>I liked Sowell's book, "Wealth, Poverty and Politics". Can you recommend one of Piketty's books? I'd say start with Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. Its a great read, if a bit thick (its a very large tome indeed and very information dense) >Is that necessarily true? The US has abundant natural resources. Tesla could be mining lithium a few hundred miles away from their factory instead of importing it... Its about access, cost, amount, etc. One company getting lithium is a rounding error. The entire market for lithium is bigger than Tesla and even electric cars. Then…
Reign in unlimited military spending is not "limited government", it's "limited military". Making sure the pentagon stops "losing" trillions is not small government it's basic accountability. But you're right it's more than that. And the billionaires. But like I said, one point at a time! You've clearly read ahead of the class. And "no more pork barrels for democrats"? I said leftist, not democrat. I still believe in state solutions to healthcare to start, since that's the topic at hand. And yes, I know it's much bigger than the military and pentagon, but I can't exactly summarize Pikkety's…
Surprisingly, a lot of people in this thread hesitate to recommend Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". I'm not sure why this book is somehow surrounded with overblown controversy. I think it is an excellent book on historical economics. His conclusions are drawn from an extremely large dataset that is publicly available and downloadable here: https://www.quandl.com/data/PIKETTY It's by no means an Economics 101 book, but it should definitely be part of any economist's personal library in my opinion.
The lesson that constant percentage (that is, exponential) growth cannot continue endlessly is the fundamental message behind the concept of Limits to Growth. That is, there exist intractable limits to growth, and that no matter how convenient it may be to pretend otherwise, humans ignore this fact at their extreme peril. Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most current orthodox economics and economic policy. Even apparent mavericks such as Thomas Piketty assume that growth will continue interminably (noted in Capital in the Twenty-First…
It is almost certain that the British economy will not collapse. That said, it is also virtually certain that there will be at least a loss of economic growth, possibly a recession. The worst prediction I've seen by reputable economists (though that was before it became clear that May was going to push for a hard Brexit) was a loss of 9% of GDP growth by 2030. The bigger problem is that Britain is already facing significant structural challenges that are going to be compounded by Brexit. Too much of the economy is centered in the area around London [1], leaving the rest of the country…
> Due to that, statistically, Europe does worse than the US wealth inequality […] Do you have a source for the statistic that show this? Another comment mentioned Gini. Piketty uses the share of the top percentile (1%) or decile (10%): * https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequal... * https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-new-... The US isn't the worst in the world, but it is certainly more unequal than Europe as a whole, and most (all?) EU countries.
There are several chapters on wealth inequality in Piketty's book: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce... Wealth is harder to measure because it's not as reported in most countries. You get an 'income slip' for tax purposes (e.g., US Form W-2), but there's no official 'wealth slip'. That's one of the things that Piketty suggests: declaring of credits and debts in an official way, which could then be used for a (net) wealth tax. Starting as little 0.1% if you're just over (e.g.) $US 10M, and having a top rate of (e.g.) 2% for those that are worth more than (say)…
This Economist article points out some of the many small academic works that quibble over details with Piketty and Saez. But that's not anything new. The major points of their work, and especially of Piketty's monumental _Capital for the 21st century_ still stand: that capital is a positive feedback loop in a way that labor is not; that mid-20th-century laws that put brakes on this feedback loop have been removed; that a variety of data sources are confirming growing inequality and market capture particularly in the UK and US; and that the only reasonable solution for this is a tax on owned…
Most people just read Piketty to page 26 anyway. So anyone claiming they read it, probably not. The Summer's Most Unread Book Is… http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-summers-most-unread-book-is-... ""Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty: 2.4% Yes, it came out just three months ago. But the contest isn't even close. Mr. Piketty's book is almost 700 pages long, and the last of the top five popular highlights appears on page 26. Stephen Hawking is off the hook; from now on, this measure should be known as the Piketty Index."
Piketty also did good job in providing proof that the discourse Marx's capital started is still relevant today: wealth keeps concentrating and that will undermine the whole premise of democracy. “When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.” ― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century This…