this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Ironically, I got radicalised by a book written by a Milquetoast centrist, Capital In The 21st Century.
It's essentially a capitalist thinking through the fundamental implications of capitalism, especially that the market demands that the rate of return must be higher than the rate off growth. Piketty goes through the history of the 20th century and how the post-war boom came about, and how it's equality was dismantled in the eighties in order to fuel greater returns.
Then he comes up with his policy recommendations, and it's.... a wealth tax. Which you know, I'm not opposed to, but the idea that's going to have the same sort of impact as the creation of the welfare state and WW2 is insane. Never mind that there's nothing in place to prevent the rise of austerity again. At that point I knew the only way to proceed was to dismantle the capital class in it's entirety.
I actually started reading it recently! I saw hype a while ago and it was in my reading list and the cover was pretty.
I uhh, yeah there really doesn't seem to be that much substance to it? I check out the database to see if there was anything I could do with the data, and after I checked it didn't seem all that great called the World Inequality Database, link here.
I'm not sure if I'll finish it, like you said the authors centrist and so far appears to be milquetoast. I just, I think honestly I thought the data-driven aspect (quantitive) would be cool but there's not realy sophisticated modelling going kn as far as I can tell.
I don't suggest anyone read it... maybe flip through the first ~20 pages to get a feel for how the largest problems of our day are whittled down to narrow and eventually single issues. It's an interesting piece of rhetoric I'd say, how the author & people reading it come to believe in such a solution.