Income Inequality!

[ShivaX]

RANT VIDEO: YOUNG PEOPLE ARE SCREWED

Rudy normally does goofy Magic the Gathering stuff. Basically he worked on Wall Street/finance, got tired of it, bought a lot of Magic cards and now makes his living buying and selling cards. But this, instead of his usual joking about Magic and Flesh and Blood cards is about… incoming inequality.

It’s a good rant from a dude that never seems serious and usually talks about Timmys and tacos.

[John_Doyle]

Good rant. Heh, I have some of those booster boxes behind him. It’s crazy how much they’ve appreciated in the last twenty years!

[KevinC]

Amazon’s New ‘Factory Towns’ Will Lift the Working Class

If you get paywalled I think you can get in via Google searching the headline if you really want to know how bad the take is.

[inactive_user]

But it worked so well last time!

[KevinC]

Looking to the Gilded Age for ideas on how to improve income inequality. Truly brilliant.

[ShivaX]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfp2O9ADwGk

A song of hope and the future.

[Thrag]

If that video had credits wardrobe services would be listed as provided by cocaine.

[BennyProfane]

That Bloomberg article is shallow, but it does raise some good points (though it doesn’t necessarily answer them).

I have no doubt that working in an Amazon fulfillment center is grinding. But I’m more concerned that in 10 years, most of those jobs will be automated and then you will have tens of thousands of unemployed people living in a ring around urban areas, with no prospects and probably little access to services they will need. Will UBI be available by then?

[lordkosc]

This Simple Chart Reveals the Distribution Of Global Wealth

I’ll plop this here unless there is better thread?

[Perky_Goth]

r/Austria - Can I pay Austrians US minimum wage if they are located in Austria

My advice as an American living in Austria is for you to try the following:
Fuck off

[ShivaX]

[inactive_user]

What a wonderful distillation of some shit so many of us have been saying for so, so fucking long.

(e: it strikes me this could read as snark. Not intended!)

[JonRowe]

That is 100% the argument that people should be making when someone says “I don’t trust the government to spend our money”

But you trust billionaires to?

[Dan_Theman]

Love that. I somehow wasn’t following him before, but I am now.

[Perky_Goth]

The Pandemic and Capitalism

Neoliberalism received a shock at the dawn of our century with the bursting of the dot-com bubble and then 9-11, and an even bigger one with the financial crisis of 2007-2009. All this gave rise to a backlash from the left, at least in Western countries. This movement is characterized by the trope of exclusion of certain groups from the general prosperity, inflected by a group consciousness and a politics of identity. The left in short became neoliberal in its core commitments. It no longer sought fundamental reform of the capitalist system, still less its overthrow. Instead the “progressive” view—as personified across the globe by luminaries ranging from Paul Krugman to Thomas Piketty—is to seek redistribution within the system, an economics combining growth with opportunity. Opportunities are to be delivered by education, affirmative action, anti-discrimination enforcement, and similar measures, plus a reorientation of the tax burden toward the ultra-wealthy in the name of social justice. Social entrepreneurship and self-help are other aspects of this worldview.
These measures aim to make neoliberal austerity—an ideology lent protective cover by calls for “fiscal responsibility”—more balanced and more fair, and to curtail the most egregious consequences of capitalism, including environmental injustice, extreme poverty, and differential life expectancy, so that they do not fall so heavily on people of color or other marginalized groups. But those in the neoliberal left do not dispute the system itself. Nor do they question its success at delivering the goods in the form of material sufficiency and of incessant, seductive novelty in the experiences of consumption. Acceptable politics therefore resolves into a tussle between Hillary Clinton 2016 and Elizabeth Warren 2020, between “America is already great” and calls for wealth taxes and anti-trust, to make capitalism work (somewhat) better than it actually does. To people with this perspective, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn were beyond the pale.
Meanwhile, Azmanova argues that capitalism itself has moved on, leaving its neoliberal phase behind and the global left-neoliberal critique and prescriptions largely dangling in mid-air.
Precarity capitalism , Azmanova argues, is our fourth phase and has become the new face of the old system. Its main trait is not growth or competitiveness but instability, and its dominant form of inequality is not of income or wealth but of security and self-confidence. The crucial divide within economies dominated by precarity is between a minority ensconced in a diminishing set of safe career paths or sufficient wealth not to bother worrying about that, and a majority living in persistent anxiety over the costs of health, housing, education, the quality of public services and other formerly ordinary attributes of middle-class life. And to this one might add the overarching fear of ecological limits, manifested mainly as climate change.

[JoshL]

For the life of me, I cannot figure out what is being argued in that article. Something something the global left screwed everything up by not dismantling capitalism?

[Perky_Goth]

If regulation and reigning in is the new socialism, sure. Otherwise, just not fighting for real limits on capitalism.
After all, even the alternatives are capitalist.

[scottagibson]

@JoshL

Something something the global left screwed everything up by not dismantling capitalism?

Not even that. We apparently screwed up by not better regulating capitalists. Shocking revelation, that.

@Perky_Goth

If regulation and reigning in is the new socialism, sure. Otherwise, just not fighting for real limits on capitalism.

I’m not really getting the fine distinction between regulation and reining in and real limits, and the article isn’t much help with that.

[Aceris]

@JoshL

For the life of me, I cannot figure out what is being argued in that article. Something something the global left screwed everything up by not dismantling capitalism?

He reviews a book by one lefty approvingly and then goes off on a lengthy tangent about how daddy was right.

The idea that all developed western nations can simultaneously maintain an industrial stock whose productivity grows at a rate out of proportion to the rest of the economy is clearly nonsense. The “successes” (from his perspective) of Japan, Germany, South Korea (and China, although there are other things going on there as well) have relied on the willingness of other countries to allow their industrial sectors to shrink, either because of an ideological perspective that sees the increase in immediate total prosperity as more desireable (I guess you could call that neoliberalism?) or, within the EU and particularly the Euro, because they cannot legally do otherwise.

[scottagibson]

Is there a reason that one can’t have a service-based economy and strong unions and strong labor protections? I don’t think the answer is obviously ‘yes’.