There are a lot more people out there that quote Piketty than have read Piketty.

The basic idea here — that capitalism has entered a stage of long-term stagnation, where each recovery is turning out to be more lackluster than the last one — is essentially a variation on Piketty’s blunter “r > g” — which expresses the belief that, if left unchecked, capitalism will evolve into a rentiers’ paradise.

Piketty makes this really damn clear, puts it into words a half-dozen times and uses examples across 400 years of history: "R > G" is written for economists who can't think without coefficients but as far as the rest of us are concerned, the plain-text bald-as-day argument is that capitalism accumulates wealth. That's it. That's the whole book. He certainly offers a number of potential solutions but a good 85% of that book is demonstrating all the different ways that capitalism accumulates wealth. His use of the term rentier is for people whose income is passive, rather than active. It is, by definition, accumulated. And he makes the point that the longer wealth has been permitted to accumulate the more inequality there will be.

The key element shaping inequality is no longer the employment relationship, but rather whether one is able to buy assets that appreciate at a faster rate than both inflation and wages.

Assumes facts not in evidence. The key element shaping inequality is the assets one grows up with and one can continuously tap. This has never not been the case. Example: I have a buddy who is showrunner on three shows on Netflix. He's repped at Principato Young. He's as successful as successful can be but since he grew up in a broken home out in Mojave he rents an okay house in Hancock Park. I have another buddy who didn't finish college but since his mom decided not to sell her childhood home when Grandpa died he lives rent-free two Gold Line stops from DTLA. As does his girlfriend, who can now afford to take a hairdressing job in Orange County because she's getting an easy $2500/mo rent subsidy. People without those subsidies bailed a long time ago, or they live in extremely modest circumstances: my roommate in LA couldn't afford to work in LA if he weren't getting the friend rate on his room and even still, he's getting supplemental income every month from his folx.

Employment remains an important factor as it shapes the ability to do so (e.g., the ability to service a mortgage), but it is increasingly only one among other factors.

We used to believe in 20% down payments. We're now at 3%. If I were to buy my own house for what it's worth right now I'd need to have $15k put aside so I could put $2500 a month towards it. 20 years ago my wife put $6k aside so she could put $1150 a month towards it. If my wife were to graduate this year she'd make about $5k more a year doing her job than she did in 1999. MONEY FROM YOUR PARENTS is the primary driver in homeownership which is why the millennials are salty - lots of their parents were wiped out in 2008 so no house for them.

I certainly hope wealthy America will one day no longer successfully stoke infighting amongst the plebs, but there are few signs that such is on the horizon. I'm not alleging that it's always a conscious "stoking" from the wealthy, at the individual level, but it's certainly happening at an institutional level.

Anarcho-libertarians say: "See, the system sucks, we should abolish it completely", but offer no way to first either 1) enforce a more equitable distribution of wealth before the suspension of all gov't, or 2) convince me that a free market alone imposes enough accountability on any wealthier asset-owners. In fact, point #1 is not a goal at all, for many. Wealth inequality is considered righteous and necessary. I agree that some wealth inequality can exist in a perfectly healthy society, but I consider the current distribution absurd. Truly fixing things might require a cultural revolution, but the US is sooooooo not there yet. The cultural volatility is around, but it's been effectively harnessed. On both sides of the political aisle, to an extent. One distinction? The progressives actually have policy ideas. The GOP has unity behind a demagogue, though, which turned out to be a surprisingly effective vehicle to help them preserve minority rule.

Giving voice to this sense of accelerating economic polarization and concomitant political trends, Malcolm Harris in his book Kids These Days says of his own generation that they will end up as “fascists or revolutionaries, one or the other.”

It does seem like the millenials and gen-X'ers that scrutinize American politics and economics the most have decided that some radical new approach may be necessary. Stabilizing the climate is necessary. How the free market alone fully manages that before things get catastrophically worse is still unclear to me.

I will concede that "good" cultural shifts could make the free market work, in a lot of cases. But "good" cultural shifts make sense; They are based on reasoning, e.g. a logical response towards a threat, working towards something better for oneself and/or others. Although there is certainly a lot of culture shifting going on, our objective reality has been poisoned with mis- and dis-information, and so the process of responding towards things like worsening economic conditions is very much disrupted. Fox News sucks, but I'm convinced that social media will prove to be the real tipping point. We may be forced to restructure society because of how disruptive the internet has been.

In a skit about some of this, someone would give a speech from a podium in which they use the word "capital". An attendee looks it up in their Marxist Language Dictionary. Of course, it's there. The doxxing begins, and after the speaker is kidnapped by an angry mob less than one minute later, the attendee is questioned by police and contests any responsibility for the kidnapping on the basis of "free speech suppression". Because first amendment references are a magical password, the police leave immediately, and to defuse any and all possible joke whoosh'ing, the attendee explains to the camera that people can't be using Marxist language. The police reappear, and join in denouncing commie bastards. One officer's gun is engraved "Karl Marx's Last Kiss".

disclaimer: am_Unition is an anti-libertarianism bot trained on Hubski propaganda submitted by viewers like you. No but I did enjoy the article, thank you. :)