Forbid teaching about White privilege

[discovolante]

I did enjoy the way Millenie Al thought he could overturn the findings of one of the most influential and respected economics books with some back-of-the-envelope scribblings, without even making an effort to find out what the book says. Seriously impressive intellectual hubris, that.

I think that assuming by 'national income' Piketty meant GDP, when the failure of GDP as an indicator of a country's financial wellbeing is more or less central to Piketty's arguments was a pretty good indicator of where that post was going tbh. Might have been deliberate!

Obviously I haven't read Capital either, lest anyone thinks I'm showing off (or bullshitting). But I have read Chronicles, a mercifully shorter collection of journalistic pieces making similar points to a lay audience, and he's had other articles in the Guardian and elsewhere. I even read the wikipedia article on his book, which summarises its contents and others' critiques of its methodology in a few short paragraphs.

I get the impression that sometimes - and I don't want to single Millenie Al out too much here, because others do it too - when people read a post that seems to confront their worldview they react, generally in a way that implies they think the people they're responding to are incredibly stupid, before doing the due diligence to check that they've understood what's being said and sought out a bit of information and context on the subject.

I've read it, which is why he is pretty much the only economist I ever refer to, because I know nothing else, but I also finished reading it about 6 years ago so my memory of is is pretty fragmented at best. And I'm numerically illiterate so obviously I didn't understand any of it. I've also read Chronicles, which I fished out of a giveaway of my friend's books at his funeral, otherwise I probably wouldn't have got it.

Anyway, I made a decision a little while back that I'd only spend time researching things for posts if I felt like I stood to benefit from it too, by learning something new, so doing due diligence for someone else isn't top of my priority list.

[monkey]

Obviously I haven't read Capital either, lest anyone thinks I'm showing off (or bullshitting). But I have read Chronicles, a mercifully shorter collection of journalistic pieces making similar points to a lay audience, and he's had other articles in the Guardian and elsewhere. I even read the wikipedia article on his book, which summarises its contents and others' critiques of its methodology in a few short paragraphs.

There's a recent documentary based on it too. Can't tell you how good it is because I decided to watch it late at night and fell asleep ~20 mins in. But those 20 mins were alright.

(I read the book, but it was a while ago and I've mostly forgotten it outside of r > g is bad and u shaped graphs which show this)

[Millennie Al]

No, the rate of inheritance tax is 0% - in that, that's what most pay. The marginal rate that a tiny number pay is 40%.

HMRC would disagree with you as their figures show that £5billion was collected last year, so it certainly cannot be 0%.

But given the annual value of inheritance is of the order of £90bn (2014/2015 numbers) and rising that's a long way shy of a 40% rate, more like 6%.

That's entirely consistent with a large number of people passing on relatively small inheritances, entirely inconsistent with the proposition that inheritance is increasingly concentrating wealth.

[Little waster]

HMRC would disagree with you as their figures show that £5billion was collected last year, so it certainly cannot be 0%.

But given the annual value of inheritance is of the order of £90bn (2014/2015 numbers) and rising that's a long way shy of a 40% rate, more like 6%.

That's entirely consistent with a large number of people passing on relatively small inheritances, entirely inconsistent with the proposition that inheritance is increasingly concentrating wealth.

It is even more consistent with a small number of people* passing on relatively large inheritances while paying almost no taxation on them.

What it isn't consistent with is any suggestion that the 40% IHT rate is anything like ubiquitous and has proven a significant factor in preventing inherited wealth cascading unearned down through the generations


*2017-2018 figures put it at 24,000 out of a total death rate of around 620,000 (or about 4% of the total) and clearly doesn't include any estates which managed to completely exempt themselves from any IHT at all (e.g 700 out of 3000 estates valued >£2m).

You can drill further into that in the linked appendices.

[Millennie Al]

Piketty's Capital...

I've read it, which is why he is pretty much the only economist I ever refer to, because I know nothing else, but I also finished reading it about 6 years ago so my memory of is is pretty fragmented at best. And I'm numerically illiterate so obviously I didn't understand any of it. I've also read Chronicles, which I fished out of a giveaway of my friend's books at his funeral, otherwise I probably wouldn't have got it.

Anyway, I made a decision a little while back that I'd only spend time researching things for posts if I felt like I stood to benefit from it too, by learning something new, so doing due diligence for someone else isn't top of my priority list.

In that case I'd suggest trying Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. You probably won';t actually learn much economics from it, because you'll know it already - since it's so old, all the good ideas are very widely known nowadays - but it's interesting as a historical document.

[Millennie Al]

I get the impression that sometimes when people read a post that seems to confront their worldview they react, generally in a way that implies they think the people they're responding to are incredibly stupid, before doing the due diligence to check that they've understood what's being said and sought out a bit of information and context on the subject.

You could say the same about Piketty. He thinks that equality is the metric by which a society should be measured, but this is an area which has been well explored by philosophers and equality certainly is not a suitable metric for a society.

[Bird on a Fire]

Christ on a bike

[Woodchopper]

I get the impression that sometimes when people read a post that seems to confront their worldview they react, generally in a way that implies they think the people they're responding to are incredibly stupid, before doing the due diligence to check that they've understood what's being said and sought out a bit of information and context on the subject.

You could say the same about Piketty. He thinks that equality is the metric by which a society should be measured, but this is an area which has been well explored by philosophers and equality certainly is not a suitable metric for a society.

I don't agree. There are other ways by which societies can be measured - eg proportion living in absolute poverty, fairness (as distinct from equality), liberty, opportunities for self-actualization, security etc

Ultimately it comes down to value judgments and one can't simply exclude one or another. In practice most people would want a mix of several elements - eg perfect liberty would be terrifying but perfect equality might be boring, so decide where the balance lies.

[Millennie Al]

[Piketty] He thinks that equality is the metric by which a society should be measured, but this is an area which has been well explored by philosophers and equality certainly is not a suitable metric for a society.

I don't agree. There are other ways by which societies can be measured - eg proportion living in absolute poverty, fairness (as distinct from equality), liberty, opportunities for self-actualization, security etc

Ultimately it comes down to value judgments and one can't simply exclude one or another. In practice most people would want a mix of several elements - eg perfect liberty would be terrifying but perfect equality might be boring, so decide where the balance lies.

It is a value judgement, but it's still possible to assess what people generally profess as their values and see if a metric is consistent with them. And, to use your examples of liberty and equality, having a mix means we watch for lack of liberty and equality and then assess the whole situation. But that's not using a metric whereby when you see something is bad under your metric you immediately jump to the conclusion that this must correspond with something bad in reality.

For example, suppose there is a (simplistic, to aid analysis) town with 500 homeless people and 500 rich people who each own their house. Under a metric of equality, if a storm comes past and destroys all the houses, it has improved things because now everyone is homeless, so they are all equal. Similarly, if one night the homeless people each invaded a house and killed its owner, taking the hose for themselves, that would also be an improvement as it leaves everyone equal. And, of course, the opposite - that the home-owners kill all the homeless people. I don't think very many people would agree that these changes that increase equality are desireable changes.