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   pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jul-2023 02:57:43 JST pettter

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   • Charles U. Farley

   @freakazoid Re: inequality data I think that Thomas Piketty is probably doing the best possible job, but even then I have a lot of issues with both the data and what he does with it.

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     Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jul-2023 02:57:44 JST Charles U. Farley

     What if I told you that the actual goal of monetary policy is to hold down the standard of living of the working class?

     Hear me out.

     1. Rising rents are considered bad; they're included in CPI. But rising *purchase prices*, which represent how accessible the financial security of homeownership is, are considered good, and they are only indirectly included in CPI through "owners' equivalent rent".

     2. When things get so expensive that we have to buy something else, they just change the CPI basket so that the thing we can't afford anymore stops having any effect

     3. When things get crappier, CPI often includes that as a *deflator* through "hedonic adjustment". Your donut spare, for example, is considered to add something like $500 to the value of your car over a full size spare

     4. When inflation gets too high, the central bank responds by inducing unemployment, i.e. by pushing down working class incomes

     5. Because the working class by definition has to work to survive, "full employment" says nothing about the standard of living

     6. Rising stock prices are considered good even though most working class people can't afford to own stocks, which makes the stock market a proxy for wealth inequality.

     Why would they do this? Surely they're not simply evil. The reason is that their actual goal is to maximize wealth inequality, which is just another term for the power of the most powerful. The whole system has been engineered to transfer ever increasing amounts of power to the people who already have power, and central banks are the most powerful and opaque instrument of wealth transfer that has ever been created.

     It's actually really hard to find a good visualization of wealth inequality. Most histograms look at the total wealth controlled by the different percentiles, but the buckets used are vastly different in size. The top 0.1% of households in the US, 132,000 households, control $18 trillion. That's $136 million per houshold if it were evenly distributed which it's not. The bottom 50%, 66 million households, control $3.44 trillion, or $52,000 per household. That's a difference of 2616x.

     How can votes matter at all when 1/1000 of the population controls over 5x the resources of a majority of the population? It doesn't matter that the 50-99.9th percentile controls more wealth, because concentrated interests always win out over dispersed interests, and of course most of those people have been bamboozled into thinking they're on the same side as Bezos and Musk even if they don't actually *like* Bezos or Musk. They're just happy to be in the top half and not the bottom half.

     pettter repeated this.
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     Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jul-2023 02:57:55 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     It's not like central bank governors are thinking "What can I do today to maximize wealth inequality the most?" Not at all. Instead, they focus on *proxies* for wealth inequality. Proxies like the stock market, the price of houses and other assets, and unemployment. Actions that drive up unemployment also drive down working class wages and thus labor costs, which increases corporate profits and thus the wealth of the wealthy. Practically everything central bankers consider "good" is a proxy for increased wealth inequality, while anything that reduced wealth inequality would cause those proxies to move in a direction they would consider "bad".

     Think about what it would take to make houses affordable: either house prices would have to grow more slowly than inflation, which would require high inflation, or houses would have to fall in price, which would drive up the default rate and require bailing out banks and the GSEs that support the mortgage market. Meanwhile, that would cause the total wealth of the 50-90th percentile to drop dramatically, because home equity represents a substantial fraction of their net worth.