Yeah TJ I agree.
THE last thing I would want is to turn this space into a political discussion forum. I have enough of those in "RL". I am also happy to be friendly with a number of more conservative people on this site and want to keep it that way and talk and play baseball here.
But I will take this bait just this one time. This is from a speech I gave around two years ago on the state of our civilization:
Its inequality is unsustainable. It has been estimated that the ratio of the income of the rich to that of the poor in ancient Athens was around 400 to one, while for the late Roman Republic it was around 20,000 to one. Well, CEO pay to the average worker’s income in the United States has now reached 400 to one a couple of years ago and has continued to rise, so we are beyond the levels of ancient Greece, a democratic society, but one with a hereditary aristocracy and slave owners. Meanwhile, the ratio between the income of the richest Americans – hedge fund managers and private equity managers, and the average income has now reached 16,000 to one, so we are about at Roman levels of inequality in the United States of America. But our civilization today is global, and when we look worldwide, the Romans look like bleeding heart liberals compared to us – the richest 200 people have incomes equal to those of the 3 billion poorest, of half of the human race, and the two richest men in the world, Carlos Slim and Bill Gates, each increased their overall holdings this past year, this year alone during a major world recession, from 120 to 170 billion dollars each. As nearly as I can do the math, the ratio between the richest people in the world the 2-3 billion that survive on about 2 dollars or so a day is around 10 million to one. That is unsustainable, it cannot last, and no civilization can, or should survive, that encompasses that level of inequality.
One aspect of this inequality relates to the intellectual crisis and its material roots. That is the growing abyss between “mental” and “manual” labor, or more precisely between a privileged few who are celebrities and everyone else. Michelangelo was a member of the stone cutter’s guild, a recognition that while everyone understood the difference in talent between the ordinary stone cutter and the greatest sculpture that ever lived, that difference was one of degree, they were of the same type, and indeed one who cut stone himself could appreciate all the more the skill of the best. Once baseball players and other athletes had jobs in the off season, working in sporting goods stores or bars to earn extra money, and many Americans and other ordinary people played the games they watched as members of organized teams. Again, by playing, they were better able to understand the skill of the professionals even if they could never have effectively competed against them. Democracy’s perspective is that of the amateur. Today, a few celebrities, a few highly sophisticated mathematicians on Wall Street developing derivatives, those who know how to run a Central Bank, to plan an economy at least of the sort we currently have, experience lives that have nothing in common with those of ordinary people and the work they do. Spinoza was once an ordinary, skilled lens crafter, Dante a member of the apothecaries’ guild. This gap between mortal humans as though some are gods and the rest of us the extras on Star Trek, expendable so the main cast can go on their adventures, is unsustainable, and a part of the overall inequality.
Beyond that, I will just mention that for a different perspective than that of Mises to see:
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, a relevant excerpt of which can be found online here:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
and for two different perspectives providing a more realistic history of the development of modern market economies there is the magnificent three-volume work by Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Civilization, and the one-volume masterpiece by my old, late professor and friend Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century.
Finally, the best recent work on the rise of capitalism is Silvia Federici, Caliban and Witch. All of these do a little better job of explaining how societies have developed than the fairy tale that Mises tells. And of course, for the daring, there are chapters 26-32 of Marx's Capital, vol. 1. This is the readable, historical part, and the last of these chapters provides a good account of how you end with the gap between the 1% and the 99% we have today. I named a team for it in an OL and it made it to the LCS. Not that this proves anything.
Now let's get back to baseball...
6/3/2012 9:24 AM (edited)