefer Fox News brainwashing.
Bob’s data is correct except for the difference between the cost of degrees in public and private colleges. This is the full quote:
“The price of going to college has been increasing since the 1980s. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average cost per year for the 2015-2016 academic year was just over $19,000 for a public four-year university. The figure jumps to nearly $40,000 for a private university. These totals include tuition, fees, room and board.
The average for all four-year institutions comes out to $26,120 per year.”
Note that these are average costs for public versus private education. In my neck of the woods, the nearest public university offering a four year degree has a cost of about $11,600 per year. That university has announced that for students entering this year in the autumn, their tuition will not rise for the next four years. The aim is to encourage continuity in studies free of gotcha increases in tuition. That aids in planning.
If these prices are the sticker prices, it is important to know that almost no student actually pays that amount. See the link I posted above to see what students actually pay.
Americans owe over $1.56 trillion in student loan debt, spread out among about 45 million borrowers. That’s an average of $36,667 per borrower.
This crowd might want to spend some time with French Revolution-related historiography.
Just sayin’.
Suggested watching: speech by Nic Hanauer from several years ago, in case you did not see it.
Comment: the French Revolution took place against the backdrop of decades of discussion of political ideas that have revolutionized the way the whole world looks at goverment. All our present day ideas come from those concepts, many of which, like Montesquieu’s were based on classical civilization and the writings of the Greeks and Romans. Others harkened back to European tribal solutions to human problems. While it may be locally popular to engage in discussion of new ideas about politics and society, it would appear that the Salon is not alive and well. It has been replaced by the echo chamber. Maybe it is time to empty the echo chamber pots.
Nice, Roy–and thanks.
They still want to control the process! I don’t get to dictate how my money is used when I send it off to meet my tax obligations. I have a limited ability to donate to charities of my choosing, but I certainly don’t direct their activity. I leave that to people who know what they are doing. The only fair way to limit their voice is to get rid of Citizens United and let the wealthy make their contribution through taxes like the rest of us where a democratic process decides how dollars are spent. I don’t care how much they pay attention to my opinions if they are still allowed to decide how to allocate their wealth. I heard Melinda Gates pontificating on giving half their wealth away and encouraging other super wealthy people to do the same. I could not get that little voice out of my head reminding me of how they control how their wealth is (not) used in their home state. Pay your friggin’ taxes and stop trying to rig the system.
During the expansion of industry in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, capitalists made money off of human labor. This gave rise to the conflict that Karl Marx noticed in his fabrication of the ideas we call communism. Even before he died, his predictions, not unlike those of the present, wanted revision.
What on earth does an economy look like when human labor becomes a relatively small part of the production equation? As Bob pointed out above, productivity has risen dramatically without corresponding increases in wages. Of course, the only thing that is left to significantly is technology. Now workers on the four mile stretch of highway near my house are fewer than you would have seen in days past. Now they operate huge machines that move the hills and lay the pavement. When they get off work, you could cram them all into one bar and they would still be able to sit down to watch a ballgame on TV. Nor do the people freed of the drudgery of working the long handled shovel have alternatives. Some find employment, but many are engaged in jobs that used to be relegated to the young who were just entering the job market.
Capitalism works where it exists. Farmers growing crops can exchange products. Craftsmen who make items by hand create better products if there is competition among many. Soon, however, the inane biases of the buyer pervert the system, and inferior products are perceived as superior. While all can tell if a leaf of spinach is good, way fewer can say that a car or guitar is made with excellence. But we do not have anything like that now. Our most wealthy citizens are mostly concerned with moving money around in such a way as to scrub some of it off for themselves as it goes by. Services like Azamon employ people to provide services for people who are wealthy enough to pay for them. Since Reagan’s recession in the early eighties, only the service sector of the economy has expanded. As increasing numbers of people find themselves on the outside of this economy, more pressure will be brought to bear to blow up the order of things.
So where is an economy going that cannot put money into the hands of those who would make it go? Nowhere.
With all the automation and improved AI, the number of people on the outside of the economy is going to increase as more people are furloughed from advances in technology.
Weirdly, working people in the US still go to the polls and vote against themselves, so effective is right-wing propaganda, but this can’t last. Unless the leaders of the New Feudal Order figure out how to share the wealth and income more widely, there will be hell to pay. I hope very much that we will avoid the rioting in the streets, but the well-to-do in the US, including what’s left of the middle class, have no idea how very desperate a great many Americans now are. As I see it, there are two choices, we can opt to go the route of the European Social Democracies, or we can end up with this class war in the streets, and that would be a great horror that might well end in despotism. But its fascinating to see what a huge industry there is in the US of paid court singers for the leaders of the New Feudal Order whose business is to tell them that everything is just fine. How many times, throughout history, does this have to be repeated before people at the top get a freaking clue?
Evictions have doubled in the US since 2000. Rents have increased 70 percent. There is an eviction in the US every 4 minutes now, and the highest rates are for single women with children. Here’s a good video on this topic: https://evictionlab.org/why-eviction-matters/#video
And here are some interesting charts on the increase in personal debt in the US: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_united_states_of_debt/2016/05/the_rise_of_household_debt_in_the_u_s_in_five_charts.html
What kind of future are the billionaires imagining for the other 99.9%?
A future where everyone has a computer chip embedded under the skin that reports everything the people think and do.
From these reports, the billionaires get lists of people that must be eliminated
Then garbage trucks roll down streets at 3 AM and agents dressed in black with bright red armbands that say “MAGA Long Live our God Trump” knock on doors of those who are on the list. Those people are then forced out of their homes and into the garbage trucks that are all one huge trash compactor where the people are all crushed into a solid cube of bloody flesh and bones that will be turned into energy bars for the workers being forced to slave away 16 hours a day seven days a week earning poverty wages with no benefits.
People that do not spend more than they earn buying consumer products that increase the fortunes of the already wealthy will end up on those lists. No one in the working class will be allowed to save money. If they are not mired in debt and suffering, they must die for the benefit of the billionaires.
The chorus SHOUTs: “Long live Our Glorious Leader the “P” snatching Donald Trump, our lusty god of gold.”
That reminds me of some dystopian si if I watched once. Or read?
It was a 1973 film called “Soylent Green” with Charlton Heston as a detective. It was about a dystopian future of dying oceans and year-round humidity due to the greenhouse effect, resulting in suffering from pollution, poverty, overpopulation, euthanasia and depleted resources.
Soylent Green is people!
And we can bet and win that bet that the autocratic oligarchs will make a profit off those Soylent Green bars and still manage to hide the fact that they are made of people that were labeled the enemies of the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (aka: the MAGA Man Monster, a close cousin of The Joker).
The media will ignore the Soylent Green bars. Some people on the internet will attempt to warn the rest of us about them through Social Media, but Fox’s Hannity, and/or Alex Jones, and Limbaugh will all shout repeatedly with help from Twitter Fingers MAGA Man that the rumors and allegations that Soylent Green bars are made out of people are another leftist conspiracy theory just like the alleged Sandy Hook conspiracy.
Then they, the alt-right’s army of talking head (with help from Russia), will manage to switch the topic to abortions and how every abortion even in the first week is another cute baby being murdered by those horrible, evil leftists that all deserve to die … (and be turned in to more Soylent Green bars).
That was a fascinating article! It also elicited thousands of comments I don’t have time to read. It is clear that billionaires haven’t a clue. Especially Silicon Valley billionaires many of whom have been experimenting with LSD and other drugs, they live in worlds of fantasy. Their visions of the future involve everyone lounging around drinking vegan protein shakes while robot superbeings design tiny submarines to extract trapped Thai children from caves on Mars. They Musk be kidding! And of course, of course they want to be in charge of everything. They don’t realize how dumb they really are.
The Giridharadas argument is airtight. Inequality must be tackled with democracy, not neoliberal oligarchy. Many billionaires seem to have sought narrow educations and their knowledge of the world is far from well-rounded. Knowledge of history is important — I’m looking at you, David Coleman. The New Deal and the Great Society hold answers to today’s problems. We’re going to get progressive democracy back whether it’s with Bernie Sanders or guillotines. Your choice, billionaire imbeciles, step aside or go try to live with your robot servants on another planet. And good luck with that.
“We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was so crazy and almost immoral that people were forced to go and labor in order to be able to survive.” Hilarious. That’ll last for the three minutes or so there’s enough trillionaires to comfortably support the population. Humans tend to multiply faster than capital: that’s why we’re in this mess to begin with.
I say, capitalism is working exactly as it was designed: many people work their butts off to make few rich. In America, we have the largest inequality hence capitalism works here the best.
No doubt, we need a different design. We may not need to reinvent the wheel: Scandinavian countries don’t have capitalism anymore, and they seem to be doing fine despite the terrible weather and longest dark nights in the winter.
Exactly
What I like about the post is that we get a sense, these guys (billionaires) start to get afraid, but they still think, they can bs their way out of the inevitable by pretending they are concerned about some big and noble, like capitalism and American ingenuity instead of admitting, they are concerned about their wealth, power or worse.
It doesn’t matter what they think, because they are not the ones who will make the next step.
No that’s wrong. Maybe read the wiki article on the “Nordic model.” It’s definitely capitalism. “The Nordic model is described as a system of competitive capitalism combined with a large percentage of the population employed by the public sector (roughly 30% of the work force).[30] In 2013, The Economist described its countries as ‘stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene even to protect iconic companies’ while also looking for ways to temper capitalism’s harsher effects. We could do it here too, but step #1 would be building back up the unions.
Huh? I think we are talking about the interaction of economics and governance and the balance between the relative influence of each on a society.
Andrew Yang references the TEP charter school in his education policies & is light on detail for K-12 education. I’m not finding much independent commentary on that school. Can you provide any assessment (assuming he is looking at that as a model)?