While I found Allison Schrager’s City Journal review of Thomas Piketty’s new book interesting throughout, I found its opening paragraph particularly so:
The overwhelming majority of economists agree on a few things: secure, well-defined property rights are a vital ingredient of growth; people respond to incentives; the economy is not zero-sum; sustainable growth comes from innovations that enable us to make more from less; some trade-off between equality and growth is necessary because innovation often makes some people rich, and they must be rewarded for their risk-taking and talents.
The reason: I think it’s a succinct statement of the views of socialists including “democratic socialists” in the United States. They do not seem to believe in property rights, that peole respond to incentives, that the economy is not zero-sum, i.e. that in a purchase transaction there is always an exploiter and an exploited, or that economic inequality should exist. The empirical evidence for the matters Dr. Schrager lists is overwhelming but, as Jonathan Swift observed:
Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.
No amount of evidence will persuade anyone from disagreeing with those views because they are essentially religious in nature, i.e. by reasoning never acquired.
Nonetheless I agree with Dr. Piketty that a violent revolution against market systems is coming but, unlike Dr. Piketty, I think it will result in the empowerment of a new aristocracy and the impoverishment of billions.
You can’t reason yourselves into a consensus.
But, you CAN use reason to extend an EXISTING consensus.
The trick is getting the order right.
FIRST find an existing consensus, THEN argue.
Nothing less will work.
Slightly more detailed exposition here:
https://medium.com/@piercello/reason-in-the-age-of-disinformation-dce61888ff71
I see much of the purpose of today’s politics as PREVENTING consensus from emerging, so that the resulting perma-conflicts can be leveraged for power and influence.
But there is, I think, a knee in the exponential info-tech curve, beyond which the perma-conflict approach to politics is no longer viable, or even attractive.
The signs suggest we may already be there.
Will we survive the turbulence of the transition? Time will tell.
I have not read any left leaning economist who would disagree with the statements from your excerpt. Who are you thinking of as socialists that would disagree?
Steve
I didn’t say that left-leaning economists disagreed with those views but that socialists including “democratic socialists” do. They’re much more common on the Continent. Piketty rather obviously disagrees with them. James Galbraith all but certainly disagrees with them—some of his articles have been republished by the Democratic Socialists of America for that very reason.
Speaking of whom the DSA includes present and former members of Congress and some other prominent Americans. The views being criticized appear right on their web site:
I think it will result in the empowerment of a new aristocracy and the impoverishment of billions.
Basically, feudalism, or its capitalist cousin, fascism.
I believe that entropy and diminishing returns apply to governmental, economic, and societal systems. Over time, they naturally become more disorderly and less efficient.
Property Rights
My personal data is my property, but I have no rights. When Facebook sells my data obtained through one of its users contact list, that is theft, and using my tax dollars to subsidize the court system Facebook uses to justify that theft is socialism.
Progressives are clueless, and free-market capitalists are blind. What a wonderful world.