Not normally a fan of Brad deLong, but I can appreciate his brutal attack on our comfortable myths…
“Now I think it is an open question whether it is harder to do the job via predistribution, or to do the job via changing human perceptions to get everybody to understand that:
*no, none of us is worth what we are paid.
*we are all living, to various extents, off of the dividends from our societal capital
*those of us who are doing especially well are those of us who have managed to luck into situations in which we have market power–in which the resources we control are (a) scarce, (b) hard to replicate quickly, and (c) help produce things that rich people have a serious jones for right now.”
I highly recommend his piece and the Noah Smith one he includes. Provoking some new ideas?
Meh. Sorry. It was a struggle for me to finish reading Smith’s article when I got to this:
It’s not true. And from the beginning of this country, government has been a participant in choosing the winners and losers.
Both gloss over the fact that capital is free to move wherever it damn well pleases with no regard that the capital wouldn’t exist if not for the people and governments that were instrumental in it being created and therefore, shouldn’t be free at all. OTOH, no more thinking has gone into where US communities are dying than thinking went into why they existed and grew in the first place. What came before and what of that is left for the future and does it hold any value for the future other than to absorb a certain portion of the population that isn’t critical to the general economy and country. In a certain sense technology giveth and technology taketh away. Maybe less tolerance for organic and accidental growth (much of which leads to requiring answers and solutions for government to take care of and manage, but only in a short-sighted manner to respond to capital and voters) and more mindfulness from day one and everyday thereafter.