Occupy was right: capitalism has failed the world | Hacker News Reader

Occupy was right: capitalism has failed the world

theguardian.com

34 pointsselmnoo12 comments

I know the article title is kind of big and sensational'y, but I really encourage everyone to look into Piketty's book, it's really a behemoth. A lot of folks are calling it this age's 'Das Kapital". It's well-researched, and very data-backed. Piketty was a professor at MIT until 1995, when he went back to France. Here's Paul Krugman's review of the book (worth a submission of its own, really): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-...

That's a very good reading. Thanks for the hint!

The real question is: what's next?

If regulators cannot face up to established capital even while social temperature increases in response to well known global threats (environment, food, energy, population, etc.) then will a bottom-up re-organization of global economic paradigms through the adoption of new technologies for decentralized commerce eventually occur?

One thing's for sure: the centralized paradigm of old is clearly showing its warts. It also seems like most of the interesting changes are coming out of the remnants of academia, already disenfranchised communities (Greece, etc.) or the new possibilities offered by technology.

In other words, in global terms what he is saying is that those who have capital and assets that generate wealth (such as a Saudi prince) will always be richer than entrepreneurs who are trying to make capital.

Except if you look at "rich lists", you see plenty of self-made, first-generation wealth. Who are the richest men in the world? Gates, Buffett, Ellison, Slim... All businessmen.

More typical nonsense from the Graun (who by the way, are based offshore in the Cayman's for tax purposes).

"She was the first female president of King County’s United Way, the first woman to chair the national United Way’s executive committee where she served most notably with IBM's CEO, John Opel, and the first woman on the First Interstate Bank of Washington's board of directors. Mary's son Bill Gates is the founder of Microsoft."

Yeah, totally self-made, first-generation. And her connection to IBM didn't help with this MS-IBM contract at all. Anybody could get this contract with enough hard work and dedication.

I like that. Let's keep this going.

Howard was a businessman, investor, and four-term Republican United States Representative. He also served as the campaign manager for conservative Senator Robert Taft in Taft's 1952 presidential campaign. Howard's son is Warren Buffet, CEO and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway.

Oh come on. How many of his billions did Gates inherit from his parents? Umm, none. And "anyone" nearly did get that contract, but Gary Kildall was out hang-gliding that day.

And this on a website where upper middle class kids from Stanford and MIT dream of getting rich off a cat-sharing app...

What your comment does is entirely reframe the original point, which was capitalism's objective qualities as practised over the last 200 years and enumerated by a team led by one of the world's most respected economists, in terms of an assumption that the ability to get obscenely, impossibly rich is a foregone requirement before any economic system may be discussed. I find that really interesting.

Maybe also because it is much easier to assess the wealth of a businessman who owns shares of publicly traded companies than of princes in Saudi Arabia?

Would be good if your statement was backed by some statistics because I could easily make the exact opposite claim: You only know some names that hit the news on that list. These names might be 1% of that list and hence not representative.

The important thing is to know the truth in order to make the correct deductions. Can we find a such a list? How a person on that list if chosen??? etc.

Easy enough: http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#tab:overall

The Sunday Times has one too, these sorts of lists are very popular.

Good do we know how many of these people are self-made? I know the IT related guys (Gates, Zuck, Balmer, etc) but they are a fraction of the list. I'm sure there are others but what is their real % is still not known.

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