Friday, April 18, 2014

Methodical sedition

says The Chronicle of Higher Education in Capital Man
And an interview with Thomas Piketty by Jonathan Derbyshire. Excerpt:
"A big difference between today and a hundred years ago is that you have 20-30 per cent of national wealth in the UK and other European countries belonging to what I describe in the book as the “patrimonial middle class”, by which I mean the 40 per cent of the population that is neither in the top 10 per cent nor the bottom 50 per cent.  The bottom 50 per cent still own less than 5 per cent of the total, so that hasn’t changed much over the past century.
So the existence of this patrimonial middle class makes a big difference to the political, social and economic landscape. The question is what happens next? Is this group going to get stronger or is it going to shrink? Is their share of national wealth going to be reduced, which is, to some extent, what has been happening in the past 30 years?"

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