"As the French economist Thomas Piketty reminds us, this is the kind of dynastic wealth that’s kept Europe’s aristocracy going for centuries. It’s about to become the major source of income for a new American aristocracy."
I thought that in classic feudalism the lords ("non-working rich") most definitely did have to work to keep their positions - they had to supply men and fight for their king personally when required.
Edit: You can arguably still remnants of this in parts of the British Army - particularly cavalry regiments.
My understanding is that most slave owners where 'middle class'. Sure they could afford a few slaves to help out with the heaviest work on the plantations, but certainly not enough to completely free them of having to work themselves.
With 10 slaves IN the house, taking care of cleaning and everything?
Exact numbers aren't easy to come by, but at least based on numbers I've found for North Carolina[0] it seems that the majority of slave owners owned less than 10 slaves in total with 2-4 being most common number of slaves slave owners owned.
Now obviously the slave owners work and working conditions was absolutely and obviously trivial compared to that of their slaves, but that is hardly the same is not working. My is working conditions are probably far more comfortable than that most of the plantation owners, but I still claim to work for a living.
>My is working conditions are probably far more comfortable than that most of the plantation owners, but I still claim to work for a living.
Are they though? They weren't supposed to solve hard (thinking-wise) business and algorithmic problems, or sit tied to a PC and program 8-12 hours a day.
If anything Southerners were considered leisurely compared to the Northerners.
Founding or running a slave plantation both required a lot of work. Just because one thing about someone is repugnant doesn't mean that everything else is. Most plantation owners worked at their disgusting trade.
Not the same at all. Remember that slaves were kdinapped from their home, shipped thousands of miles, saw their women raped to make more "product" and had their descendants forced into the same system. If you want to opt out of the corporate system you can in today's world, without worrying that slaves catchers and their dogs will be sent after you, and you will be tortured if they catch you.
So it's the same. Instead of spending money on shipping them thousands of miles, making sure their women are raped and hiring men to force their descendants into the system, you just give them some money and fill some blanks. Result is the same - cheap work done for you. I'd even say slaves were really expensive and required much oversight and trouble for the value they provided.
Go back and read your Roman history. The rest of the book's not all that great (too dense, no exposition), but the first chapter of A.H.M. Jones' biography Augustus lays out the conflicts of ~ 75 BCE to ~ 1 AD, particularly the conflict between the two principle political parties, the oligarchical optimates and the proletariate populares, as well as their respective political objectives. It's quite contemporary:
It was the agrarian problem that sparked off the violence that was ultimately to destroy the Republic. Tiberius Gracchus' bill, enacted in 133 B.C. for distributing the public land, after leaving a generous allowance to the occupiers, in small lots to poor citizens, excited such furious resistance among the senatorial landowners that a group of them lynchded Gracchus. This was the first in a series of violent clashes between two groups who called themselves the _optimates_ and the _populares_. The nucleus of the _optimates_ was the small clique of nobles (men whose fathers, grandfathers, or more remote ancesters had been consuls) who more or less monopolized the highest offices and dominated the Senate, but they had wide support among the propertied class, even, as Cicero says, propserous freedman; otherwise they could not have maintained their unbroken hold on the higher magistracies. They were conservatives, who regarded the rights of property as sacred, and therefore resisted bitterly any attempts to redistribute land or cancel debt. They were upholders of the constitution and of religion, which could be used to block any revolutionary legislation. Though at times they had to yield to popular pressure, they always remained the government.
The _populares_ were a much less well defined group. Their leaders were individual politicians or very small groups of politicians, who at intervals attempted to legislate in the interests of the people, by which they meant the common people. Most of them were also nobles, and their usual weapon was the tribunate of the plebs, which was the normal legislative office --- when the Senate wanted a law passed it normally requested the tribunes to put it to the plebeian assembly, and a tribune could pass a law without the assent of the Senate --- and possessed other formidable powers, such as an all embracing veto and the right of impeaching the most senior magistrates (after their year of office) before the people: it was also an office to which it was easy to be elected, since there were ten tribunes a year. The _populares_ developed a regular programme of legislation. First came the distribution of smallholdings to landless citizens. These were at first offered to all. Later, when Marius began to recruit landless peasants into the army, the distribution was limited to time-served soldiers, who obviously had a superior claim. The next point in the programme was the provision by the state of corn for the proletariat of Rome at a price that they could afford. From time to time the _populares_ were interested in the problem of debt, which frequently meant agricultural indebtedness. They were early successful in introducing the secret ballot into voting in the assembly, for legislation, elections and trials. They also stood up against the execution of Roman citizens without a lawful trial; the Senate was very prone to ignore this elementary right of the citizen in what it deemed to be political crises. Most _populares_ advocated the grant of citizenship to the Italian allies. They were generally interested in the welfare of the provincials; most of the extortion laws were promoted by _populares_. Finally, they substituted _equites_ (citizens owning 400,000 sesterces who were not senators) for senators as jurors in the criminal courts.
Sincerely whenever an history book names just one cause for the decline of the Roman empire, I toss it aside.
I get it, people want to have a nice clean explanation for the fall of the Roman empire, but mankind and societies don't really work that way, it was a number of big and small issues that made the Roman empire come to an end and every respectable historian during - at least - the last 2 decades as stopped trying to pinpoint just one motive.
> Six of today’s 10 wealthiest Americans are heirs to prominent fortunes. The Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined.
There's 3 large groups here : 6 out of 10 are heirs to fortunes that were already fortunes in the 18th century. 2 were made between the 2 world wars, and 2 after WW2. There does seem to be a constant here too. Wealth of the older families is declining, whereas recent fortunes seem to be increasing.
Heirs:
1. AB Inbev families (Spoelberch, de Mévius en Vandamme) - 49,391,305,000 euros.
2. Albert Frère (left on photo) - 6,205,140,576 euros
3. The Emsens Family (Etex) - 3,614,510,000 euros
5. The Lhoist-Berghmans Family (Lhoist) - 2,789,342,500 euros
6. The Janssen Family (UCB and Solvay) - 2,458,359,000 euros
7. The De Nul Family (Jan De Nul) - 2,078,252,000 euros
8. Ackermans & van Haaren - 1,700,863,000 euros
9. The Collinet Family (Carmeuse) - 1,470,600,000 euros
10. The Balcaen Family - 1,305,811,000 euros
Made wealth:
4. Frans Colruyt (centre) and the Colruyt Family - 3,246,369,000 euros
> If the owners of capital assets whose worth increases over their lifetime hold them until death, their heirs pay zero capital gains taxes on them. Such “unrealized” gains now account for more than half the value of assets held by estates worth more than $100 million.
Those people also derived no benefit from their wealth. They invested their wealth rather than spending any of it.
> The new work requirements haven’t reduced the number or percentage of Americans in poverty. They’ve just moved poor people from being unemployed and impoverished to being employed and impoverished.
I don't know enough about the Clinton welfare reforms to have an informed opinion but having a job makes it a great deal easier to get another job.
> Six of today’s 10 wealthiest Americans are heirs to prominent fortunes.
So 40% of the 10 wealthiest Americans made their own money? That sounds like the mark of a dynamic economy.
There is an interesting discussion to be had about wealth, poverty, work and the relation between them. This article is not part of it.
>Those people also derived no benefit from their wealth. They invested their wealth rather than spending any of it.
I call BS on "any of it". They spent enough -- and not that much is really needed compared to their total wealth -- to live like kings, with several luxury houses all across the country/globe, yachts, private jets, parties and all.
>I don't know enough about the Clinton welfare reforms to have an informed opinion but having a job makes it a great deal easier to get another job.
It can also make it harder, as you can't go looking for a job when you're overwhelmed working two jobs or 10+ hour shifts (as many of the "lazy" poor do). Besides this all presumes there are jobs for that particular job market -- else, merely looking or at best going from one crappy job to another is not much of an improvement.
The more better of (e.g. us programmers) can take months off of work, even start a personal project, and use our savings to get by for a while before starting to look for a new job. The poor play job seeking in a harder mode. Double so when they're fired from the previous one.
>So 40% of the 10 wealthiest Americans made their own money? That sounds like the mark of a dynamic economy.
Does it really? Seems like it should be comparative -- if 60% done the same in the past, then it would be sounding like the mark of an economy becoming less dynamic...
If this is your idea of the "1%", prepare to be disappointed. It's more like the 0.001% - a few thousand people in the US.
In California, one of the top income states in the US, the top 1% of households grossed $500k+ [1], which is about $250k after taxes (admittedly this is at the low end). This is nice house, nice cars, good schools for kids, and occasional first class trips abroad money, yes, but not yachts and private jets money.
> Those people also derived no benefit from their wealth.
Of course they did. You don't have to spend money to benefit from it. You get access to opportunities people without wealth don't have, most important being loans and such means of raising capital.
The typical approach is to get loans with the "unrealized" stuff as collateral, and then deduct the interest payments from tax owed on dividends from said assets.
So let's discuss here! I think these issues are very interesting, and it's fascinating that there exists views that differ so radically when it comes to how wealth should be redistributed (if it should), and when it comes to whether a given fortune is 'deserved'. It is also fascinating to see how different these views are between, say, Europe and the US.
Personally I think Pikettys suggestions make sense if we're trying to truly build a system where the quality and quantity of work performed is as closely mapped to the amount of wealth gained as possible. The nuances are difficult - i.e. how do we deal with the fact that parents want the best education for their children, etc? There must be set some thresholds, and as usual, people will find ways to circumvent those thresholds.
Opinions also differ on how big of a role luck plays. I lean towards the view that noone truly 'deserves' wealth because they are all products of their genes and upbringing, so if someone is lazy, is it truly their 'fault'? They lack certain neurological impulses that other people have, but how were they supposed to gain these impulses in the first place? Maybe the only difference between that person and someone non-lazy and 'successful' is that the successful kid once saw a television show about Thomas Edison which the other kid happened to miss. To me it seems obvious that it is these kinds of coincidences that make a person what s/he is. Then we create environments to make certain coincidences more probable, but there are never any guarantees that your child will not become a heroin addict, develop mental issues, or what have you. And I don't think the child is ever truly 'at fault' although we may phrase it as such in order to try to import the correct neurological pathways in our child's brain.
And the same is true for the occurrences that lead to massive wealth. In many cases it takes genius (which, as I argued above, is a matter of chance IMO) but as many people will attest, genius is only part of it - you also have to be at the right place at the right time.
Given all this it seems unreasonable to me to say that any wealth is 'deserved'. In my view, the only thing that can positively be derived from the concept of wealth is as a motivator for people to innovate. Thus, when wealth becomes something that you inherit, it has less of a sociological purpose.
This article basically says that having a wealthy non-working elite is bad. However, I'm not so sure. This non-working elite won't simply sit staring into a wall all day. Aren't many of them likely to get into cultural and artistic stuff?
Take language, for example. I think it's interesting to look at French. Seems like the guttural r became common after the French revolution. Why would anybody use that sound for communication? It's basically the same sound that you make when trying to get rid of slime from your throat. I can imagine that French used to be a really beautiful language, back in the day when France had an aristocratic elite. Seems like the French working class has basically ruined it. Or is this just a coincidence?
The English language in the USA has not suffered as badly. But I find it interesting that Americans put more weight on the r sound than the British. I've come across people who like the guttural r because they say it makes them sound more "authoritative". I guess people who have poor self-esteem often compensate with brand-name clothing and other status symbols. Maybe they compensate with language, too? Other than that, a non-working elite will have much more time to develop a refined taste, which in the case of language, is something that everyone will benefit from (assuming everybody else ape this elite).
