I’m starting on Piketty’s Capital, but it’s long and even just from the introduction I am getting it will probably be less “entertaining”. The writing is a bit dry. So I might mix in the Debt book too.
“Look, if I reduce reality to two variables, then I can make graphs ok!!! Then I can just extrapolate WISDOM from that and go and MAKE ACTUAL CHANGES IN THE REAL WORLD. With fucking confidence! Look at my power point!!”
Yes, I am grumpy. I have so much book left you have no idea.
These people made the big mistake of thinking their field was like physics. Though tbf to physics they have way more advanced math and wasaaay more variables and waaaaaaaaaay more understanding of what it means to simplify by removing variables.
To clarify, since there seems to be some confusion, I am not judging any of this on ideological basis. I’m judging it on methodology. I am trying to figure out if economics is as weak methodology-wise as my impression currently is. This book is not helping to alleviate that impression.
He is actually going to go on through a whole book where the whole thing is going to be about making predictions for developing nations based on historical data from now “developed” nations whose whole gig was to rob the rest of the planet of their resources…
Oh wow this makes me grumpy. He is doing it. He has already in the freaking introduction reduced everything to a tiny set of variables and simple math, and then he made a graph and made sweeping predictive statements based on it. This field is bullshit.
This thread might actually end up being even more grumpy than the Team Topologies book thread. And it is depressing to say that this book is actually more coherent than Team Topologies. That says a lot about how absolutely terrible that book was.
Oh wow, this will be rough. This is the book form of when people write a thread rather than a pithy post because they expect someone to go “well actually” so they go through every minute detail to make sure there is no case uncovered.
Except, in this case, bias is already creeping through. “Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself, the key question is to decide whether it is justified”.
If this guy doesn’t soon discuss how his data is skewed because it doesn’t cover large parts of the population that were to varying degrees not allowed to own land, inherit, vote or work freely, I’m going to buy this book in physical form just to stab it.
“Look at me! I have government data going back centuries in Europe and the US!”
Ah yes. The centuries were all wealth was in the hands of… *checks notes* ah yes, white men, that’s right. The prototypical human. Yes. We know that from medicine… carry on.
So far he’s just going on about what is capital and I just realized something, in the part before the slavery quote earlier he talked about how he didn’t like how some economists have started to talk about “human capital”. Basically he seems to think that capital is things you can buy and sell. You can’t own humans, so no humans can be capital. He seemed a bit disappointed about that, but that might be my interpretation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital
I think he’s wrong about the “human capital” thing and I think any early investor in a tech company would agree with me on that. Not sure it matters. I haven’t gotten that far in my head. But it seems silly to discount. Also on a national level that suddenly might make education something the economists might care about.
I think he is now talking about how having colonies was great for Britain. But France wasn’t doing that well on their occupation of other peoples lands.
But his language is so sanitized it’s weird.
“On assets that French citizens owned in the country’s foreign possessions.”
Ok, lol, he is inadvertently dissing MAGA by saying than in historical economic context 1950-1970 were an outlier and not at all “normal”. “Inadvertently” because this book came out in French in 2013.
We have now spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at how there was little inflation for a long time by studying amounts used in various novels in France and Great Britain… shout out to Jane Austen, I guess.
Oh joy, we’re gonna take a “brief detour through literature” as we start chapter 3: “The metamorphosis of capital”
This might be a French thing 🤷🏻♀️
To recap chapter 2: we have reduced “growth” to a single number for any particular country. Don’t worry if it’s small, small is good because compound interest.
All complexity has been dismissed under “who knows really” or completely ignored.
Sociologists would be infuriated by this book, he keeps on saying stuff like “who knows why that is, it could be so many things, we’ll just never know”
I can hear sociologists screaming: WE KNOW
And then in a much calmer voice: We might not know EVERYTHING, but there is SO MUCH we do know, about why that is.
It is clear that he will not at any point acknowledge that what he is talking about is limited to a small part of the population. White men as the prototype human is strong here, and completely unacknowledged.
This brings to mind the extremely relevant TED talk by the prominent Norwegian Labor Party politician Hadia Tajik: “Why women are more profitable than oil” https://youtu.be/4D9ubPTr8rY?si=Cjf0JgcIa0tGgKsD
The entire chapter 2 seems to be about reducing the “growth” of a country to a single percentage number per year and then saying that “y’all compound interest makes small numbers big”
You know when you listen to someone and you go “Nah, I’m sure he didn’t mean that” that’s me constantly in this book.
Currently he’s at:
If folks have lots of children, inherited wealth is insignificant because you have to divide it over all the children (note he does not discuss class differences in number of children here, which was an issue in Norway and I’m sure is everywhere tbh). Also he doesn’t describe inheritance processes where everything or large parts are passed to only one child (oftest the eldest MALE child)
I think this is where he wants to stop. Because the next bit breaks his plan:
He mentions that population growth can also be through immigration, but he doesn’t discuss how that completely ruins this breakup of inheritance.
And then he gets hand wavy about immigration being bad because of conflicts between these groups.
You see where I’m getting iffy here?
He says that inherited wealth is not an issue in the US because of population growth. But then he says that the population growth in the US was because of immigration… you see my problem?
The math ain’t mathing. And I don’t know if it is racism or having two variables or both.
Americans, how did the abolition of slavery impact population numbers? Did the US count enslaved people in the census before the abolition of slavery? He is basically saying that the population of the US increased dramatically between 1780-1910. But I am wondering who they were counting in 1780.
People tell me this guy is a leftist-economist… and I’m here in chapter 2 getting strong “replacement theory” vibes. I don’t really get where folks are getting that impression. But I’m only in chapter 2.
Ah yes, the amazing growth of post WWII Europe when we got the Marshall Plan money so we could rebuild after having it bombed and burned for five years. You’re gonna love post-war Ukraine, Mr Piketty. 🙃 So Much Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
This is the problem with having two variables, mr Economist, you lose absolutely all relevant context. But the wonderful graphs you can make more than make up for it.
Guy who did not spend one sentence on the bias of his data, or how colonialism is the direct cause of poverty and political instability all over the world, just spent a good chunk of time on compound interest.
I’m failing hard on this one, this shit is so extremely racist. And he doesn’t even discuss it in context as he goes along. It’s like what happened was Fine Actually. https://social.vivaldi.net/@Patricia/112682532791671773
I just can’t about how much he seems to crave colonialism. And seems to blame the countries who were/are victims of it. And “counties owned by other countries” is just a disgusting phrase.
Omg this shit is so racist. He has zero shame. The colonialism is strong with this one.
But let’s do methodology (because the rest is just disgusting): he has chosen France, Great Britain, Germany and the US over the past 300 years as the countries he will extrapolate from. He has just talked about how France and Great Britain “owned” large parts of Africa and Asia. Apparently the German colonial “assets” were insignificant. But they were good at tech or something. Anyhoo, these very average countries, during this very “normal” time of colonial expansion, slavery and plundering of natural resources (my words, he doesn’t actually mention it at all), are of course the perfect candidates to extrapolate from to make predictions about similar countries in this century such as… Brazil, India and China? Sounds reasonable. Carry on.
I just can’t get over how the man who has done zero analysis on how his data skews so immensely white, male and landowner, is actually going to spend time analyzing the economy of buying and selling human beings.
Capitalist = smart people Communism = stupid people This guy is a charmer. Also, why do you need to state your bias, dude? Could it be that this is just makeup on your opinion? Asking for a friend.
Scene: tech meeting, devs around a conference table, one guy on a sofa in the back, possibly sleeping.
Senior dev to junior dev: So I told you to add 3 commandline arguments to the application. How did that go?
Junior dev whipping out their notebook: Yes! So, I created three new modules!
Surprised faces all around the table. Guy in the back on the sofa removes his headphones.
Senior dev: …ok?
Junior: YES! One module is sorting algorithms, some stable some not, I’ll leave it to you to decide which to use!
Narrator: no tests
Junior: then I made a module for string processing algorithms! I made a bit more than I think we need, but I felt it should be complete!
Narrator: no tests
Junior: and finally I made a finite state machine library so that you can test if the combination of arguments is valid
Narrator: absolutely zero tests
Junior beaming 😃
Senior: … ok so we’re not doing that.
Other juniors around the table silently in their heads: he’s just jealous because he couldn’t make anything so fantastic!
Guy in the sofa silently checks in importing a command-line arg library, sets up the three arguments and writes 9 tests. Then puts the headphones back on with the music from Zelda.