CapitalistImperialistPig

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me................  F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Rich Boy . Hemingway heard and borrowed critic Mary Colum's rejoinder to the effect that the only difference was that they had more money.  Robert Sapolsky takes a look at the data and the neurobiology.  It seems that the answer is both no and yes.  ...when it comes to empathy and compassion, rich people tend to suck. This has been explored at length in a series of studies by Dacher Keltner of UC Berkeley. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, on the average, the wealthier people are, the less empathy they report for people in distress and the less compassionately they act. Moreover, wealthier people are less adept at recognizing other people’s emotions and in experimental settings are greedier and more likely to cheat or steal. Two of the findings were picked up by the media as irresistible: (a) wealthier people (as assessed by the cost of the car ...

Krugman on the right's furious efforts to discredit Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century : Brad DeLong links to the now extensive list of pieces debunking the FT’s attempted debunking of Thomas Piketty, and pronounces himself puzzled: I still do not understand what Chris Giles of the Financial Times thinks he is doing here… OK, I don’t know what Giles thought he was doing — but I do know what he was actually doing, and it’s the same old same old. Ever since it became obvious that inequality was rising — way back in the 1980s — there has been a fairly substantial industry on the right of inequality denial. This denial didn’t rely on any one argument, nor did it involve consistent objections. Instead, it involved throwing many different arguments against the wall, hoping that something would stick. Inequality isn’t rising; it is rising, but it’s offset by social mobility; it’s cancelled by greater aid to the poor (which we’re trying to destroy, but never min...

After a long sojourn in the shadows, inequality has reared its head in the public discourse again, especially in the recent statements of Obama and the Pope. The exact sources of inequality in today's world are a bit hard to trace, but some threads are known. In the first place, greater inequality in the US is partly driven by outsourcing and the rapid economic progress of Asia and parts of the old Communist empire. In that sense, some of American inequality is driven by decreasing inequality between Chinese (say) and Americans. Almost everywhere, though, the disparity between the rich and the rest has increased dramatically. A lot of this can be traced to the triumph of neo-liberal economic thought - which is pretty much is called paleo-conservative economics in the US. The massive failures of socialist economics led to gigantic opportunities for those who could pick up failing government businesses for a song - usually with the help of political connections and gross skulldu...