Are there no workhouses?
December 15, 2017 9:44 AM   Subscribe

The World Inequality Report published [pdf] on Thursday by French economist Thomas Piketty, warned that inequality had ballooned to “extreme levels” in some countries and said the problem would only get worse unless governments took coordinated action to increase taxes and prevent tax avoidance. The economists said wealth inequality had become “extreme” in Russia and the US. The US’s richest 1% accounted for 39% of the nation’s wealth in 2014 [the latest year available], up from 22% in 1980.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet (16 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
I remember an old comment here saying the two outcomes to this are either progressive taxation or violent revolution. But both of those options may become moot when private individuals can afford bigger armies than nations can.
posted by rocket88 at 10:17 AM on December 15, 2017 [6 favorites]


Thanks, OP! Came here to do a FFP on this Guardian article, but perhaps it's better to link to it here.

Trump turning US into 'world champion of extreme inequality', UN envoy warns. Special rapporteur Philip Alston, fresh from fact-finding tour, issues devastating critique of US society and condemns ‘private wealth and public squalor’

Also, directly from Philip Alston in The Guardian, "I have seen and heard a lot over the past two weeks. I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage-filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by opioids, and I met with people in Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them, bringing illness, disability and death."
posted by Bella Donna at 10:46 AM on December 15, 2017 [8 favorites]


Wealth is really good at only one thing. And no, it's not innovation or creating jobs. It's accumulating more and more wealth. Once it reaches critical mass only forceful legal or armed intervention can stop it. But since by that time wealth probably controls all the legal and armed options, you are basically screwed...
posted by jim in austin at 10:49 AM on December 15, 2017 [5 favorites]


It's not likely to change and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
posted by RedShrek at 10:56 AM on December 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


Bella Donna, I was just reading The Guardian article and was also about to do a FPP on it. I expect Philip Alston isn't on Trump's Christmas card list any more.

I've noticed an increase in homeless people in London. It's unsurprising, when you look at how benefits are being cut, and the unaffordability and unavailability of basic housing. At work I have to deal with a lot of people in financial difficulty, and it's absolutely true that most of us are just three paychecks away from destitution.
posted by essexjan at 10:58 AM on December 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


Well, aside from forming a socialist government that taxes the highest tax bracket heavily. It's been done.
posted by domo at 11:00 AM on December 15, 2017 [11 favorites]


Let’s try that.
posted by The Whelk at 11:18 AM on December 15, 2017 [6 favorites]


guillotines tho
posted by poffin boffin at 11:28 AM on December 15, 2017 [15 favorites]


Does anyone know why they combined the US and Canada?

I am not in any way an economist but I looked up some of the StatsCan stats, trying to compare to some US measures of inequality earlier this year and they were very different.
posted by quaking fajita at 11:38 AM on December 15, 2017


It's not likely to change and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

This attitude is tiresome and lazy.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:39 AM on December 15, 2017 [25 favorites]


I'll go further and say this attitude is what allowed it to happen.
posted by rocket88 at 12:17 PM on December 15, 2017 [8 favorites]


It's not likely to change and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

In Britain we took our neoliberal centrist party and through thuggish coup after thuggish coup* dragged it back to it's leftist roots. It's the biggest political party in Europe, polling neck and neck (or sometimes higher) than the rightwing corporatist party.
Things can change! But you have to make them change!

And if you don't want violent revolution (because that never ends up well) you should go out there and make it change. But don't sit there telling me I'm powerless to change it. That's a self fulfilling prophecy.

*Ok, to be honest the thuggish coups are more amiable meetings in the pub. Sometimes there's curry.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 12:20 PM on December 15, 2017 [14 favorites]


Does anyone know why they combined the US and Canada?

That's only for the regional analysis - they also combined most of Europe. There's also data by country (available here).
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:36 PM on December 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


2007-I’m a lefty progressive!
2009- I’m better understood as a social democrat
2016- I have a lot of socialist leanings
2017- The Important thing is that we stain our flags red with the blood of the bosses
posted by The Whelk at 10:50 PM on December 15, 2017 [16 favorites]


I have this feeling that it's not just that people esp. Millennials are getting more critical of capitalism, in particular the rampant, militant kind typically labelled "neoliberal". A large part of this apparently outward criticism is also an inward self-searching.

They began to find that the premises and promises of Capitalism, as an ideology, are not an is, but an ought. For individuals they're an introject. And part of the reason why this introject is so powerful, is that it tries to convince them that it's what it is not -- the natural state of being, a force of nature, the best of possible worlds, or the foundation rock of ethics. If you feel that there's something wrong with it, it is you that are not doing it correctly. You're holding it wrong.

People are feeling that this introject does not necessarily agree with their experience. For most it doesn't.

Guillotines indeed. David Hume style.
posted by runcifex at 1:37 AM on December 16, 2017 [2 favorites]


It's odd reading threads like this not long after reading threads where people complain about the DSA or primarying Claire McCaskill.

These numbers were from Obama's watch. It's likely to get far worse under Trumpism, but it's not like the Democratic Party has been performing well in this area since Bill Clinton intentionally veered things right.
posted by Foosnark at 5:13 PM on December 16, 2017


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