This article originally appeared on Occupy.com
This week on Act Out!, the REALLY hateful eight get a low life scum spotlight as we dive into the latest Oxfam report about the continuous rise of global income inequality. Next up, writer and activist Justin Podur gives us a rundown on war and peace in Colombia, how Uncle Sam and corporate goons benefit and what WE can do – thinking globally and acting locally.
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PJKar replied on
Piketty, Inequality and Capitalism
The hateful eight indeed! I believe it was Balzac who said behind every great fortune is a great crime. Criminal, low life scum. A very interesting presentation on inequality, the sociopaths associated with it and their despicable associates like Bank of America who destroyed so many peoples lives in the 2008 financial disaster.
Thank you for bringing attention to the Piketty paper. Just to supplement the video Piketty’s paper can be found here,
http://wid.world/document/f-alvaredo-l-chancel-t-piketty-e-saez-g-zucman-global-inequality-dynamics-new-findings-wid-world-2017/
Page 4 contains a link to WID.world the World Wealth and Income Database a user friendly, database accessible to everyone that he and others developed for measuring inequality in various countries.
The Oxfam report can be found here:
https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/economy-99
The growth in inequality resulting in the obscene disparity we observe today is well substantiated in the statistics presented in the video and as indicated this trend will continue. A question then arises, can this trend toward increasing disparity be reversed. The aforementioned Thomas Piketty, is a world renowned scholar on the topic of wealth and income inequality, a neoclassical economist who is no enemy of capitalism. However, in his widely acclaimed book on inequality particularly as it relates to capitalist economies, “Capital in the 21st Century” he is decisive in his conclusion that in a capitalist system the trend cannot be reversed on its own. In his summary of his major results he states:
“The second conclusion, which is the heart of the book, is that the dynamics of wealth distribution reveal powerful mechanisms pushing alternately toward convergence (less inequality) and divergence (more inequality). Furthermore, there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.” (parentheticals added)
The increasing trend in inequality is a permanent feature of capitalism on its own.