Jamie Galbraith's review of Piketty. Professor Galbraith can be credited with kindling the debate on inequality and bringing the subject to the fore of media attention.
What is “capital”? To Karl Marx, it was a social, political, and legal category—the means of control of the means of production by the dominant class. Capital could be money, it could be machines; it could be fixed and it could be variable. But the essence of capital was neither physical nor financial. It was the power that capital gave to capitalists, namely the authority to make decisions and to extract surplus from the worker.Dissent
Kapital for the Twenty-First Century?
James K. Galbraith | Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin
Piketty was born in 1971 so he has never existed under the metals...
ReplyDeleteSo we can see this younger person moving away from the way the previous generation people who existed under the gold look at Marx's "Capitalism", etc....
I look at Marx concept of "capitalism" as a vestige of the gold standard days and part of what Warren calls the "gold standard mentality"... it is not descriptive at all of what we are doing these days... it is applicable for the history books only...
imo Picketty is trying to move forward and trying to start to analyze/document what we are doing these days out from under the gold...
Perhaps look at Picketty here as a first cut at this from the perspective of the lead edge of a new generation... he doesnt look like he is read into MMT so probably out of paradigm... but he sees 'a difference' and is trying to analyze it imo...
Perhaps re-title it "Kapital out from under the metals"...
we have to move away from the 'gold standard mentality' on all levels...
rsp,
Dissent? Reads more like a smack-down.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand the hoopla over this latest treatise, but if it brings about a New Deal 2.0, that would be an improvement.
revolution in a teacup
ReplyDelete"Wealth concentrations seem to have peaked around 1910, fallen until 1970, and then increased once again."
ReplyDeleteSo perhaps hot wars lead to less concentration, cold wars lead to more concentration... rsp,