Piketty: Quality of Life for Billions of People is at Stake
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 มิ.ย. 2024
- Can society continue its long-run trajectory and commit to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can advance equality?
World-renowned economist and inequality researcher Thomas Piketty in conversation with Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking about Piketty’s just-released book, A Brief History of Equality.
The book condenses 20 years’ worth of research into inequality and provides well-founded reasons to believe that recent trends in the growth of inequality can be reversed in the not too distant future.
Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, his new book shows, we have been moving toward greater equality. The book guides the reader through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It’s a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fight against injustice. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people. We know we can do better, Piketty concludes.
LEARN MORE
A Brief History of Equality www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.p...
Thomas Piketty’s Personal Website piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/
Wonderful conversation. I so do appreciate Mr. Picketty coming on. His message is so incredibly necessary. By the way, I’m not an academic. But thanks to conversations like these, I’m able to understand everything that’s being spoken, & I thank these 2 gentlemen, & others like them, for helping me get to this point.
“In these difficult times”. They didn’t have to be this difficult & I wish more people knew that. These problems were created. They didn’t just come about naturally.
Exactly. It didn’t have to be this way. A statement that could have been made countless times over the last two years of failed policies and the last 40 years for that matter.
John F. Kennedy: "Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."
Oh not as such, they came about quite naturally, in terms of the nature of capitalism.
It literally incentivises the mass extraction of wealth from the peoples and communities of the majority workforce unto the minority capitalist classes in nice houses/yachts far away.
It literally incentivises capitalists to purchase media to manufacture the consent of enough of the population for the politicians the rich want who will give them the policies they want and remove the ones they don't.
It literally incentivises capitalists to purchase politicians via campaign contributions in order to ensure the capitalist minorities interests will always be met before the interests of the majority workforce whose interests are directly opposed to the capitalist.
It literally incentivises the mass prevention of democracy in 70% of life most people spend at work.
And it literally incentivises the mass destruction of the climatology and ecology of this world, to do all that.
So in that sense, where we are, is perfectly natural, and predicted by many.
@@Nine-Signs beautiful comment!!!
@@marybusch6182 Much obliged my friend. Thank you for reading.
Looking on a slightly longer timeline it has all become clear.
Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 - 48, observed what the capital accumulation of neoclassical economics did to the US economy in the 1920s.
“a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped”
A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt.
Is that why Keynes added redistribution?
Yes, it stopped all the wealth concentrating at the top.
A strong, healthy middle class developed in the West.
Maggie and Reagan removed the redistribution and inequality soared as things returned to the old normal of neoclassical economics.
A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt.
It's interesting how the Great Depression could be seen as having positive effects in terms of changing policy - whereas in 2009 the risks of another one were averted at all cost and here we are - political gridlock. Maybe Obama should've let the banks fail, or at least have taken a different path? Obviously, f*** neoliberal economics and trickle-down, but the consequences of it was not felt enough to make radical change. Maybe if it did, Bernie would have won or maybe Romney would have in 2012.
@@therationalist234 The missing link - Japan
Japan led the way and everyone followed.
At 25.30 mins you can see the super imposed private debt-to-GDP ratios.
th-cam.com/video/vAStZJCKmbU/w-d-xo.html
What Japan does in the 1980s; the US, the UK and Euro-zone do leading up to 2008 and China has done more recently.
The PBoC saw the financial crisis coming unlike the BoJ, ECB, BoE and the FED.
It was very late in the day, so the Chinese are still in trouble, as we can see.
Neoclassical economics is the economics of the Roaring Twenties, the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression.
Policymakers sooner or later use the economic growth model of the Roaring Twenties, oblivious to where this is leading.
The US had done it first in the 1920s, so Japan could study the Great Depression to avoid this fate.
th-cam.com/video/8YTyJzmiHGk/w-d-xo.html
How did Japan avoid a Great Depression?
They saved the banks
How did Japan kill growth and inflation for the next thirty years?
They left the debt in place and the repayments on that debt killed growth and inflation (Japanification)
They didn’t realise the debt in the banking system were claims on future spending power, and this would suck the life out of the Japanese economy for decades
Japan discovered how to avoid a Great Depression and deliver Japanification instead.
Brilliant conversation.
Well, thank you closed captioning...
It was very good considering what a failure the captioning was when he was on Democracy Now
thanks you a lot!! this is a very open minded, mature and thoughtful discussion;
Like that he touched on the Brexit issue. Yes, of course there are people who wanted to leave for nationalistic reasons but, beyond that, there actually were good economic reasons for a country like England wanting to leave and many, supposedly enlightened and educated people, seemed to completely ignore them. You could have been/can still be in favour of the UK being in the EU *while* appreciating that there are issues within the existing EU architecture that disproportionately affect working class people.
The problem was that those of us who listened for those 'good economic reasons' never heard any. The arguments we heard were about how much was being sent to the EU, without acknowledging what was coming FROM the EU. Or that the EU money would go the the NHS (which it wasn't going to and, of course, it didn't). This was the info from the Brexiteers. [I am a Canadian, so I have no dog in this fight.) The main good arguments were about not joining the euro-Zone, and maintaining control over the currency -- but the UK had never joined the eruo-zone and wasn't going to.
I've studied economics for 20 years from Smith to Marx and beyond, I've a keen interest in political and economic history, and have been a resident in the UK in the midlands for 40 years.
"There were good economic reasons for a country like England wanting to leave"
I saw none before, I see none now, and everything I warned of prior including how brexit would be used to destroy any candidate offering change, has come to pass.
So do enlighten me as to what exactly those good economic reasons are because I will likely enjoy shredding them for the bullshit they would transpire to be but I am also not above learning something new. Also the UK is 4 nations, not 1.
@@otsoko66 I recall Tories/right wingers moaned about the cost of membership of the EU on myriad occasions during the ref, what they failed to mention was that the UK pays the same amount to subsidize Northern Ireland per year in order to stop them kicking 7 shades of shit out of each other. Arguably we got far more from the EU than we ever have from NI.
@@Nine-Signs This is the patronising tone we experienced from the Remain side. 'I'm an expert' the rest of you are ill-educated, deluded fools. To be fair it was this attitude that accelerated the Brexit vote. Read Piketty's book 'Categories'. It's full of detailed arguments about the structural and fiscal weaknesses of the EU.
@@donaldclark2693 You couldn't provide me with the benefits I requested so you've taken to what, denigrating the person speaking because you cant get around their point?
I asked a simple straight forward question and stated my own thoughts, I didn't denigrate anyone, that was your choice.
I literally said, "I am also not above learning something new" so answer the bloody question instead of spitting your dummy out of your pram at the person who dared to ask it that offended whatever beliefs you have.
I asked what are the economic benefits of leaving, I did not ask what are the structural issues within the EU, they are clearly evident and have been for decades and as for Thomas Piketty whose works I know well, he is not writing books on why people should leave the EU, he is writing books on the failures of capitalism and the bending of EU institutions as a result of that system along side its structural inability to deal with the contradictions of capitalism that concentrates wealth and power from many unto few.
And that should have been the only focus of workers in the UK, not brexit or remain, which was the diversion thrown up by elites aided by Farage & Co. to misdirect the mass fucking anger from the collapse of 2008 onto something that would do fuck all to change a damned thing for the majority workforce, beyond making their lives shitter and poorer while keeping capitalism relatively unchanged and booming for the rich. Alone. While simultaneously being used as a wedge issue to divide workers against themselves and prevent enough of them from amassing behind the candidate who was actually offering to alter capitalism to favor workers before the rich for once in our fucking lives.
So bravo. The 1% thank the lot of you, be they in the EU or not, they still fucking win.
p.s. you mistook patronizing middle class for working class and pissed off at such systemic fucking ignorance, which is what I am.
Piketty will win a Nobel Prize .
Not if they keep giving that the neocons.
@@marybusch6182 Economics to the neolibs, peace prizes to the neocons.
Haiti forever ! The first real democracy
Piketty!!! A VIP voice for the working classes!
i believe that's called a 'rhetorical' question. human society is directed by small groups committed to their individual wealth and power. the already visible outcome will be a collapse of civilization, with mass deaths from climate overload, and ancillary disease and war. if the now built-in temperature over-run is high enough, even extinction is possible.
we need revolution, since leaders in place have little inclination to change anything. perhaps it will happen in time to preserve a base level of civilization. that's our only hope.
You will see lots of nice climate charts showing our paths, there will be a green line in the middle of the trajectories on the chart from the worst to the best outcomes, the green line the TV will say, is the line we are on, which will ensure we rise to no more than / "only" 2.7oC.
Now, let me tell you why that is bollocks. Because the middle of the road outcome the TV will claim we are on, is entirely based on the implementation of NETS and BECCS.
First BECCS, basically, carbon capture and storage. It has never worked at scale despite near 25yrs of development and billions of dollars from governments globally. Best efforts come with a 45% efficiency penalty, meaning you have to burn 45% more fuel to get the same energy out that you got without trying to capture the carbon at the plant, which in turn jacks up the price to the operator rending such a plant economically non viable as well as an ecological disaster due to the additional fossil fuels needed for the same energy output.
NETS, these ones make me laugh they really do, some sobbing in between but mostly laughter. "NEGATIVE EMISSIONS TECHNOLOGIES" or as I like to call it for the sake of reality: NON EXISTANT TECHNOLOGIES... 0.0
Yup, our middle of the road were doing awful but not as bad as it could be scenarios are based on an energy platform that doesn't work and technologies that don't exist and if you know anything about thermodynamics nor will they.
We are going to hit at least +3oC, feedbacks may carry us over 4oC which is pretty much an extinction level event for most complex life on the surface, all animals have a wetbulb, a maximum thermal limit under given conditions of humidity, for humans, we drop dead at + 55oC 0 humidity to +35oC in 95% humidity, roasted from the inside out over several hours. Fun.
For curiosities sake, according to the numbers I have if we stopped all emissions right this minute we would scrape 1.8 by the time the planet reached a new equilibrium, which we could at least make some attempt to adapt to.
I wish it were possible to believe in revolution as a solution, but I think that recent history provides persuasive if not conclusive evidence that large groups of people tend to divide into warring nations, economic sectors, political factions, religions, and ethnic allegiances that prevent any of them -- or their uneasy alliances -- from having the resources, leadership, and experience to carry out a successful revolution. In the US, religious zealots and rightwing extremists have their own twisted versions of revolution which are manifestly regressive and selfish, not oriented toward any truly humane commonwealth. Growing societal dysfunctions may breed fragmentary demonstrations and rebellions, but nothing that collectively amounts to an intelligent, competent revolution that changes underlying structures and forces of disintegration.
@@FredHosea yes, indeed. i suggest revolution is necessary, but clearly unlikely. i could save time, by saying, "yer doomed!" however, we struggle on, and the looming climate crisis may inspire sane and effective action. nothing like the prospect of imminent death to focus the mind.
The people who run nations suffer their citizens for one reason - slavery, taxation and military conscription. We are like farm animals to them. And the people who pretend to politically support them don't really express anything other than their approval of how the system works for them in their lives. The human race is as far away from democracy as it ever was, and that is what leads to destruction of "the people's" environment, not Mar-a-lago for sure.
This is an old taping?
Sad that those who are most responsible and least affected, always have the most to gain from these economic recession, sadly…
The question is - after we revolt and take it away from them how do we KEEP it?
Make peace treatys around the world and cut defense spending drastically.
Never stop fighting, freedom isn't cheap.
Good there's at least 3 others who agree with me something drastic needs to be done.
Have you guys heard of the Rand Report on wages that said America's top 1% made $47 Trillion between 1978 and 2018? I have heard people like Mark Blyth estimate that is now like $55 Trillion because of the boom brought by COVID. If America is a bit under 25% of the worlds Economy then its reasonable to assume the worlds top 1% has made of with $220 Trillion since 1978.
Do any of you have any idea what that physically looks like?
In Australia our version of Who wants to be a millionaire used to have a box with $1million in it. It was just over a cubic foot. A 20ft container, which is the standard unit for transportation, has 1130 cubic feet of space. So it can be reasonably assumed that a 20 ft container loaded with cash is roughly $1 Billion AND 1,000 20 ft containers is roughly $1 Trillion.
See the ship in the photo -> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-foot_equivalent_unit
That's the Emma Maersk and when it was launched in 2006 it was the largest container ship ever built at 11,000 TEU. It would take 20 such ships to move $220 Trillion and there were only 8 of those ships made.
Now there's the A-Class container ships like the one that got stuck in the Suez Canal. Their capacity is 24,000 TEU so it only takes 9 of them to move $220 Trillion, but unfortunately there's only 6 of those so 3 of them would need to take 2 trips.
The top 1% haven't simply made of with a boat load of cash they have made of with boat loads (plural) where the boats are the biggest container ships ever made.
@@solgato5186 As the mother of TWO children diagnosed with different forms of sociopathy my thinking is giving a creature with complete lack of empathy power must be avoided. I look at earlier revolutions and time after time they were eventually undermined by immoral people at the top.
We spend it as quickly as possible! 🤣
I would like to have listened to what he is trying to say, but the opening monologue is kind of a rant, and I am tuning out. Moderators must direct and compartmentalize these discussions. I am simply not able to follow what he is saying because the discussion is not organized. What a pity.
Приглашаем Томаса на интервью для нашего канала.
❤❤
This entire discussion is moot without a racial capitalism analysis. The foundations on which all of this is built is colonization. Without that analysis, it's just working around the edges on ways to uphold the system. So his analysis of Haiti and property rights, starts to move towards there. But deeper analysis is still required.
I will press the 'like' button and it SHOULD make "like #617" and stay there. UPDATE: it's GONE!
Great guy. Too bad he is so hard to understand in English. How about some subtitles?
Good point! I am watching on October 8, 2022 at 8:56 am pacific; they added the English subtitles 🎉 you were so right w/o subtitles he is annoying in his accent, not so in his content, however.
I came here to learn how to invest after listening to a guy on radio talk about the importance of investing and how he made $960,000 in 4 months from $160k, somehow this video has helped shed light on some things, but I'm still confused, I'm a newbie and I'm open to ideas.
Investing in stocks is a good idea, a good trading system would put you through many days of success.
Having monitored my portfolio performance which has made a jaw dropping $470k from just the past two quarters alone, I have learned why experienced traders make enormous returns from the seemingly unknown market.
@Doukas Amal Exactly, the trick is to diversify your investment, don't panic when everyone else is and invest consistently.
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When slavery ended?
Oh he means in the western world.
I think he meant officially/legally
@@romansobak8333 in the US it never did, it is LITERALLY allowed in the 13th amendment of the constitution, by omission. Slavery is allowed in prisons. According the US constitution.
@@Nine-Signs thanks for that info,what a shocker and it explains high incarceration rates
⚠️ *Stop* *wasting* *time* *and* *money* *on things that doesn't matter, invest it so you can have multiple streams of income* 🔴🔴
Agreed, investment is the key to financial freedom
That would be what I like to call... Bullsh**
People don't have enough disposable money to eat and pay bills simultaneously, and capitalism has rendered millennials the fist generation to be poorer than their parents in 150 years of records, they don't have a pot to piss in never mind money to piss away on possible bad investment Ponzi schemes.
Musical chairs
Gobelegoop
The free market and equality is a contradiction. Does it really make sense for a referee to redistribute points from the winning team and give them to the losing team? That defeats the whole point of competition. Why even play the game if the referee can arbitrarily interfere and redistribute?
Who are you representing, The Koch Industries, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos? or D) All The Above
You're in the Babylonian casino system. High stakes, but the grand illusion is that its not. Quit the system and the city. Don't participate any more than necessary. Grow your own everything.
Right
Redistribution should come through inheritance tax. That's not taking it from the winners bc the winner is dead. Inheritors aren't winners. Yet those claiming the meritocracy of the prevailing regime are the greatest enemies of inheritance tax. This is bc the prevailing regime isn't about meritocracy at all, it's about perpetuating the arbitrary powers that be. All the extra dysfunction we have in society can be traced to the supreme institution of anti- meritocracy, inheritance. Positive liberty destabilizes this anti-meritocratic system so negative liberty must be made ubiquitous. There then is no possibility for the positive liberty institutions necessary. Even Rob Johnson recognized the need for stronger inheritance taxes in a Davos interview in 2014. Significant percentages of people have been convinced that taxes in principle are bad. It is important to see exactly how that message has become so prevent. I see many folks with building blocks but the capstone seems to have escaped everyone.
Inheritance is a form of charity which is voluntary. Redistribution should be voluntary rather than through the force of government coercion which is immoral. Instead of redistribution and charity what we need is pre distribution and socialism.
Pickety ate too much
Inflation...
♟unseen but very effective