Piketty’s data
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Wow LBird you've just gone and written a brill review, unfortunately my opinion – like your post – is ideologically biased and falls at the first hurdle. Nevertheless, it clarifies a lot of the points you have been making over several months. Just hope when the review does appear in next months Socialist Standard it carries a disclaimer along the lines you are suggesting.
Brian wrote:Wow LBird you've just gone and written a brill review, unfortunately my opinion – like your post – is ideologically biased and falls at the first hurdle.But 'ideology' is not a 'hurdle', to be either 'fallen over' or, perhaps you are suggesting, to be best avoided entirely.'Ideology' is the inescapable enabler, the horse which we ride, to jump the hurdles.I openly give the name of my horse, because I employ the proper scientific method in the horse race that is science.Those who refuse to name their horse are not actually running the horse race on foot, they are just pretending. Believe me, they're on a horse!Come on, Communist! We're in the lead!
Brian wrote:Nevertheless, it clarifies it lot of the points you have been making over several months. Just hope when the review does appear in next months Socialist Standard it carries a disclaimer along the lines you are suggesting.Well, I would expect the periodical title of Socialist Standard would give a clue as to the mount!But, yes, perhaps the reviewer will make explicit their particular hobby horse.Is your horse named 'positivism', Brian?
LBird wrote:Brian wrote:Wow LBird you've just gone and written a brill review, unfortunately my opinion – like your post – is ideologically biased and falls at the first hurdle.But 'ideology' is not a 'hurdle', to be either 'fallen over' or, perhaps you are suggesting, to be best avoided entirely.'Ideology' is the inescapable enabler, the horse which we ride, to jump the hurdles.I openly give the name of my horse, because I employ the proper scientific method in the horse race that is science.Those who refuse to name their horse are not actually running the horse race on foot, they are just pretending. Believe me, they're on a horse!Come on, Communist! We're in the lead!
Brian wrote:Nevertheless, it clarifies it lot of the points you have been making over several months. Just hope when the review does appear in next months Socialist Standard it carries a disclaimer along the lines you are suggesting.Well, I would expect the the periodical title of Socialist Standard would give a clue as to the mount!But, yes, perhaps the reviewer will make explicit their particular hobby horse.Is your horse named 'positivism', Brian?
Your further clarification on the need to be open on declaring our ideological bias before using:The proper scientific method (and it always has been this, the positivists were pretending otherwise) is:1 raw data (ie. everything, everywhere, at every time)2 human social consciousness (including ideology and theories)3 selection from ‘everything, etc.’ based on human parameters4 presentation of pre-chosen ‘facts’ (allegedly ‘raw data’, but in reality ‘pre-cooked data’)5 implications, lessons drawn (the second ‘active’ stage)is how I've tried to approach any subject area which catches my interest. Hence my signature is to underline what I'm after are "positive outcomes" which are not based on observations but quantifiable results which makes an appreciative difference in the number of workers who have come to accept the case for the need for socialism.Just to keep on thread. I appears imo Piketty is just another apologist for capitalism by providing the data which fits his theory that 'the trickle down theory' is not working and is not going to work – ever – so we are stuck with capitalism whether we like it or not. The danger is if we accept some of his data as helpful to our case this could be misconstrued that we are endorsing positivism.
In message #154 i said"i beginning to suspect that Piketty simply threw that in as a passing after-thought and of little importance to himself having seemingly not bothered to provide any supporting evidence for it or extrapolate its effect, simply guessing what tax burden the rich could bear. "Galbraith seems puzzled too. "if the proposal is utopian, which is a synonym for futile, then why make it? Why spend an entire chapter on it—unless perhaps to incite the naive?"http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/kapital-for-the-twenty-first-century
Perhaps, more telling is this review by a trade union leader and how he is using the book. The international tax is "manna from heaven " for McCluskey.But as i said from early on and as McCluskey also says "a part of me was thinking: "Hang on, this is just telling us what we already know! …"http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/apr/28/len-mccluskey-capital-21st-century-manna-from-heaven
Adam, you remarked on the Libcom thread that "If he doesn't think the tendency of the rich to get richer (as opposed to the rate of return growing faster than the rate of growth) can be reversed why does he call for a "tax revolution" to try to do this? After all, he's not a Trotskyist raising this as an unrealistic transitional demand ! If he really believed that this particular tendency couldn't be reversed he would come as an opponent of capitalism but he definitely does not."http://libcom.org/forums/theory/capital-21st-century-piketty-16042014#newI earlier threw in on this thread that i consider him a neo-trotsky for suggesting policies that he thinks are too utopian to achieve but still recommend people politically striving for [ perhaps as a step towards increased democratic accountability that controlling the inevitable tax evasion you talked about with SP ]. Why is Piketty so keen on a policy that he himself considers very remote of being implemented. Again, this is also emphasised by Paul Mattick's review. http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/06/field-notes/editors-note-much-ado-about-something This review explains why people like McClusky a public sector union leader is enthusedhttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/a-general-without-an-army/"He argues that the debt could be effectively repudiated without default, by repaying it in a stroke by a large, one-off progressive capital tax, spreading the burden across the wealthy in general (not only bondholders), and abandoning austerity entirely. This logic can be extended to budget “crises” everywhere — the risk of social security “going bust,” of rising health costs, of just plain cramped, stretched, or inadequate public services and benefits."Anyways, that's my question for today…Who is the book actually written for?
I'm asking this question …Who did Piketty write his book for (rather than why) because YMS eaarlier on the thread pointed out importantly that Marx was one of us. Marx began his study of economics having already taken his stand on who's side he was with and then wrote his Capital to furnish the workers with the theoretical tools to combat the supporters of capitalists and frequently said so.Keynes i think wrote his economic analysis for governments and politicians to set policy, but even he seemed to want to satisfy the needs of the common person through his schemes.So coming to Piketty, if he acknowledges it is unlikely to be implemented and that is seconded by nearly all those reviews i have read by fellow economic writers, his suggestions are not the real politics of Treasury departments, finance ministers and exchequers.From one review i read, it says out of 700 pages he mentions trade unions just only three times and merely in the passing (i wonder just how many of the wrong type of fish he netted he then tossed back into the ocean on this particular subject). No lengthy descriptions or explanation of strikes and wage struggles or demands for better conditions, or descriptions of the sweat shop outsourcing that made Steve Jobs his billions (i noted in one review he approves of Steve Job's remuneration because he was an entrpeneur and innovative …while implies Gates was more of a thief). So it seems the interests of the working class was not in the forefront of who Piketty is hoping to reach out to. Or even particular cares for or have any special empathy with. I don't think he merely wrote it for the sake of providing more accurate statistics purely out of academic interest such as all those facts and figures regularly supplied by central banks. He had a motive and he aimed at a specific audience or as Paddy kept saying in Kids Stuff video …"ideology again". But who is it he wants to convince?Was it all simply to get us thinking about how we can re-distribute wealth for a collective well-being?…To pay for climate change…dump the question of national debt when it comes to paying for the Welfare State? Are all the small steps he insists we begin to make , stepping stones to someplace else…if so where?Despite the current claims, i'll be curious to know , just how much regard the book will retain in a few years time…much less after the 150 years of Marx Capital.
alanjjohnstone wrote:I'm asking this question …Who did Piketty write his book for (rather than why)…It seems that the ‘target audience’ for his book, Alan, is his own profession: that is, the bourgeois economists.
Piketty, Capital, p. 32 wrote:To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences… This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity….Hence they must set side their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything….The truth is that economics should never have sought to divorce itself from the other social sciences and can advance only in conjunction with them.And although you wanted ‘who’ rather than ‘why’, I have to hazard a guess as to ‘why’.I think that many experienced bourgeois economists can see that their discipline is disappearing up its own arse, under the deleterious influence of ‘anglo-saxon’ mathematics, and even students of economics in the universities have recently started becoming restless with being taught essentially meaningless mathematical formulae. I think that it’s no co-incidence that Piketty is French, and so from a different ‘European’ tradition which is far more aware of history (1871?), than the smug British-American ‘mathematical and statistical’ number-crunching idiots, who pay no attention to meanings or contexts, social, cultural and historical.So, I think Piketty is a good bourgeois economist, who seeks to wake up, to open the eyes, of his fellow capitalism-sympathisers and ideologists, before his profession becomes entirely worthless to the bourgeoisie in the class war. ‘Economics’ needs to regain some credibility, and Piketty is there to help.Piketty is, in the words of Marx, a hired-prizefighter for the bourgeoisie. We Communists shouldn’t be taken in by his ideology, methods, ‘data’ or resultsI think Piketty’s book is the result of a theoretical crisis with the economics profession, and will probably have no lasting effect (either within the profession or with the wider public), unless we are about to see the crumbling of the Anglo-Saxon, Thatcher/Reagan, Hayek/Friedman ideological axis within the discipline of economics.Whatever the outcome of that internecine struggle, we Communists have to pose a fundamentally different alternative, based upon Marx, or bourgeois economics will simply march on in either the old ‘mathematical’ mode or a new Pikettian form, both to our detriment.
And who better to do it than someone who was indeed previously a smug mathematical model idiot…i'm not being libelous as i think he himself describes his early pedegree as such..Yet as someone pointed out , his back book cover has him in front of a blackboard of mathematical equations as he hasn't jettisoned it as a tool as we all know by his now 1st and 2nd Laws. Turning a social science – political economy – into a physical science that. i might be wrong on this but doesn't Marx's only call one thing an actual "law" that he applies it only to a tendency (declining rate of profit) with plenty of exceptions to ensure it is not taken as a practical rule. Why did he include solutions that he even considers to be extremely unlikely to be turned into policy?This seems to be what his fellow professionals all draw attention to (as i have quoted from) while it is the "lay" commentators who emphasise the bonanza of his tax legislation and proceed to lay great worth by it.
alanjjohnstone wrote:Why did he include solutions that he even considers to be extremely unlikely to be turned into policy?This seems to be what his fellow professionals all draw attention to (as i have quoted from)…I think he knows his solutions require a jettisoning of 'mathematical' economics, and that his profession isn't ready to do so, yet at least. His 'fellow professionals' aren't yet ready to return to 'political economy' (which is, in effect, what Piketty is pleading for) and prefer to persevere with 'economics' (ie. neo-classical, individualist, mathematics).They seem suspicious of where 'political economy' might go… given where it all ended up last time, in another book called 'Capital'.
L Bird says: "Picketty is, in the words of Marx, a hired prize-fighter for the bourgeoisie. We Communists shouldn't be taken in by his ideology, methods, 'data', or results."I've not read everything of Marx by a long way, but describing someone as "a hired prize-fighter for the bourgeoisie" doesn't sound like Marx to me. Marx was an indefatigable user of data collected and made available by the British government (eg. the famous Blue Books), and a respecter (and critic) of bourgeois economists like Ricardo and Tooke, whose statistical data in A History of Prices (6 Vols) was used by Marx in writing Capital.You on the other hand, seem to have an aversion to the use of statistical data (and of mathematics generally) in economic analysis. So can you tell me please what sources you would use if you were to undertake the same task as Picketty, ie. to map the elusive shape of wealth and income inequality in modern capitalist societies? Picketty uses the World's Top Incomes Database (WITD, accessible on the Net), National Income and other data from various governments, estate tax returns etc. I like his honesty in saying that these sources, though the most extensive ever assembled, are yet incomplete and imperfect. However, since you believe that facts are constituted by theory (and ideology) I assume that the data you would use re inequality would be quite different than Picketty's data since he is a "bourgeois economist" with a different theory (and ideology) to you, a Communist. So what data would you use?
"Who did Piketty write his book for?"Couldn't it be for himself? Expecting good returns – or am I being just too trite?
J Surman wrote:"Who did Piketty write his book for?"Couldn't it be for himself? Expecting good returns – or am I being just too trite?"I did deliberately aim the book at the general reader," says Piketty as we begin our conversation, "and although it is obviously a book which can be read by specialists too, I wanted the information here to be made clear to everyone who wants to read it.'
pgb wrote:You on the other hand, seem to have an aversion to the use of statistical data (and of mathematics generally) in economic analysis. So can you tell me please what sources you would use if you were to undertake the same task as Picketty, ie. to map the elusive shape of wealth and income inequality in modern capitalist societies? Picketty uses the World's Top Incomes Database (WITD, accessible on the Net), National Income and other data from various governments, estate tax returns etc. I like his honesty in saying that these sources, though the most extensive ever assembled, are yet incomplete and imperfect. However, since you believe that facts are constituted by theory (and ideology) I assume that the data you would use re inequality would be quite different than Picketty's data since he is a "bourgeois economist" with a different theory (and ideology) to you, a Communist. So what data would you use?I'm not sure where this uncomradely tirade came from, pgb.I've never expressed "an aversion to the use of statistical data (and of mathematics generally)".I've always argued that any scientist should reveal their 'ideological' beliefs, which determine what counts as 'data', whether statistical, mathematical, anecdotal, literary, palaeological, religious, philological, mythical, etc., etc.The 'data' I would use would be 'data' produced by my ideology.I'm a Communist.Since we live in a capitalist society, most of the 'data' we need is either not collected or is not regarded as 'economic data'.The data that does exist is ignored by Piketty, and all other bourgeois economists.I'm quite happy for 'statistical and mathematical' techiques to be employed to produce 'data' referring to 'exploitation'.But first, we need a unit of exploitation to be defined and measured. Of course, we would already be aware that much 'exploitation' is not 'objectively measurable', and so is not so amenable to 'mathematics or statistics' and can't be captured as a 'unit', as it regards such subjective proletarian experiences as feelings of boredom or resentment.As a simple example, I would argue that 'personal happiness' would be an 'economic measure' within Communist economics. This could be determined by asking each worker how they 'feel' about their work, on a scale of 1 to 10. Any worker scoring less than 10 would be offered a different job.This sort of 'statistics and mathematics' is meaningless to the profession of economics.Our Communist 'economics' would be a world away from Piketty's bourgeois concerns.
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