Links

Reading is different on line (via Naked Capitalism)I find that I still print papers even short ones if I have to back and forth.
This is probably a minor example Andrew Gelman on Simpson's paradox.
The drugging of the American boy (via Rahul Siddarthan). Blame it on classifications? Here a philosopher looks at DSM-5
Peter Martin in The Age looks at trade agreements but is vary of TPP.
Maine against tax dodging multinationals
Sidharth Mongia on T20 and Yuvaraj
Dysfunctional police: baby charged for attempted murder
Mhaske, son of a laborer returns from US to contest elections in India
Upperstall chooses this video in its tribute to cinematographer V.K. Murthy:

Marx, Piketty and Krugman

What little I know of Marx is from this essay by Robert Heilbroner (a lapsed Marxist, I think) in his book "The Worldly philosophers" and a more recent book "Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism" by Paul Mattick Jr.
Piketty in his Capital21 is somewhat dismissive of Marx, but as Doug Henwood says in his review:
"Starting with the title, the eternally recurrent specter of Marx hangs over this book. Early into the first page of the introduction, Piketty asks, “Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century?” Phrasing the question as something grounded in the past is a nice distancing technique, as the psychoanalysts say, but the answer is clearly yes. Several times, Piketty disavows Marx—just a few lines later he credits “economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge” for allowing us to avoid “the Marxist apocalypse”—but he also concedes that those prophylactics have not changed capitalism’s deep structures and the tendency for wealth to concentrate. It seems, in other words, that Piketty’s own research shows that the old nineteenth-century gloomster had a point."

Paul Krugman has been enthusiastic about Piketty's book in his posts and is writing a detailed review of the book. Now Rober Waldman (about whom I know very little but his name name appears frequently in Economist's View linked posts) says in Krugman and Kapital "He has been flirting with Marx for a while (Thomas Piketty seems to be a mutual friend who helped them break the ice)." May be the detailed data presented by Piketty convinced him of some of Marx's points. It seems that Marx won't go away.

Paul Krugman on gravity

I always thought that this kind of anti-gravity force works at every level. "You see my point: the sheer wealth of the 0.1 percent has a kind of gravitational attraction, pulling people into their orbit and their worldview." says Paul Krugman in Channels of oligarchic influence: an example.

P.S. Related discussion at Economist's view.
With all the focus on top 1% or .001%, I cannot help feeling that many others have a role too, particularly the middle classes. Palma said a couple of years ago ‘In Latin America the middle classes seek to defend their share of income with different forms of alliances with the élite (some more successfully than others). This is different to India, for example, where the administrative classes defend their position mostly via alliances with the poor (which gives them the political power to mediate in the different conflicts between the capitalist élite and the state)’. from
http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/its-the-share-of-the-rich-stupid-brilliant-inequality-stats-politics-from-gabriel-palma/

A dance from 'White Nights' 1985

More Piketty discussions

Steve Roth at Angry Bear :
"Where are the lines between “real” capital, “human” capital, and “financial” capital? What are their economic relationships? (If you’re under the impression that they’re obvious or clearly understood and agreed-upon, you’re not thinking very hard. At all.)

My purpose here is not to solve that capital conundrum — far be it from me. I come not to bury Piketty, but to praise him. His usages and definitions provide a very useful framework in which to discuss issues that have been hard to discuss coherently absent such framing. The evidence he’s assembled within that framework, and his remarkably cogent discussion of that evidence, gives ample evidence of that.

But even more: By tackling these definitional issues head-on (if not always successfully), he has brought an inconclusively theorized crux of economic thinking — the nature of capital (plus wealth, value, and even money) — back to the forefront of discussion. We can all hope that much good will come from that."

And Kevin Quinn at Econospeak.

James Galbraith on Capital

James Galbraith in his review of Piketty's Capital 21 says
"Although Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, has written a massive book entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he explicitly (and rather caustically) rejects the Marxist view. He is in some respects a skeptic of modern mainstream economics, but he sees capital (in principle) as an agglomeration of physical objects, in line with the neoclassical theory. And so he must face the question of how to count up capital-as-a-quantity.

His approach is in two parts. First, he conflates physical capital equipment with all forms of money-valued wealth, including land and housing, whether that wealth is in productive use or not. He excludes only what neoclassical economists call “human capital,” presumably because it can’t be bought and sold. Then he estimates the market value of that wealth. His measure of capital is not physical but financial.

This, I fear, is a source of terrible confusion. Much of Piketty’s analysis turns on the ratio of capital—as he defines it—to national income: the capital/income ratio. It should be obvious that this ratio depends heavily on the flux of market value. And Piketty says as much."
But Piketty also says that he is looking for long term trends. It is not clear to me that housing or land cannot be considered as capital. For one thing, money can be made in investing in real estate. Money can be borrowed using land and housing and can be invested. Lot of middle class people, apart from the rich, have been doing this. Once you accept physical capital (James Galbraith has objections to this too), I do not see why housing and land cannot be accepted as capital.
Just trying to understand Piketty bit by bit taking criticisms into account.
P.S. Brad DeLong pitches in "Two pieces on Thomas Piketty that I do not like so much.

The first is the almost always reliable and very sharp James K. Galbraith, who--for some reason I don't understand--thinks that Piketty intends his Capital to be a book about production rather than about distribution. And as a result I think his review goes awry: James K. Galbraith"

Links

I might have linked this before but I noticed a video to go with it Your ancestors, your fate

I find that I have misunderstood and miscalculated while reading Capital by Piketty. I am now trying to supplement it by a paper of Piketty and Zucman. Here is a piece from The Economist on some crucial parts of the book (possibly google search of the title may be needed to access it) Reading "Capital": Chapters 5 and 6. Some from the left do not seem to like it , here is a review of a review by Philip Pilkington.

Another Geeta Dutt-Lata Mangeshkar duet

via Dustedoff.

An old favourite from Waadah 1957

Another review of Piketty

I have almost completed reading Piketty's Capital. But there are various things I have to reread and also try to follow his calculations, perhaps using Piketty-Zucman. But his presentation is clear and readable. In this review The Age of the obvious:Piketty's Capital:
"This is an important book: it marshals a lot of data, and puts it together in a coherent model.

But the model is not as new as it might seem. Piketty spends a lot of time distancing himself from Marx, and well he should, because this argument, even with a different model of what Capital is than Marx used, isn’t that much different from Marx’s view on the concentration of Capital, nor is his view of post – WWII history particularly different from a fairly orthodox reading of it: the financial collapse, depression, and two World Wars destroyed the wealth and thus power of the rich, and made it possible to put in place policies which were hostile to their interests and which made it so that more of national income was distributed to ordinary people......

There is no fundamental analysis of the mode of production or the mode of violence, either, and without those you cannot determine how much power various groups have to take a share of the national income.  How many people are needed for production?  How many people are needed for violence?

Piketty’s book is important primarily because it proves the obvious, and this is the age of the obvious.  You must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, what any educated individual already should know because there is a lot of money in obfuscating the obvious. It pays very well to be a conservative ideologue spouting off about economic freedom, because very rich people want the government to make them rich, bail them out, and not tax them."

George Kennan on democracy

I came across this quote.
 “There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentric than embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision … Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the centre of all virtue.” 
Google search showed that it is due to George Kennan one of the architects of cold war from a book of his Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin. Apparently, he belonged to the realist school of diplomacy and was deeply suspicious of democracy.

Strange electoral reforms proposed in Canada

one of them "Section 44 of Bill C-23 requires Elections Canada to appoint central poll supervisors from lists of names provided by the candidate or party that came first in the last election, favouring incumbents and their parties."  from Don't undermine elections in Canada.
Comment from The Age "In Canada, the process of the changes has been as worrying as the content. The government is bypassing the usual forms of consultation and full parliamentary and public debate that normally occur with any major changes to electoral administration.

If all of this can happen in Canada, it can potentially happen anywhere, and there are hints that aspects of these reforms might be on the agenda here."

One from Baaji (1963)

Two from Mousiqar 1962

Varieties of Marxism?

I find from a link that Richard Singer posted and some related discussions  that there may be several varieties of Marxism. I have been following only one thread that I read in Robert Heilbroners's "The Worldly Philosophers". Even there I could not understand the thesis, antithesis stuff. It is about capital's emphasis on profits rather than useful production, the corresponding need for low wages, unemployment and the problems that might arise due to too much accumulation of capital. The period with which we are familiar with from the first world war to 1970 ort so seems to be an exceptional period and perhaps should not be taken as a model. The link which Richard posted Marx blogged to death.
P.S. Link to Heilbroner chapter on Marx 

Two about the middle classes

One by Thomas Frank at Salon Plutocracy without end: Why the 1 percent always defeats the middle class "What hit me that day was the possibility that my happy, postwar middle-class world was the exception, and that the plutocracy we were gradually becoming was the norm. .... As the triumphant wingers stand athwart the unconscious bodies of their opponents, beating their chests and bellowing for some new and awesomely destructive tax cut, a liberal’s heart turns longingly to such chimera as pendulum theory, or thirty-year-cycle theory, or the theory of the inevitable triumph of the center. Some great force will fix those guys, we mumble. One of these days, they’ll get their comeuppance...........You can build a plutocratic model that will stumble along just fine, like it did in the nineteenth century. It requires different things: instead of refrigerators for all, it needs bought legislatures and armies of strikebreakers—plus bailouts for the big banks when they collapse under the weight of their stupid loans, an innovation of our own time. All this may be hurtful, inefficient, and undemocratic, but it won’t dismantle itself all on its own."
From The desperation of the vanishin middle class by James Kwak:
"The underlying problem with financial advice—besides the fact that most of it is wrong, conflicted (in the conflict of interest sense), or covert marketing—is that, even in the best case, it rarely works. The underlying financial problem that most Americans have isn’t that they buy too many lattes or pick the wrong stocks. It’s that they don’t make enough money to begin with, at a time when many necessities like health care and education are getting more expensive. "
Some of the Indian middle class that I have seen in coastal Andhra (from contractors to small landowners to bus drivers, seems a bit different. They tend to save in gold or buy little plots of real estate in towns or keep the land and real estate they inherit. The prices have invariably gone up and many of them are quite comfortable now except those who did not move from farming. Those in cities and some of the richer ones seem to be investin in stocks.

Still reading Piketty

Just finished Chapter 12, though I have to reread earlier chapters, particularly Chapter 11. There have been several excellent reviews and alternative suggestions to his for the problems raised. The closest my reading is one by Doug Henwood http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_01/12987
See also Inequality and sabotage: Piketty, Veblen and Kalecki and the discussion
Was Marx right? in NY Times
P.S. I find that I have misunderstood some crucial parts and so have to go back and forth.

Chart book of economic inequality

for 25 countries via Timothy Taylor: "The 25 countries are partly determined by the availability of long-run (meaning a good chunk of the 20th century) data. Along with the United States, the other countries are  Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mauritius, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The figure for each country is also followed by a few bulletpoints that highlight some main trends. Detailed sources for the data are also provided."

Faculty vs administration numbers

I remember a Dutch professor telling me in 1980 that there was time when the number of admninistrators in his university was a fraction of the faculty number but by then it has crossed. This paper discusses the trends since the eighties in the US. Harvard is apparently bucking the trend. It is apparently leading to protests in some places. A quick search did not lead me to the exact data. From this article  from 2011
"In 2005, colleges and universities employed more than 675,000 fulltime faculty members or full-time equivalents. In the same year, America’s colleges and universities employed more than 190,000 individuals classified by the federal government as “executive, administrative and managerial employees.” Another 566,405 college and university employees were classified as “other professional.” This category includes IT specialists, counselors, auditors, accountants, admissions officers, development officers, alumni relations officials, human resources staffers, editors and writers for school publications, attorneys, and a slew of others. These “other professionals” are not administrators, but they work for the administration and serve as its arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouthpieces."
This from 2014 has numbers for public schools:
"To get an idea of how drastically the situation has changed over time, consider that in the 1949-50 school year, teachers outnumbered non-teaching staff by 2.37 to 1. In other words, sixty years ago there were 237 public school teachers for every 100 non-teaching staff. Now in states like Virginia, that ratio has almost been completely reversed, and there are now 1.83 non-teachers for every public school teacher in Virginia, or 183 administrators and non-teaching staff for every 100 teachers!"

The debate starts

'Save capitalism from the capitalists by taxing wealth' from The Economist's View