[Peace-discuss] Next Piketty reading group - Wednesday 24 June, 6pm

[C. G. Estabrook]

Last night’s meeting of the AWARE group reading “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” began the consideration of "Part Three: The Structure of Inequality.” 

At the next meeting we’ll talk about chapter 8, “Two Worlds.” On-line access to the book: <http://resistir.info/livros/piketty_capital_in_the_21_century_2014.pdf>.

By “Two Worlds,” P. doesn’t mean the worlds of the rich and the poor, but rather two major classes of the rich: the 1% live radically different lives (and earn radically different incomes) than the next 9%. In fact, he is even more specific, distinguishing the .1% (the super-rich), the small subset who live off of income from capital.

The chapters are outlined at the end of the book. The outline of chapter 8 is as follows:

8. Two Worlds 
A Simple Case: The Reduction of Inequality in France in the Twentieth Century 
The History of Inequality: A Chaotic Political History 
From a “Society of Rentiers” to a “Society of Managers” 
The Different Worlds of the Top Decile [= 10%]
The Limits of Income Tax Returns 
The Chaos of the Interwar Years 
The Clash of Temporalities 
The Increase of Inequality in France since the 1980s 
A More Complex Case: The Transformation of Inequality in the United States 
The Explosion of US Inequality after 1980 
Did the Increase of Inequality Cause the Financial Crisis? 
The Rise of Supersalaries 
Cohabitation in the Upper Centile [= ’THE 1%’ —CGE]

Members and friends of AWARE are invited to join the group at 6pm on Wednesday 24 June at 5 Litchfield Lane in Champaign (regardless of whether they’ve read the text).

—CGE  

===========================ADDENDUM==============================
A range of uneasiness is prompted by Piketty’e equation capital = wealth. A crude summary—

DAVID HARVEY (et al.) - ‘capital' should be restricted to Marx’ usage: not all property but only productive property; 
PAUL KRUGMAN (& D. Green) - the inflated salaries of CEOs are more like capital than income from labor;
MATT ROGNLIE (MIT grad student) - the capital share of national income has risen (and the share going to workers has fallen) as P. says, but - when you account for depreciation properly - less dramatically than P. says, and entirely about housing;
RICHARD D. WOLFF (& yr. obdt. svt.) - capital should be distinguished into investible assets and other assets that go to make up net worth, for tax purposes; 
(e.g., if investible assets over $1million were subject to a progressive wealth tax, only 1% of Americans would be affected by the tax).

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