I have a couple of pieces up on the topic that’s likely to consume much of my attention for some time to come: Piketty’s Capital in the 21st century.
Here’s a long review article at Inside Story focusing on the conditions that have made Piketty a bestseller. And here, at The Drum is my take on claims by Chris Giles at the Financial Times that Piketty’s data is fatally flawed.
Update Piketty has responded to the Financial Times. To sum up, as I said in the Drum piece, the criticisms are (mostly incorrect) nitpicks except for the point about UK wealth inequality. Here Piketty’s demolition is convincing. The FT hasn’t used a consistent series. Rather, it’s taken a recent survey estimate (likely to underestimate wealth) and spliced it onto older estate data to produce the counterintuitive finding that the inequality of wealth hasn’t increased.
John Quiggin 
Another overview
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/pikettys-fair-weather-friends/
It is obvious that we’ll disagree on the political and substantive point about near-permanent wealth accumulation. Right now if you have capital to invest then there are many investment opportunities out there and if you look at equities or fixed income r>g. Yet these opportunities are grotesquely mispriced relative to risk and once interest rates rise I am pretty confident r<g for many of the wealthiest out there. Unfortunately, wealth includes pensions etc which is not only for the "top 1%" and many people are going to get similarly hit once rates start to rise.
The other problem is that you do not offer solutions to the perceived problem of inequality. A global wealth tax? Seriously? Tax someone for their income, tax them on their savings, tax them on their capital gain and then tax them again for whatever is left over? That is confiscation not taxation.
Overall, Piketty is an important contributor to the debate around wealth and inequality. Unfortunately those who praise him come up with hideous policy designs. Instead of tackling problems around lack of educational opportunities, poor public investment in productivity-enhancing physical and social infrastructure, and streamlining tax and regulations, you come up with pretty silly policy ideas that will never be implemented!
In Pride And Prejudice, the Bennet sisters’ uncle Mr Gardiner was ‘in trade’ — that is, a business proprietor — not a lawyer. It was their uncle Mr Phillips who was a lawyer: ‘their mother’s … father had been an attorney … She had a sister married to a Mr. Phillips, who had been a clerk to their father and succeeded him in the business, and a brother … in a respectable line of trade.’ Mr and Mrs Phillips play less part in the novel than Mr and Mrs Gardiner and are described in less flattering terms when they do appear.
@faust
I guess what you mean by ‘confiscation’ is taxation that you don’t like (so presumably confiscation that you do like is just taxation).
An example of r>g is since 2008-14 US junk bonds have returns 146% to investors. Why so high? Because they absolutely tanked between 2007-08. If you invested in a 2006 issuance and had to sell in 2008 then you would have taken an absolute bath and probably would be fired if you were an investment “professional”. So r>g but also r<g. Timing is everything!
@J-D
Subjectivity is everything. What is excessive taxation? 20%? 40%? 80%? 93%?
My view is anything over 40% is confiscation of wealth and income of an individual. You may think difference. The great thing about a democracy is the majority broadly make the choice.
So far I’ve read about 40 reviews of Piketty’s book in the hope of staving off the necessity to read it. (I confess that I haven’t yet read the last 10 words of Keynes’s General Theory or Tolstoy’s War and Peace so why should I feel embarrassed now?).
Questions. Given that TP’s French and American backgrounds identify him as one of the world’s supersophisticates is it to cynical to wonder if his ridiculous policy prescriptions were part of the PR to make the book a best seller and get the author on every TV and radio station for interviews? To cut short argument on that “ridiculous” let me acknowledge that St Francis, Jesus and other charismatics have been almost equally ridiculous in their policy prescriptions.
Another question. The simple logic that underlies progressive taxation (a dollar taken from a rich man hurts less than the dollar taken from the less rich) equally supports the need to pay the rich a lot more in order to add to their welfare compared with what needs to be paid to the less rich or the rich themselves when they were merely CFOs with a Harvard MBA earning a million a year. More generally, if you want to get people who are clever enough to become full professors of economics and become pundits in the 21st century to undertake the hard grind of becoming and remaining senior executives in large commercial institutions – or following their dreams as mineral explorers year after frustrating year – do you perhaps need to hold out exponentially, or at least geometrically larger financial rewards as the whole society grows richer and Maslow’s hierarchy applies??? (100 years ago Roger Federer might have been senior partner in a firm of accountants after a few years on the tennis circuit).
Globalisation (some would say “again”: that we are barely back to the 1890s) is obviously important too. And the fact that a rich person like James Packer can now look abroad and see a Mexican worth $60 billion, several Chinese and Indians worth multples of his billions etc. Should perhaps remind us that owning more pigs so one could entertain the tribe more lavishly has always been part of competitive human nature way beyond the needs of consumption or even propagating one’s religion, ideas or ideology.
And if no one cares much about inequality (apart from us chatterers) – at least as evidenced by their behaviour – that might have to do with the huge rise in real incomes over the lsdt ep years. In Australia anyway, and maybe in the US their old myths protect them from the effects of envy or a sense of injustice and a conspiratorial explanation.
@faust
The shabby secret of the wealthy is that the more power and wealth they have the more income they can extract from the economy. It has practically nothing to do with how hard they work or how much they contribute to society. How does the CEO of CBA contribute 150 times more to society than an aged care worker?
I say the rest of us who get fleeced by them every day have a right to confiscate some of their obscene wealth to share it around. And that is actually good for the economy.
(borrowed from a responder at The Drum)
like in france, a democracy where the majority broadly chose, through their instrument francois hollande, to slap a wealth tax on the rich?
or, like in australia, a democracy where the majority broadly will be presented with a free trade agreement that was negotiated without consultation with them, in secret?
democracy is fine & dandy as long as the electoral system isn’t rigged.
and whether a 40% tax rate is excessive would depend would depend to some extent on where the other tax brackets are set, wouldn’t it? -a.v
I’ve now read the Inside Story review article and just offer a couple of comments which I hesitate to characterise. (Is there not some spatial contradiction between “nitpicking” and “peripheral”?).
I think it is just untrue that access to the Ivy league universities is only for the rich. Apart from the seriously well informed analysis by Ron Unz in The Myth of American Meritocracy a couple of years ago [thanks by the way to whoever it was that put me on to that and to his writing] I can cite the advice to some English friends who want their children to get into American universities if they can’t get into Oxbridge. They were told that being fluent in German, French and Spanish wouldn’t help. In other words a big part of what your rich parents can buy you doesn’t count.
I also note that you have omitted to consider another kind of inheritance. There is parental/ancestral money and parental culture (though that can be just the work ethic of immigrant parents, often illiterate). But there is also biological inheritance. The ends of the Bell Curve will continue to extend (with or without lumpiness at either end) so long as assortative mating and the filtering of previously undereducated brains in the once deprived classes means that few smart people don’t get adequate education or financially useful training and, in all likelihood, marry and have children with some like themselves.
@Salient Green
The shabby secret of the clever and energetic (and ordinarily egotistic) is that the cleverer and more determined they are the more income they can extract from the economy. It has practically nothing to do with how hard they work or how much they contribute to society. How dare the the CEO of CBA collect only 150 times as much in salary and bonuses as a childcare worker and then insult us all by paying 3000 times as much in tax?
“Obscene” indeed. Let all those of us who are confident enough of our virtue and brave enough to stand up to charges, justified charges, that we violate the rule of natural justice against being judges in our own cause break free from the bonds of convention and grab some of what he has for ourselves. We can’t acquire brains or character so we will have to demean ourselves by taking money.
@yuri
@yuri
Interesting idea on assortative mating, but if the ends of the bell curve were always extending, why hasn’t humanity evolved into opposed camps of tall/short, pretty/plain (or any other dimension that has favoured and disfavoured ends) a hundred thousand years ago?
There is also reversion to the mean. Not all the the alpha male’s daughters will be pretty.
I suggest that for the social and economic changes of the last century cultural influences are probably more important.
@yuri
Amusing. There were a whole bunch of years in the 1980s when I paid much more tax than Kerry Packer, despite supporting myself and my young family by taxi driving, occasional academic editing, tecnical writing and bus driving, and when Kerry Packer would lose more gambling at a casion in half an hour than I paid in tax all year.
Salient is right. There’s simply no good warrant for one fulltime working person earning 150 times as another full-time working person — even allowing that both are doing what one could fairly call “work”.
@yuri
Amusing. There were a whole bunch of years in the 1980s when I paid much more tax than Kerry Packer, despite supporting myself and my young family by taxi driving, occasional academic editing, technical writing and bus driving, and when Kerry Packer would lose more g*mbling at a cas|no in half an hour than I paid in tax all year.
Salient is right. There’s simply no good warrant for one fulltime working person earning 150 times as another full-time working person — even allowing that both are doing what one could fairly call “work”.
@john
I agree with Yuri about assortative mating (so few people mention it despite the Ivy League universities being referred to as a marriage market for the upper-middle classes that I wonder if he’s got it from me. That would be the flattering kind of plagiarism).
Regression towards the mean applies but the question has then to be asked as to what is the population towards whose mean the scores or other measures regress. To take an example which is unlikely to excite emotions, it would only be by the most unlikely fluke that the average of all Brahmins, Dalits and Parsees was one to which the scores in each of those communities tend to regress.
That points to the answer to your hypothetical about the ends of the bell curve always extending. Indeed they weren’t and I understand Yuri’s proposition to apply merely to the new class/population of the (educationally selected) assortatively mating that he has identified and any other similar ones in the past (Hebrew upper classes returned from Babylon?) though I think he’s proposing that the phenomenon is now on a much larger scale.
For my part I would agree that the cultural and environmental factors which have produced the Flynn Effect (so obviously not genetic even when you set aside extreme cases like Ireland where urbanisation has been more than co-incidental) have been huge but that, logically, could make the genetic (and perhaps family-cultural) factors all the more important because pretty well everyone has been educated into being a modern thinking literate person.
I think it is safe to assume that human ability and effort follow a bell curve or normal distribution. Indeed, I am sure numerous studies have demonstrated that. If rewards matched ability and application then wealth would also follow a bell curve distribution. In reality, in a capitalist country, wealth follows a very different distribution, a vastly different one in fact. I hope this links to the right graph (fingers crossed).
http://www.intmath.com/blog/singapore-wealth-mean-and-median/5227
Therefore, factors others other than direct reward for ability and effort must be at work. It seems a safe bet that the old adage “money makes money,” crudely describes what is at work here. At a certain point, accumulation of wealth (and power) reaches a critical mass which allows further rapid accumulation of more wealth and more power.
There is another form of distribution which I think is called the “king distribution” but I am not sure if this is the right term. For example, the population of countries follows this distribution. There are couple of “kings of population” (India, China) several more big boys (USA, Indonesia, Brazil etc.), a modestly sized bunch of smallish middles and then a large string of very low of population countries.
Much in nature, that is based on accretion, seems to follow this “king distribution”. Look at astronomical bodies; a few kings (by mass black holes probably) more princes (suns), many small bodies (planets) and numerous tiny bodies (asteroids, comets etc.) It is thus arguably a natural tendency of accumulation or accretion in nature. I am maybe drawing a long bow here, so comments are welcome. But while something is a natural phenomenon in this sense we should not equate “natural = right” in the moral sense.
So while in an un-regulated system or a market regulated system (as opposed to a governed system) this tendency is natural, we have to ask ourselves is it right to allow it to play out unimpeded? It’s a moral question. The results of letting it play out unimpeded are now being seen in the USA for example.
“In November 2012 the U.S. Census Bureau said more than 16% of the population lived in poverty, including almost 20% of American children, up from 14.3% (approximately 43.6 million) in 2009 and to its highest level since 1993. In 2008, 13.2% (39.8 million) Americans lived in poverty. Starting in the 1980s, relative poverty rates have consistently exceeded those of other wealthy nations. California has a poverty rate of 23.5%, the highest of any state in the country.” – Wikipedia.
@faust
So is Piketty, or John Quiggin, or anybody else proposing a tax of over 40%? If not, what are you complaining about?
@yuri
If dollars taken from rich people reduce their welfare less than dollars taken from poor people, and if you are aiming to collect dollars with the least reduction in welfare, then you should aim to collect those dollars more from rich people than from poor people.
If dollars given to rich people add to their welfare less than dollars given to poor people, and if you are aiming to distribute dollars so as to achieve the greatest increase in welfare, then you should aim to distribute those dollars more to poor people than to rich people.
Also, what makes you think people don’t care much about inequality? If you think that’s what their behaviour shows, what behaviour are you talking about?
@yuri
If, for the sake of argument, it’s true that assortative mating produces, over time, distribution curves with longer and longer tails, then it’s clearly inadequate by itself to explain changes in the distributions of income and of wealth where only one of the tails is getting longer and longer.
@J-D
Of course, but one might add too, that some of the dollars redistributed to poor people also, ultimately, contribute to the happiness of some of the rich people from whom the money for redistribution was taken.
While the wealthiest people can probably insulate themselves entirely from the sight of poverty and become totally dissonant the exercise costs money and the layers of privileged people below them find it a good deal harder. Having to walk past the homeless and perhaps feeling threatened, being accosted in the traffic by people wanting to wash your windscreen and seeing stories of degradation undoubtedly spoils the enjoyment of privilege.
So even large layers of the privileged have a collective interest in the social difference between themselves and others being substantially narrowed. They may not appreciate the benefits of that until the negative consequences of inequality manifest of course, which is why the state not permitting them to become too relatively privileged may actually be in their interests.
@Ikonoclast
I think there is a fallacy in your reasoning that relies on pointing to a big diiference between the normal curve and the distribution of income. First, it doesn’t allow for age differences. More important it overlooks the the shape of the distribution if you were to construct an index made up of appropriatele weighted contributions of many relevant factors, including, e.g., IQ, energy (perhaps = number of hours a day of effective output), emotional intelligence, quality of parenting received, availability of capital when needed.
I am not sure about “king distributions” but in recent years there has been much mention of power laws. It has at least served to remind people that the normal distribution assumes each event or measurement is independant of previous ones. That may be relevant to the point made above because good health coul connect them all an ensure they correlate positively with each other advantageous trait.
@Fran Barlow
That is a point I have made here before.
Public education, health, sanitation and transport were introduced and championed by the wealthy/privileged for that very reason. Apart from any compassionate or charitable considerations they simply realised that a society full of poor, sick and stupid people was unpleasant to live in and innefficient/counter-productive for their own enterprises.
@J-D
True: see my last comment.
@yuri
If you have some evidence to show that the size of the income a person can extract is primarily determined by cleverness, you’re not sharing it with us.
@yuri
If you accept that the income distribution curve has to be explained as the result of a complex interaction of different factors, what’s your justification for emphasising assortative mating?
@Midrash
Midrash and yuri share the same view about assortative mating? Doesn’t that make it more likely that it’s wrong?
What’s that you say? You think that if they agree that makes it more likely that they’re right? No, I don’t see why that should be. I’m sticking with my first thought.
@J-D
You mistake the very limited point I was making, namely that we tend to overlook the logical corollary that, if you need to motivate someone and need to do it with money then each dollar added does less and less and, logically, you will have to pay a lot more. Extrapolating that to communities as a whole you are going to have to increase rewards for getting people who have alternatives to take the less attractive jobs. If you could live in Oxford or Cambridge as a fellow of an ancient college and still get married and have your children well educated wouldn’t it take a lot of money to persuade you to become CFOVof Universal Widgets in Newcastle (either one)?
And aren’t there now, compared with 1950, far more attractive academic jobs, museum curatorships and so on? True it is probably irrelevant to the Nathan Tinklers of this world. (Doesn’t he make Kerry Packer look good? Just showing that I share some of this blogs characteristic snobberies
@J-D
Your first thought may have one thing right though you don’t seem to appreciate it. If two people used different methodologies to come to the same conclusion that might be additional support for the view both arrive at. But if, as seems likely in the case of Midrash and myself, the reasoning seems to flow from similar understandings of the latest and best literature and authorities then there is no special validation by consilience. We are just both correct.
Do you know anything about assortative mmating BTW?
Was wondering how long it would take for the climate denialist strategies to kick in on this issue. FT first off the blocks.
@yuri
If you need to motivate somebody, and if you only have money available as a motivator, then each successive dollar will be less effective than the one before (which, among other things, suggests that perhaps you should be investigating whether there’s anything apart from money you can use as a motivator).
But the practical significance (if any) of this observation depends on answering questions about who it is that you want to motivate and why. Why, in your example, would you be trying to motivate an Oxbridge college fellow to take a job as CFO of Universal Widgets?
(Since you mention it — although I don’t know why you mention it — it is true that there are more academic jobs now than there were in 1950. I haven’t seen the evidence that would show that they’re more attractive, though. What I’ve heard inclines me to suspect the opposite.)
There may be more academic jobs, but I get the distinct impression they are not as attractive as they were in 1950. These days they share far too many conditions with the fast food industry.
Piketty’s response:
Click to access Piketty2014TechnicalAppendixResponsetoFT.pdf
@Salient Green
I don’t think the CEO of CBA should earn that much money because I don’t think the CEOs of Australia’s major banks are terribly good. They are terribly lucky, though. Overall, the Australian banks did not collapse due to a number of factors of which good internal risk management is one of them. I think the Australian banking sector is the closest in the major developed economies to being a utility and I am inherently uncomfortable with shareholders rewarding utility management like they are entrepreneurs.
@J-D
This is a reply to your challenge to me to produce evidence to justify a view that I didn’t express (even I think in my satirical response to Salient Green) namely that the income someone extract is primarily determined by cleverness. Not only didn’t I say that; I have already pointed to multifactorial explanation and indicated that I was not suggesting any particular weighting. I have to wonder if you are trolling in the hope that you can sit back and chortle at having provoked exasperated rudeness from someone. Surely anyone can agree that in any given competitive context where several people are aiming to extract top dollar then, cet.par. the odds are on the cleverest winning, but also with cleverness being one of the things held equal the odds will be on the winners being those who can concentrate and work 18 hours a day, and so on.
@faust
Agreed though I wouldn’t mind, for example if Mike Smith’s taking ANZ into Asia made him fabulously rich in his holding of ANZ share because he succeeded and he didn’t depart on the cusp of disaster, provided that other shareholders got full value for the risks they had let him take and he went off with no golden parachute if he failed. (I think there is an inevitable asymmetry which had a lot to do with the causes of the GFC. Particularly in highly geared financial businesses there is a huge temptation, if not incentive, to go for the huge reward even at high risk of failure because the penalties for failure are not certain or severe enough. If one in three of the bigger failures were chosen by lot to be hung drawn and quartered it might dampen enterprise a bit but would surely mean fewer bank failures. As it is some get away with having put the mansion and holiday house in the spouse’s name and even get to keep the spouse while they start again).
@J-D
What’s my justification for “emphasising” assortative mating? Yes, I think you might be trolling hoping for a gotcha moment when you provoke the explosion. You don’t really need me to provide the answer do you?
As you should know and acknowledge I didn’t emphasise its causal importance. I merely pointed to its omission in JQ’s and, almost certainly, TP’s analysis.
@yuri
Salient Green wrote: ‘The shabby secret of the wealthy is that the more power and wealth they have the more income they can extract from the economy.’
You wrote, in response: ‘The shabby secret of the clever and energetic (and ordinarily egotistic) is that the cleverer and more determined they are the more income they can extract from the economy.’
By taking Salient Green’s sentence and then substituting ‘clever’ for ‘wealthy’, I understood you to be suggesting that cleverness plays a larger role in explaining why some people have larger incomes than does an initial position of wealth.
If your intended meaning was something different from that, it’s not clear to me what it was.
If I only wanted to state that lots of different factors affect people’s incomes, without suggesting anything about the relative importance of any specific factors, then I would write ‘Lots of different factors affect people’s incomes’ without making any specific mention of any individual factors. By choosing to mention some specific factors, you create the appearance that you want to emphasise them. Why?
@yuri
Out of all the possible factors that might have been omitted, why did you choose that particular one to mention?
No, since you ask, I don’t know what the answer to that question is if you don’t choose to state it.
@J-D
To your three par post: pretending to be obtuse again?
Why would I seek to motivate Oxbridge dons to be CFOs at Widget Manufacturers? Wrong question. If business needs people of the kind of intelligence and work habits which qualifies them for stimulating and otherwise pleasant academic posts then it will have to offer them incentives to choose one rather than the other. Clearly old college port, a panelled dining room lined with portraits of great historical figures and genial relaxed conversation with one’s non-competing peers is not part of the incentive package….
And you must see – contrary to what you say – why I mention that there are (far) more academic posts now than in, say, 1950. After all my point was that the (supposed) fact that there are more ways for an intelligent hardworking person to live an agreeable life without undue financial stringency was reason for thinking that, if you had to secure their services in grubby “trade” and had to do it with money you would, logically, have to offer a lot more money.
A serious argument from you might have treated the question as an empirical one and offered evidence, or just a speculation, that the number of potential JQs had risen so fast that they were overflowing academe and just begging to be taken on as bank trainees….. No, I don’t think so either.
As to your querying the average punter’s relative lack of concern over inequality (apart from the occasional flurry which can apply briefly to many issues whipped up recently in the media) I remember seeing poll results which had inequality as a low rated issue in terms of relative importance, and the voters are constantly confirming that almost everywhere. (Have you noticed the ALP picking up all Ken Henry’s egalitarian nasties?).
@zoot
You make good though empirically testable and contestable points, partly dealt with in my last response to J-D.
It must certainly right that the average academic job today – in some quite important respects anyway – is less attractive than the typical position in 1950. That’s because the grand old universities remain the few grand old universities with their ancient charns, traditions and prestige. And while I don’t think the same applies to art gallery directorships, museum curatorships, film production and directing orchestras, dance and opera, the pleasantness of such positions might now be reduced by the fierceness of competition and the rate if change. I would accept that I have raised an empirical question but I think it is well worth considering when the favoured alternative explanation for higher pay for executives has something of the flavour of conspiracy theory (albeit in a spirit of scepticism which Adam Smith would not have disavowed). Not that any one simple explanation suffices.
@yuri
ANZ is looking good now but let’s wait to see how they look when the cycle turns. It is easy to expand into a growing region where key competitors are withdrawing. What really matters is when the cycle turns (the ‘Emperor has not clothes moment’).
@J-D
Without trawling laboriously through my mind when I chose to mention it I suppose it popped up in my mind by reason of some more or less chance neural connections whose immediate stimulus or stimuli I am almost inevitably unable to pinpoint (desire to make a brief clever-dick input to the conversation? Desire to say something JQ wouldn’t say, or maybe think of? Who knows?). Obviously I think it a valid if not clearly correct and important observation and decidedly one unlikely to amongst the commonplaces of most blogs, let alone this one. So, add potential rarity value to the list.
Now over to you. You have stuck your neck out more than you may have intended by saying there other omitted matters – of presumably greater weight – that I might have mentioned. You owe it to us to back that up with examples and to justify your assessment of their relative importance. Otherwise the implication in your question just fail, it falls flat at the threshold.
There is an article in the current edition of Science (which incidentally is devoted to inequality) about a physicist who looks at income in the same way as physicist look at the distribution of the speeds of molecules in a gas. Most gas molecules have around the same speed, but a few have a succession of collisions that result in much greater speed, giving a distribution with a long tail.
This mechanism ignores the details of the way society is organised, just relying on random interactions and the law of large numbers. Of course society is complicated, but I reckon the way to go is to start with this “statistical mechanics” model, and then add to it.
…doesn’t just fail, it falls flat at the outset.
Apologies for another couple of typos too.
@ John Brookes
I agree. I tried saying “Seconded” but it refuses to appear.
The China connection.
I have just read a Guardian piece gleefully pointing to apparent errors by the FT’s Chris Giles who found errors in Piketty’s research. While reading it I was provoked to consider how far TP’s work stands up or is even relevant when you factor in the vast increases in the wealth of citizens of what is soon to become the world’s biggest economy (where BTW Piketty’s g greatly exceeds everyone else’s r). And that’s before you factor in globalisation and international trade as causes for the changes in inequality in other countries. China incidentally is almost certainly a country where the rise in inequality would almost universally be accepted as the price to pay for general prosperity.
Also just read is the Henry Thornton blog quoting a Nobel Prize winning economist and a successful builder both saying wages in Australia would have to fall, the builder explicitly making the China connection. Not perhaps directly relevant to the TP tome but it does reinforce the question whether he needs to pay more attention to countries other than those whise records he has been able to trawl.
@J-D
You raise the question why I mentioned specific factors and the answer lies principally in my understanding and experience of the way people’s minds work and of communications. (You might reasonably object that if I care so much about communication I might hire an editor or take the time myself to make everything I write simpler and as clear and free from ambiguity as possible but that takes a great deal of time for those with high standards but without the talent of a Bertrand Russell or a George Simenon).
Formulations such as the generalisation you proferred I immediately feel inclined either to dismiss as waffle or to cross-examine irritably seeking detail or examples. The concrete and the specific I was always taught to prefer in communications over the abstract or general and I still think it has more than one merit. “The particular is all important” was the formulation of a famous judge expressing a view, I suppose, on the advocate’s art.
@J-D
Sorry for butting in. I had so agreed with Yuri’s frustration at what I can understand him regarding as obtuse and with the points about assortative mating and how that was presented that when I flicked down the blog and found stuff from you unresponded to I took it personally… I hope Yuri, if not sensibly retired for the night by now, would applaud me as his unwitting champion on this occasion.
I wonder how many people who call for lower wages live on a wage? What level of low wages would those making such calls be happy to see? Oh, wait a minute, we have an answer. Gina Rihehart suggested $2.00 a day.
Poor countries pay poor wages. They are not necessarily poor countries because they pay poor wages. Such countries are poor for historical and developmental reasons. However, the flip side question must be asked. Can rich countries return to paying poor wages and still remain rich countries? I have strong doubts. USA is trying the experiment.
@yuri
No, I am not pretending to be obtuse.
You write: ‘If business needs people of the kind of intelligence and work habits which qualifies them for stimulating and otherwise pleasant academic posts then it will have to offer them incentives to choose one rather than the other.’
Do you have any reason to think that business needs the kind of people who qualify for academic posts? Do you have any reason to think that the supply of such people is so low as to create serious competition for them between business and academic employers?