Over at the Demos dot org slash blog, I discussed this Bernie Sanders quote: If 99 percent of all the new income goes to the top 1 percent, you could triple it, it wouldn’t matter much to the average middle class person. The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn’t matter if people… Continue reading Does brand differentiation lower prices?
If You Want Really Low Poverty, Market Income Is Not Going To Get You There
I’ve been reading the recent EPI report from Elise Gould, Alyssa Davis, and Will Kimball titled “Broad-Based Wage Growth Is A Key Tool In The Fight Against Poverty.” The report shows, as you would expect, that if earners at the bottom had higher market incomes, then poverty would be somewhat lower as well. While there… Continue reading If You Want Really Low Poverty, Market Income Is Not Going To Get You There
Wages of Abstinence and Risk
Two posts ago, I rehashed the point that owners of capital income do not produce it and therefore have no desert-based claim to it. One post ago, I responded to the rebuttal that they do in fact do work to receive capital income, namely the work of deploying and managing capital. In that post, I… Continue reading Wages of Abstinence and Risk
“Have I Myself Not Worked?”
In my prior post, I pointed out that capital income is paid to non-productive people who don’t, under a labor-desert theory of entitlement, deserve it. In response to this explanation, some commenters have said that in fact capitalists do work in some way. It’s not that they just have capital and then income flows to… Continue reading “Have I Myself Not Worked?”
Vampire Capital
It bothers me as a general matter that so much of our discourse about the economy can proceed as if capitalism distributes things according to variations in work and contribution, or in short desert. It bothers me both because it is wrong and also because it is clearly wrong in ways that have been known… Continue reading Vampire Capital