Linda Nowakowski said:

Now that I am back where the weather allows for one to sit on the front porch.... :-D

I would like to invite people to a discussion of something that sits in the back of my mind as important but a kind of topic that most people avoid like the plague.

One of the most dramatic affects of capitalism is the dramatic changes it has on wealth distribution. If you look at plots of the changes in the Gini indices over time, you will see quite starkly where capitalism was introduced into a developing country. I think that I want to limit this to English (American/British) capitalism as compared to the social capitalism of western and northern Europe.

This redistribution of wealth that comes with the growth of capitalism may be dramatic but the questions I have are about if it is a necessity or even a desirable outcome. What are the social impacts of this accumulation of wealth to the few at the expense of the many?

May I invite the discussion to begin?

Edit: typos/grammar

Part of what I am looking for here is to see where wealth accumulation is in the subconscious driving forces in development and what the impacts of that are on both those on the high end of the wealth accumulation and the bottom end.

I don't think I have too much to say on this subject, but I will say this:

I feel that somehow money needs to be exchanged for or interchangeable with "social impact points". You transform a life for the better, you receive your costs back, within an agreed framework. It kind of works like this with the National Health Service, so why not with social enterprise?

Given this "alternative" to money accumulation, even those hard-nosed business executives might start to rethink their strategies.

Somehow, in my inexpert way, I feel this will redistribute wealth? Once you have these mechanisms, the capitalism systems will make them work for the benefit of everyone. it's a version of Social Return on Investment.

>>see where wealth accumulation is in the subconscious driving forces in development<

With regards to development, as in the development industry, I don't think they really get that they really should be in the wealth creation business. Instead it seems much development work causes economic harm to those at the base of the pyramid.

From the documentary FLOW

The World Bank knows how to spend a billion dollars in one place but does not know how to spend a thousand dollars in a million places.

So that billion dollar damn now becomes every growing debt to that nation, and the nation is stuck repaying a huge bill, and not helping its people. But, perhaps microloans to a million people could have provided a much better solution, and allowed wealth to grow at a more local level.

LOL I bet you thought I hadn't seen this. I did and started writing something, which I'll copy in here and try to finish.

Linda, happy to hear you're settling in so nicely.

Definitions are useful, but also can get in the way of understanding. One of the weird definitional problems about wealth it to what extent wealth ought to be defined in terms of quantities of money. I think that wealth is a quality. Qualities are almost always relational, e.g. "Rich enough to be generous." So the problem with allowing the amount of money to define wealth is that it sets up a sort of logic that more money means more wealth. But the quality of wealth depends on many relationships, more like an ecosystem where there are balances to be struck. We need water to survive, but the deluge imperials us.

I know that there are so many differences in our personal experiences, but we do share growing up in the USA at approximately the same time and there are some similarities in that. Today on Dave Snowden's blog he reminisces about when he was a boy and first discovered politics. He ends with:

These days I doubt if anyone knows the difference between socialism, communism and trotskyism. Depressing really.

In the text he also managed to put in this aside:

Apologies to American readers here, your political spectrum is largely contained with the British Conservative Party.

I've got to admit how on one hand it's very easy to imagine that I'm like most Americans in being quite non-ideological. On the other hand I'm totally aghast that Americans don't realize how ideological we are.

I think part of our blind spot about ideology in the USA, at least for people my age, has to do with the Cold War. Capitalism wasn't just presented as a system of economics, but a way of life set in opposition to Communism. Capitalism is for most Americans at some level of thought: Good versus Evil. Our definition of Capitalism is bound up with the good. So we're suspicious and even deliberately ignorant of ideology.

Americans understand Capitalism as private ownership, we literally think of the shirts on our backs, the stuff of our everyday life. But such "ownership" is really quite trivial to Capitalism; what is crucial is the ownership of capital goods. Capital goods are assets that add to longterm net worth.

Like most Americans the bailout of banks and AIG made my head explode. I think that part of the difficultly in coming to grips with the facts of the matter has to do with my (our) rather naive ideas about what capitalism is. I've been told since I was a child, that it's good. I been told that capitalism is about private ownership and free enterprise. Unpacking that a bit, it's easy to understand owning land, say where a coal mine is located. And it's easy to imagine someone owning the trucks, cranes bulldozers, computers, etc. necessary to operate the mine. What's harder to imagine as capitalism is making money with money. Just what is it that the big banks do?

Everyone the rich get richer, so the correlation between having money and making more isn't hard to see. But the hard thing is to see money as a "capital good." It's hard for us to imagine the managers of the big banks, whose renumeration totals in the hundreds of millions of dollars, doing something that jibes with our definition of capitalism. What do the managers own? Well they own stock purchased for them by the other stock holders. The business is peculiar too because profits are private but losses are borne by the public.

I don't want to seem too naive here, but the difficulty with the idea of making money with money seems a little strange. It's like compounding of interest, most of us know to look for ways to calculate compounding. We understand there is such a thing, but on some level it just doesn't make sense. And at some level it just doesn't make sense to us that we collectively should be on the hook for the bad debts of banks, especially when the top management continues to reward themselves so lavishly with cash bonuses.

Anyhow there's money to be made with money. The profits are private but the public is liable for enormous negative externalities: That's capitalism and capitalism is good--Kaboom!

Now all of that probably doesn't seem very responsive to the subject at hand of extreme wealth disparity. I'm not sure that extreme disparity of wealth is a necessary result of capitalism per se. There's very good reasons to believe that extreme disparity of wealth isn't good for societies.

You want to limit the discussion to American/British Capitalism. Dave Snowden's blog post demonstrates that American and Brits experienced the whole notion of capitalism differently. But something we shared was the reactionary economics of the 1980's. I think it's worthwhile noting that this economic movement was led by a troika: Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl. I think when we're talking about the sort of Capitalism that in recent years has produced such rapidly increasing disparities in wealth it's not really limited to American/British versions of capitalism. The neo-liberal stance was a Western consensus. And it's this view of Capitalism which is at the root of the current economic crisis.

I identified what I think is a problem with the current ideas about Capitalism at least here in the USA and that is we imagine that the quality of wealth is something which can be defined by a quantity of money. But there's always a problem trying to define any quality by adding up quantities. And there is also a problem with our ideas of what money is.

I'm very impressed with Keith Hart's ideas about economics and his book "The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World." (I went to Amazon and found they are remaindered. I have a $50 gift card to Amazon which has me in a quandary. What I want is a set of books that costs over $200--lol and since I won't be getting that, I can't make up my mind what to spend $50 on). So far as I can see he's posted the whole book online here. The formatting of some of the chapters is lost but Chapter 6 The Changing Character of Money is in order.

Hart points out that the word "money" comes from "Moneta, a name by which the Roman queen of the gods, Juno, was known." And he further notes: "Moneta was a translation of the Greek Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses, each of whom presided over one of the nine arts and sciences."

Hart goes through a brief description of various theories of money, which is handy as a succinct compendium. But his emphasis is money as memory. There are lots of really interesting ideas in this chapter, but I'm struck by a theory of money as memory as it emphasizes the qualitative nature of money; i.e. money as a sign of relationships.

So I've already got going the thesis that at least part of the trouble with current ideas of Capitalism come down to confusing the addition of quantities of money as wealth. But Hart draws attention to a very similar problem with our ideas of money.

"Take a look at a coin from your pocket or purse. It has two sides. One side contains a symbol of political authority, most commonly the head of someone who is or was the head of government, hence heads. The other side crucially contains the information about what it is worth, its quantitative value in exchange for other commodities. Rather less obviously, this is called tails. This example of money therefore has at least two aspects which are related to each other as top to bottom. One emphasises that it is issued by society in the form of the state, here symbolised by a person; it is a token of relations between people. The other stresses that money is itself a commodity, lending precision to trade in an infinite range of commodities; it is a real thing with an objective existence which is independent of the persons who use it."

There is a notorious history of populists like me blaming the banks for all ills. I particularly want to avoid the embedded racism which permeates this line of thinking an rhetoric. At the same time it seems a matter of fact that the current economic crisis was precipitated by a banking crisis. As awful as this crisis is, it has captured the attention of ordinary folks like me.

The Greek financial crisis is rooted in flim flams by the big banks that got bailed out with tax payer money. In communities around the USA similar financial crises are playing out the results of bank "products."

Douglas Blackmon wrote a book a couple of years ago "Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II." In this interview he says the idea came about with him wondering what if American corporations were subjected to the same sort of scrutiny we insisted that German companies have been in regards to the Holocaust. I'm pretty sure I heard him say somewhere that the JP Morgan apology for it's participation in the peculiar institution is what first caught his attention. JP Morgan is responsible for at least part of the current Greek financial crisis and also a particularly egregious situation in Jefferson County, Alabama. Their connection to slavery however is pretty remote, so I guess it's unfair piling on.

Nonetheless one of the companies that benefited most from the convict leasing that Blackmon writes about was US Steel. J.P. Morgan died in 1913, and I'm not really trying to implicate him personally in the subject of Blackmon's book. Blackmon points out that in that interview that the Department of Justice was investigating involuntary servitude as early as 1903, but no action was taken until Pearl Harbor. It became important then because the Japanese war propaganda used the condition of American black people as its main issue.

In American history clearly FDR and the Great Depression and WWII saw a remaking of an economic order. Referring to Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl as "reactionary" was meant that the neo-liberal consensus in some ways was an attempt to take economics back to the status quo ante. So in a sense that status quo ante refers back to the time of J.P. Morgan.

Partly it's from living in Pittsburgh, but I wouldn't be surprised that many Americans have an opinion about J. P. Morgan even though he died in 1913. The reason for that I think has to do with that being the time when ordinary Americans questioned the relationship between banks and society. Of course the post WWII consensus is important, but because the USA was so economically powerful after WWII, our opinions seem less about banks and more about government. In the Guilded Age, people were more focused on bankers like J.P. Morgan. While the issue of concentration of power is the same, the sort of financing the old man pursued is not at all like what his namesake bank does today. J.P. Morgan invested in real stuff, precisely the sorts things we tend to think of when we think of capital goods. The bank today specializes in financial instruments, harder I think for use to see as capital goods.

I've rambled and have gone far afield from Linda's question. So I'll sum up. I don't think that extraordinary disparity of wealth is a necessary result of Capitalism. I do think that part of what drives such great disparity has to do with how we imagine wealth confusing what is a qualitative term with quantities of money. And that money is probably best understood not as a commodity which is easily quantified, but rather as a sign of relationships, in other words to think of money qualitatively. Thinking in this way we can begin to address economic problems in a more constructive way. Extreme disparities of wealth are a clear symptom that our economic system--whatever name we give it--is seriously out of wack. Because the problem is a problem of the quality of relationships, addressing extreme wealth disparity directly is actually treating both the symptoms and causes of the present crisis. There is much more to be done.

I want to throw out 2 quotes to stir this up.

"The business of America is business." Calvin Coolidge

"The well being of the nation and its people is the business of America" Sisodia, Sheth and Wolfe

I don't believe that the unequal redistribution of wealth is a necessary result of capitalism. I suspect it is more a result of misplaced values; as in me rather than us.

Because we use wealth to measure value (of individuals as well as goods, services and companies) accumulated wealth is a distorted way to judge self-worth. It seems to me that maybe a route to cleaning up this mess is re-evaluating how we judge the worth of individuals.

Sorry about my verbal diarrhea :-(

You may be right that extreme wealth disparity is a "necessary result of capitalism," but I'm not so sure.

Here's another quotation to stir the pot:

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party . . . and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat." ~Gore Vidal

Something that's interested me with about the rise of Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers has been the insistence that Nazism was a left-wing movement.

I suppose my received wisdom on the matter is that the Nazis were right wing. But I also think that over the years of trying to come to grips with what happened in Germany what's so disquieting is rather summed up in Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil." The rise of Nazis does not seem so much left and right, but smack in the center of German society.

It's not so easy to define left and right, while it seems easy to tell just on the surface. That said it's often said that the right holds that social stratification is a good and necessary thing. Clearly there are conservatives in other systems besides capitalism.

My parents are from New England, so even though Calvin Coolidge is not remembered as a great president, he's always seemed a somewhat sympathetic character to me. "The business of America is business." had different connotations then; what came to mind was the business of manufacturing. The economy is so different today with services being the largest sector.

Take the issue of health care which has Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers up in arms. I'm not very solid on the HCR law but my objections really boil down to the idea that treating illness ought to be a reason to profit doesn't seem quite right to me. At the core the HCR law protects the standing of profit as the reason d'etre for "health care." Spending on health care represents a very significant portion of our GDP. Spend more and the GDP rises and that's supposed a good thing, but seems crazy to me. But the push back on the law is primarily from the right and it is described as "socialization."

I tend to see the issue of health care in the USA through the lens of rent seeking. The Wikipedia article isn't so great but provides a handy definition:

In economics, rent seeking occurs when an individual, organization or firm seeks to earn income by capturing economic rent through manipulation or exploitation of the economic environment, rather than by earning profits through economic transactions and the production of added wealth.

Health care is hardly the only sector of the economy engaged in rent seeking, for example rent seeking is now the primary source of banking profits. In fact so wide spread is the pattern that we tend to think that rent seeking is business.

But here's the rub, Coolidge's quote seems quite sensible to middle Americans such as myself, but it does because our idea of business is stuck in the frame of mind that production of added wealth is business. We've got a blind spot when it comes to seeing where the real money in business is these days.

I'm left in my political orientation, there's no use in pretending otherwise. Even as a boy this was often pointed out to me. I'm so lazy I haven't really worked on my left identity, rather it's just sort of received, what people say about me. That said, I don't really think that when rent seeking is brought into the economic picture that it's an issue that divides right from left. Sure those who profit from such behavior are for it, and the rich tend to be right leaning in their politics. But rent seeking behavior is something many conservatives decry as well as left-leaning folks.

I believe that the rapid increase in disparity of wealth is primarily the result of an increase in rent seeking behavior. Further I believe that rent seeking is not a necessary result of capitalism.

What to do about rent seeking is a difficult political matter. Decisions about what gets taxed and how are central to it. The average American would say that as a society we should encourage production; i.e. production of real value. The tax system rewards manipulation and exploration of the economic environment. But the issue of taxes has been so captured by the right that any change toward the direction most Americans want on both sides of the political spectrum seem almost impossible. We don't even seriously talk about the issue.

Extreme disparity of wealth holding is an enormous social problem. The core of the capitalist idea is private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism to be an effective system must be about the business of business; it only works when we're producing value. Right now we're stuck in a descending spiral that's the result of profit made not from the production of value, but rather by manipulation and exploitation of the economic environment. Capitalism need not be conceived as strictly competitive; that is a zero sum game. Indeed one good reason so many are in favor of capitalism is precisely because of non-zero sum assumption of transactions being mutually beneficial.

I find it strange that when I've raised anti-capitalism in the past on threads here others have weighed in on the side of capitalism. Perhaps if I weren't so lazy I'd identify as an anti-capitalist. Certainly I am intellectually open to different approaches to economic arrangements in society. Anyhow, it seems strange to be seeming to defend capitalism here. That's not really my main intention, rather to argue that the problem seems to me less a problem of the idea of capitalism and more a problem of how economic incentives have shifted from the production of goods towards the manipulations of money-a polite way of saying shifted from an honest living to theft.

Here's Fortune magazine editor Matt Miller on incentives in and oped in the Washington Post. His Website has a link to his appearance on The Cobert Report. Not quite the argument I'm trying to make, but similar.

There is an advantage to talking to you in person, John. What you ask? Because This would have been more the look of the conversation between you and me....

LOL I bet you thought I hadn't seen this. I did and started writing something, which I'll copy in here and try to finish.

Linda, happy to hear you're settling in so nicely.

Definitions are useful, but also can get in the way of understanding. One of the weird definitional problems about wealth it to what extent wealth ought to be defined in terms of quantities of money. I think that wealth is a quality. Qualities are almost always relational, e.g. "Rich enough to be generous." So the problem with allowing the amount of money to define wealth is that it sets up a sort of logic that more money means more wealth. But the quality of wealth depends on many relationships, more like an ecosystem where there are balances to be struck. We need water to survive, but the deluge imperials us.

I know that there are so many differences in our personal experiences, but we do share growing up in the USA at approximately the same time and there are some similarities in that. Today on Dave Snowden's blog he reminisces about when he was a boy and first discovered politics. He ends with:

These days I doubt if anyone knows the difference between socialism, communism and trotskyism.

.

Depressing really. In the text he also managed to put in this aside:

Apologies to American readers here, your political spectrum is largely contained with the British Conservative Party.

I've got to admit how on one hand it's very easy to imagine that I'm like most Americans in being quite non-ideological. On the other hand I'm totally aghast that Americans don't realize how ideological we are.

I think part of our blind spot about ideology in the USA, at least for people my age, has to do with the Cold War. Capitalism wasn't just presented as a system of economics, but a way of life set in opposition to Communism. Capitalism is for most Americans at some level of thought: Good versus Evil. Our definition of Capitalism is bound up with the good. So we're suspicious and even deliberately ignorant of ideology.

Americans understand Capitalism as private ownership, we literally think of the shirts on our backs, the stuff of our everyday life. But such "ownership" is really quite trivial to Capitalism; what is crucial is the ownership of capital goods. Capital goods are assets that add to longterm net worth.

Like most Americans the bailout of banks and AIG made my head explode. I think that part of the difficultly in coming to grips with the facts of the matter has to do with my (our) rather naive ideas about what capitalism is. I've been told since I was a child, that it's good. I been told that capitalism is about private ownership and free enterprise. Unpacking that a bit, it's easy to understand owning land, say where a coal mine is located. And it's easy to imagine someone owning the trucks, cranes bulldozers, computers, etc. necessary to operate the mine. What's harder to imagine as capitalism is making money with money. Just what is it that the big banks do?

Everyone the rich get richer, so the correlation between having money and making more isn't hard to see. But the hard thing is to see money as a "capital good." It's hard for us to imagine the managers of the big banks, whose renumeration totals in the hundreds of millions of dollars, doing something that jibes with our definition of capitalism. What do the managers own? Well they own stock purchased for them by the other stock holders. The business is peculiar too because profits are private but losses are borne by the public.

I don't want to seem too naive here, but the difficulty with the idea of making money with money seems a little strange. It's like compounding of interest, most of us know to look for ways to calculate compounding. We understand there is such a thing, but on some level it just doesn't make sense. And at some level it just doesn't make sense to us that we collectively should be on the hook for the bad debts of banks, especially when the top management continues to reward themselves so lavishly with cash bonuses.

Anyhow there's money to be made with money. The profits are private but the public is liable for enormous negative externalities: That's capitalism and capitalism is good--Kaboom!

Now all of that probably doesn't seem very responsive to the subject at hand of extreme wealth disparity. I'm not sure that extreme disparity of wealth is a necessary result of capitalism per se. There's very good reasons to believe that extreme disparity of wealth isn't good for societies.

You want to limit the discussion to American/British Capitalism. Dave Snowden's blog post demonstrates that American and Brits experienced the whole notion of capitalism differently. But something we shared was the reactionary economics of the 1980's. I think it's worthwhile noting that this economic movement was led by a troika: Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl. I think when we're talking about the sort of Capitalism that in recent years has produced such rapidly increasing disparities in wealth it's not really limited to American/British versions of capitalism. The neo-liberal stance was a Western consensus. And it's this view of Capitalism which is at the root of the current economic crisis.

I identified what I think is a problem with the current ideas about Capitalism at least here in the USA and that is we imagine that the quality of wealth is something which can be defined by a quantity of money. But there's always a problem trying to define any quality by adding up quantities. And there is also a problem with our ideas of what money is.

I'm very impressed with Keith Hart's ideas about economics and his book "The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World." (I went to Amazon and found they are remaindered. I have a $50 gift card to Amazon which has me in a quandary. What I want is a set of books that costs over $200--lol and since I won't be getting that, I can't make up my mind what to spend $50 on). So far as I can see he's posted the whole book online here. The formatting of some of the chapters is lost but Chapter 6 The Changing Character of Money is in order.

Hart points out that the word "money" comes from "Moneta, a name by which the Roman queen of the gods, Juno, was known." And he further notes: "Moneta was a translation of the Greek Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses, each of whom presided over one of the nine arts and sciences."

Hart goes through a brief description of various theories of money, which is handy as a succinct compendium. But his emphasis is money as memory. There are lots of really interesting ideas in this chapter, but I'm struck by a theory of money as memory as it emphasizes the qualitative nature of money; i.e. money as a sign of relationships.

So I've already got going the thesis that at least part of the trouble with current ideas of Capitalism come down to confusing the addition of quantities of money as wealth. But Hart draws attention to a very similar problem with our ideas of money.

"Take a look at a coin from your pocket or purse. It has two sides. One side contains a symbol of political authority, most commonly the head of someone who is or was the head of government, hence heads. The other side crucially contains the information about what it is worth, its quantitative value in exchange for other commodities. Rather less obviously, this is called tails. This example of money therefore has at least two aspects which are related to each other as top to bottom. One emphasises that it is issued by society in the form of the state, here symbolised by a person; it is a token of relations between people. The other stresses that money is itself a commodity, lending precision to trade in an infinite range of commodities; it is a real thing with an objective existence which is independent of the persons who use it."

There is a notorious history of populists like me blaming the banks for all ills. I particularly want to avoid the embedded racism which permeates this line of thinking an rhetoric. At the same time it seems a matter of fact that the current economic crisis was precipitated by a banking crisis. As awful as this crisis is, it has captured the attention of ordinary folks like me.

The Greek financial crisis is rooted in flim flams by the big banks that got bailed out with tax payer money. In communities around the USA similar financial crises are playing out the results of bank "products."

Douglas Blackmon wrote a book a couple of years ago "Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II." In this interview he says the idea came about with him wondering what if American corporations were subjected to the same sort of scrutiny we insisted that German companies have been in regards to the Holocaust. I'm pretty sure I heard him say somewhere that the JP Morgan apology for it's participation in the peculiar institution is what first caught his attention. JP Morgan is responsible for at least part of the current Greek financial crisis and also a particularly egregious situation in Jefferson County, Alabama. Their connection to slavery however is pretty remote, so I guess it's unfair piling on.

Nonetheless one of the companies that benefited most from the convict leasing that Blackmon writes about was US Steel. J.P. Morgan died in 1913, and I'm not really trying to implicate him personally in the subject of Blackmon's book. Blackmon points out that in that interview that the Department of Justice was investigating involuntary servitude as early as 1903, but no action was taken until Pearl Harbor. It became important then because the Japanese war propaganda used the condition of American black people as its main issue.

In American history clearly FDR and the Great Depression and WWII saw a remaking of an economic order. Referring to Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl as "reactionary" was meant that the neo-liberal consensus in some ways was an attempt to take economics back to the status quo ante. So in a sense that status quo ante refers back to the time of J.P. Morgan.

Partly it's from living in Pittsburgh, but I wouldn't be surprised that many Americans have an opinion about J. P. Morgan even though he died in 1913. The reason for that I think has to do with that being the time when ordinary Americans questioned the relationship between banks and society. Of course the post WWII consensus is important, but because the USA was so economically powerful after WWII, our opinions seem less about banks and more about government. In the Guilded Age, people were more focused on bankers like J.P. Morgan. While the issue of concentration of power is the same, the sort of financing the old man pursued is not at all like what his namesake bank does today. J.P. Morgan invested in real stuff, precisely the sorts things we tend to think of when we think of capital goods. The bank today specializes in financial instruments, harder I think for use to see as capital goods.

I've rambled and have gone far afield from Linda's question. So I'll sum up. I don't think that extraordinary disparity of wealth is a necessary result of Capitalism. I do think that part of what drives such great disparity has to do with how we imagine wealth confusing what is a qualitative term with quantities of money. And that money is probably best understood not as a commodity which is easily quantified, but rather as a sign of relationships, in other words to think of money qualitatively. Thinking in this way we can begin to address economic problems in a more constructive way. Extreme disparities of wealth are a clear symptom that our economic system--whatever name we give it--is seriously out of wack. Because the problem is a problem of the quality of relationships, addressing extreme wealth disparity directly is actually treating both the symptoms and causes of the present crisis. There is much more to be done.

...

Sorry about my verbal diarrhea :-(

You may be right that extreme wealth disparity is a "necessary result of capitalism," but I'm not so sure.

Here's another quotation to stir the pot:

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party . . . and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat." ~Gore Vidal

Something that's interested me with about the rise of Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers has been the insistence that Nazism was a left-wing movement.

I suppose my received wisdom on the matter is that the Nazis were right wing. But I also think that over the years of trying to come to grips with what happened in Germany what's so disquieting is rather summed up in Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil." The rise of Nazis does not seem so much left and right, but smack in the center of German society.

It's not so easy to define left and right, while it seems easy to tell just on the surface. That said it's often said that the right holds that social stratification is a good and necessary thing. Clearly there are conservatives in other systems besides capitalism.

My parents are from New England, so even though Calvin Coolidge is not remembered as a great president, he's always seemed a somewhat sympathetic character to me. "The business of America is business." had different connotations then; what came to mind was the business of manufacturing. The economy is so different today with services being the largest sector.

Take the issue of health care which has Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers up in arms. I'm not very solid on the HCR law but my objections really boil down to the idea that treating illness ought to be a reason to profit doesn't seem quite right to me. At the core the HCR law protects the standing of profit as the reason d'etre for "health care." Spending on health care represents a very significant portion of our GDP. Spend more and the GDP rises and that's supposed a good thing, but seems crazy to me. But the push back on the law is primarily from the right and it is described as "socialization."

I tend to see the issue of health care in the USA through the lens of rent seeking. The Wikipedia article isn't so great but provides a handy definition:

In economics, rent seeking occurs when an individual, organization or firm seeks to earn income by capturing economic rent through manipulation or exploitation of the economic environment, rather than by earning profits through economic transactions and the production of added wealth.

Health care is hardly the only sector of the economy engaged in rent seeking, for example rent seeking is now the primary source of banking profits. In fact so wide spread is the pattern that we tend to think that rent seeking is business.

But here's the rub, Coolidge's quote seems quite sensible to middle Americans such as myself, but it does because our idea of business is stuck in the frame of mind that production of added wealth is business. We've got a blind spot when it comes to seeing where the real money in business is these days.

I'm left in my political orientation, there's no use in pretending otherwise. Even as a boy this was often pointed out to me. I'm so lazy I haven't really worked on my left identity, rather it's just sort of received, what people say about me. That said, I don't really think that when rent seeking is brought into the economic picture that it's an issue that divides right from left. Sure those who profit from such behavior are for it, and the rich tend to be right leaning in their politics. But rent seeking behavior is something many conservatives decry as well as left-leaning folks.

I believe that the rapid increase in disparity of wealth is primarily the result of an increase in rent seeking behavior. Further I believe that rent seeking is not a necessary result of capitalism.

What to do about rent seeking is a difficult political matter. Decisions about what gets taxed and how are central to it. The average American would say that as a society we should encourage production; i.e. production of real value. The tax system rewards manipulation and exploration of the economic environment. But the issue of taxes has been so captured by the right that any change toward the direction most Americans want on both sides of the political spectrum seem almost impossible. We don't even seriously talk about the issue.

Extreme disparity of wealth holding is an enormous social problem. The core of the capitalist idea is private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism to be an effective system must be about the business of business; it only works when we're producing value. Right now we're stuck in a descending spiral that's the result of profit made not from the production of value, but rather by manipulation and exploitation of the economic environment. Capitalism need not be conceived as strictly competitive; that is a zero sum game. Indeed one good reason so many are in favor of capitalism is precisely because of non-zero sum assumption of transactions being mutually beneficial.

I find it strange that when I've raised anti-capitalism in the past on threads here others have weighed in on the side of capitalism. Perhaps if I weren't so lazy I'd identify as an anti-capitalist. Certainly I am intellectually open to different approaches to economic arrangements in society. Anyhow, it seems strange to be seeming to defend capitalism here. That's not really my main intention, rather to argue that the problem seems to me less a problem of the idea of capitalism and more a problem of how economic incentives have shifted from the production of goods towards the manipulations of money-a polite way of saying shifted from an honest living to theft.

I am certainly hoping that you are laughing right now as that is how I visualize you in my mental vingnette. I would have been across the table and at your neck at "Like most Americans the bail out..." and you would have been physically unable to make the second posting long before our proposed ending of the first.

What I said was:

I don't believe that the unequal redistribution of wealth is a necessary result of capitalism. I suspect it is more a result of misplaced values; as in me rather than us.

What do you think of that single paragraph?

I don't believe that the unequal redistribution of wealth is a necessary result of capitalism. I suspect it is more a result of misplaced values; as in me rather than us.

;-)

Values: What are values? My attention is not so much drawn to values as objects but towards the processes of valuing. I realize that for the most part that's not how people think of values but I often have difficulty communicating across this difference of perspective.

One perspective about values is that values are rules.

Another perspective about values is values are that which matters most to us.

Both perspectives presume that we somehow learn values. In the first perspective values are inculcated; i.e. impressed upon our minds by repetition, frequent instruction, indoctrination, etc. The second perspective suggests a way of learning that clarifies or perfects our values.

Louis Raths identifies seven sub processes in value clarification which I'll copy here because this second perspective isn't as widely expressed as the first:

PRIZING one's beliefs and behaviors

1. prizing and cherishing
2. publicly affirming, when appropriate

CHOOSING one's beliefs and behaviors

3. choosing from alternatives
4. choosing after consideration of consequences
5. choosing freely

ACTING on one's beliefs

6. acting
7. acting with a pattern, consistency and repetition

I did notice your message in red letters :-)

What I'm trying to address is the clause: "in me rather than us."

Early in my first semester in college I used some of my scarce pocket money to buy Louis Raths' book "Values and Teaching." I was somewhat familiar with the concepts in it already, but buying the book was a sort of commitment to what I hoped my college project would be. I was interested in learning more about how people make meaning in their lives and how then to be of service to this meaning making and I thought Raths' ideas provided a sort of map. What I quickly discovered was a degree of animosity towards value clarification I never expected. As an educational fad, it was snipped in the bud, perceived as the young green shoots of "moral relativism" best weeded out early.

Despite my greater attention to the process of valuing, I do admit that values as rules is real and important too. What then are the rules? Well when we look to religion there are often a startling number of rules, but dig a little further down and most religions base all the other rules are a few simple concepts. And one rule seems to have a peculiar ecumenical cast which we call the Golden Rule.

When we look to the community knowledge about values--look to the experts--what we see is a small number of "rules." This feature, it seems to me, implies the process of valuing; presumes that in our lives our values are something which must be fit or mapped onto a very small number of rules. But from what I can tell most people don't see it this way.

Jeffrey Toobin recently wrote a profile of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. In it Stevens remarks about his fellow jurist Antonin Scalia:

When it comes to interpreting statutes, Scalia believes that the Court should be guided by the words of the law 'all by itself.'"

In a social setting I've met an interesting Washington couple. They are both involved in Opus Dei. Contrary to what you might expect in "polite" company I do try to avoid talk of politics and religion. The woman of this couple has been very nice to me, and I suspect because she rather senses my unease with the talk of politics and religion going on around me. She is very good friends with Antonin Scalia's wife and has sought to humanize Scalia for me. Something she has in common with Mrs. Scalia is their both good Irish Catholic girls married to good Italian Catholic boys.

Fitting across cultures is really quite similar to the processes of valuing which so interest me. Ha! So is what happens in marriage generally. Something common to relationships is they tend to make visible exceptions to rules. Whether or not we think it important, in our everyday life we engage in all sorts of relationships. For those who are primarily intent on the "rules" it's not always easy to accept that sometimes the rules don't always match or fit the circumstances at hand. So it put a smile on my face that a good friend of Mrs. Scalia would say to me in effect: "Oh yeah, imagine being married to that guy!"

"in me rather than us"

Where to locate values? The harsh criticism of values clarification approaches is: Moral relativism! The gloss is that values are whatever we say they are. But what's missed in that is values are personal, but in relation to others: they are both "in me" and in "us." The location of values isn't in me or in them, but in relationship. For those for whom values are rules the location of values is not so much in me or in us as they are transcendent and eternal verities; values are in God.

I don't suspect the sincerity of Antonin Scalia in his views. I truly do think he believes he's acting in accordance with the texts of statutes. But it seems clear to me in looking at his opinions that rather than actually being guided by the letter of the law, he is guided by an agenda, that is a worldview which he assumes is supported by interconnected propositions about the world.

I have been arguing with a Ugandan blogger who is now blogging at My Song in the Trench. His old blog was "Communist Socks and Boots." The guy is brilliant, just as Antonin Scalia is known to be. I think they're both really good exemplars of the values as rules perspective. I tend to come at the issue of values from a different perspective.

Okay, so far I've responded to the second half of the paragraph Linda has posed. I've looked at values from two perspectives and remarked on what it means to "misplace" values from these perspectives. I've expressed my view that values are best understood in terms of relationships. So then to the first part of the paragraph which has to do with the causes of unequal distribution of wealth and the relationship of inequality to capitalism.

Several years ago my friend Phil Jones wrote a piece at his blog Platform Wars TCP/IP vs. the Dollar. In that post there was an insight that suddenly brought a bunch of ideas together for me in ways I hadn't thought of before:

the economy is a communication network and money is its protocol

There is a tension between the "two sides of the coin" that Keith Hart points to: Heads: portraits of the sovereign or "Dead Presidents" and Tails: information of about the value of the currency. Hart points out the heads side signifies the social construction of money and the tails side money as a commodity. What Phil Jones's observation about money did for me is to make me flip the coin from tails to heads; to see that money is not simply an object, but a signifier of relationships.

The trajectory of increasing concentration of wealth is not simply that all the stuff is ending up in a few hands, but of course it is that. The increasing concentration of wealth also represents orders of relationships between people. It's not far fetched to say that who has the money determines social relationships. I don't deny the truth in that, but don't think social relationships are made only in terms of money. Likewise, because money is both socially constructed and a commodity that possession of the money means there can be never any change in social relationships. IN other words the conversation can be changed.

I have things in your response that I need to think about but I did read it all, even if I would have reined you in early on to keep you focused.

Values in your two cases are not so different I don't think.

My individual values are those things that are of most valuable to me and most important. I have come to understand those after many, many years of living and interacting in my society/culture. I could probably explain them to you (a peer) in few words. I could not easily explain them to a child so I codify them into rules. I grew up with those rules (because my parents were no more able to explain those values to me as a child than I am now) and as I have matured and studied them I understand and embrace my values. Unfortunately, I think that there are many people who "learn" the rules as children but never mature and study them and understand. They somehow remain either as children bound by the rules or as rebelling teens revolting against them.

I just finished reading "Firms of Endearment." These are businesses that are viewed as mature companies who have on an institutional level reached the level of self-actualization and find that by incorporating those values (like the Golden Rule) -- valuing all as equals, encouraging cooperation amongst stake holders -- they land up playing a new game that is not zero sum. Treating employees well results in higher productivity and better customer relations; giving back to the community and obeying the spirit of the law results in less friction and less litigation. It means that by spending money differently - can I say more ethically? - there is a bigger pie to split up. By valuing each other and our relationships with all living creatures, we bring new value (as in the coin of the realm) into the game. But in doing that, we also had to more equally, ethically, fairly, split the pie.

Somehow when you see yourself as a simple part of the whole rather than the master of the universe, outrageous CEO packages become OUTRAGEOUS rather than just the way it is. If you are seeing yourself as a part of us it is not nearly as easy to see someone starving.

Have to run.

Not just outrageous, but self-perpetuating and spiralling out of control, through self-justification. I think these last two could be addressed, though, through some form of monitoring and capping.

My TV watching is limited to supper time. LOL I turn on the TV while I make supper and sad to say we often have it on while eating. We watch PBS Newshour and then Nightly Business Report. As I'm making supper I don't pay too much attention, and in a way don't pay too much attention during supper, but the news is often the topic of dinner conversation. Anyhow on Friday there were Congressional hearings on Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, both government sponsored institutions--what that means is they are institutions which sell stock, i.e. get private capital but have a publicly mandated purpose. Both institutions securitize mortgages; i.e.provide ways to spread the risk of failure of individual mortgages. With the financial crisis both institutions were nationalized after the financial crisis.

Something that interested me about the testimony of former CEOs of these institutions was the role of the Boards of Directors in the decisions which were made. A point made was that decisions--which turned out badly--were driven by perceptions of fiduciary responsibility of the board.

The very fundamental premise of fiduciary responsibility is to act in the best interest of those who have put you in their trust. In the main the boards of directors of corporations hold steadfastly that "best interests" are defined by maximum profits.

I certainly get the meaning of comments in re my comments like: "I would have reigned you in reined you in early on to keep you focused." But in my defense will say that I've been trying to mark out boundaries of the subject that currently are not paid enough attention to. Linda frames it:

"when you see yourself as a simple part of the whole rather than the master of the universe"

I'm not convinced that it's easy to imagine oneself as part of the whole, and "master of the universe" just seem preposterous to me. So with my lack of imagination I'm more content to try to see myself and by extension other human beings as part of something bigger than each of us. With the more modest intention of identifying factors which make a difference which I can see from my limited perspective.

Fiduciary responsibility is presumed to be largely equivalent to profit maximization. This seems too narrow a view, but because it's a view so widely held it does seem necessary to be explicit about what it misses.

One point that I've tried to make is that "wealth" is a qualitative thing such that it cannot be defined by the addition of a quantity, especially in the matters we're talking about by quantities of money.

It's clear to me that I've not made this point well. And it might be that I'm wrong, but I still think there's something to the point.

Zero sum "describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero. Zero-sum can be thought of more generally as constant sum where the benefits and losses to all players sum to the same value of money (or utility)." What astounds me about discussion of competition in business is the degree to which competition is discussed in terms of a zero sum game. For example banks argue that they must pay a very few people at the top outrageous compensation packages because otherwise these people would leave to serve competitor banks.

Again quoting from that Wikipedia article on zero sum: "In contrast, non-zero-sum describes a situation in which the interacting parties' aggregate gains and losses is either less than or more than zero." I think it important that in most contexts people (in the USA in particular) generally think well of capitalism precisely because we imagine the economy not in a zero sum way. We think it necessary that a person buying something from a company receives value in the transaction. It seems absurd to think that we give money to a company simply to increase the profits of that company. We want to know "What's in it for us?"

When profits become divorced from value added by the company the whole reason for the company's being becomes absurd. So I was listening to these former executive saying such things as the public purpose of Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae creates an untenable "conflict of interest" to their fiduciary responsibility to their share holders, my eyes started blinking and my head spun around. What are they thinking?

Well, they are thinking that business competition is a zero sum game. The business of business is not a matter of creating value, but rather distributing an existing pot of money to particular interested parties--rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Those entrusted with fiduciary responsibility ought to be interested in the value that the corporation produces not just the profits the corporation extracts. The reason for the disinterest it seems to me is a realism about the real nature of financial institutions today; they are not producing value merely the necessary tools for extracting money from the real economy to concentrate money in the hands of a few. Calling that "capitalism" really is nothing more than propaganda building on the public view formed by many years of indoctrination that capitalism is "good" as in good versus evil. But the point of view put forth by financial interests of what they do as capitalism certainly is not from any reasonably fair definition of capitalism. We're being hoodwinked and someone more capable than I hopefully will be screaming it from the rooftops.

My central thesis is that a central reason for the confused state of the economy is we tend to think in terms of objects rather than focusing on patterns of relationship. In a shell game players try to watch the cups to say under which one is the peanut. We carefully watch the movement of the cups but always loose because the thimblerigger palms the peanut; that is the movement of the cups is divorced from the movement of the cups, it's not under any of them. The key to understanding the shell game is to see that it's a trick. We have to understand the real relationship between the shell man and the peanut. So if we were to pay attention to the patterns of relationship, the outrageous compensation of CEOs playing hardly more than a shell game would be clear: That's how they do it! That such behavior is thought of as good and fiducially responsible is the real outrage.

Wealth is qualitative, that is we can only understand wealth in terms of relationships; i.e. wealth is relative. Now a second point that I've made is we also tend to think of money as an object. Thinking very concretely we think we can measure wealth objectively with money. But money in itself has a dual aspect: heads and tails. The heads side has a face which represents money's social construction. The tails side its nominal value in exchange. So money itself is not solely a quantitative measure, implicit in its value is a social contract. Money is qualitative too.

It's funny, Linda, you're probably one of a handful of the world's experts on the economic thinking of Gary North. North's views provide a high contrast to the views I'm presenting. North believes that money ought to be strictly a thing, that only the tails side is important. The heads on money are idolatry because God has decreed that money is pure gold. Likewise for North social arrangements are only properly ordered by the laws of God.

It's strange to me that as a non-believer that I should respond so viscerally to North's theology first and foremost rather than his economic views. Apparently my Christian education is hard to shake off. In my education the dialog reported in The Gospel of Matthew Chapter 22 verses 36-40 were drummed into my head:

"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

My wordy discourse about values tried to put forth the view that values are a little like a coin with a heads and tails. Values are rules but also rules that must be fitted to the particular situations we find ourselves in. So yes like a coin it make some sense to say as you do:

Values in your two cases are not so different I don't think.

The essential point is not the difference between two ways of understanding values, but that to understand values we have to take into account both sides.

Gary North's theology and economics are extremely one-sided. Jesus, and clearly you can't cite a more capable authority on Christianity, said there are two simple rules. Ah but the rules are so basic and fundamental that what necessarily follows from them is fitting the particular instances to them. North's thinking therefore seems very strange to me. What matters most to be a Christian is not following the rules but rather fitting what we do to timeless truths. Likewise there is no timeless formula for economic relations but rather inventing ways of economic behavior which fit two very basic rules. Social relationships cannot be left out of economic thinking, so very concrete assumptions like money is a commodity which can measure wealth are one-sided and wrong-headed.

No doubt North is convinced that God commands stoning, brutal torture, and bloody crimes of all sorts against people he doesn't like. How he gets there clearly doesn't fit with the very eternal rules he claims such authority. My only way of understanding how he gets there is to note the importance he places on concrete objects and his near complete neglect of patterns of relationships. And it seems to me that the current captains of the financialization of the economy, godless as they may be, suffer from a similar delusion.

I want to step back and paint a simple scenario and then ask a "simple" question.

You and I together own a business. For the sake of argument let's say it's a business that as it is currently structured just makes enough money for us to make it by - no savings even. I come into the office one day and I say "John, we are paying our people too little money. We need to pay them more money so that they can take care of their families and afford health care."

What is your response?

As I understand your scenario the current business returns just enough money to keep life and limb together for the two of us and the business employs others who receive near minimum wage with no health benefits. So everyone involved in this enterprise in in the same boat of hurting finacially.

I think my first response would be to take account with you what the assets of the business are. First to look at the tangible assets. And then to ask--open ended-- about ways that these assets could be used to create more value.

Second I would ask that we do a similar accounting of intangible assets.

The employment we are offering doesn't provide a living wage, and in essence isn't providing a living wage for the owners either.

Now that you and I have looked over the assets of the enterprise. Chances are that the value of the investments we've made already would return pennies on the dollar if we were to dispose of all the assets. So we would have to do some soul searching as to whether we had overestimated the potential for the business to create value. Or it might be that we predict potential for greater future value. If our conclusion was the former what to do would be different from the latter, so we'd have to make some judgement about that.

If for example the potential to create value seemed constrained to the present income and profit or worse, then we would need to think about winding the enterprise down. Accepting a financial loss. If on the other hand we were convinced that the business had potential to create greater value, we'd need to clarify what the enterprise needs to accomplish in order to make that happen.

I have not mentioned bringing the employees into the conversation yet. As impulsive as I am, in real life I think it would be hard not to respond right away by bringing them into the conversation. But because this is a hypothetical, it seems obvious that the intention of the principles needs to be clear before going to the employees.

If we're convinced that our enterprise provides real value and are content for the time being to get along on what the business makes for us, then we can turn our attention to ways that employees can increase their income, and it's conceivable that our business assets could be of value for them in that.

I assume we know our employees and have a sense what they're good at and not so good at. So perhaps there's a delivery aspect to the business. The delivery vehicle is an asset that might be able to produce value in some other enterprise than our business. So maybe one of the employees loves music and could manage a business of transporting and setting up sound equipment for bands around town using the delivery vehicle. Or one of the employees had in mind some sort of catering business that could be built upon our business assets that are underutilized. These sorts of business relationships are fraught with difficulty, but are possible.

LOL as I write this I'm trying to figure out at what point you brain me :-) Lots of businesses are essentially marginal ones. But even if the businesses aren't producing enough monetary returns there can be reasons for carrying on. For example the work may be quite fulfilling, that we're doing something we want to do and feel that what we do is creating value for others too. Not being able to offer employees enough money is of course a big responsibility. But if the pot money is short we'd have to be realistic about that. In some sense we'd have to view the employment as casual or temporary. Longer term relationships with employees might be possible as part-time.

If you and I are in business together then I know we have to do good. Neither of us would cheat or lie, so we're let with having to level with each other and our employees. But both of us have good imaginations so know that there are always many more solutions to problems than we ever choose. Bottom line, I feel sure we would both be primarily concerned about the business creating real value for us, our employees, customers and community.

You are on the edge on what I am looking at.

Wegman's is a grocery store that is presented in Firms of Endearment. Low margins just like all grocery stores.

They wanted to see employees get more money. The industry says it is a zero sum game. You raise the salaries, you lose competitive pricing or profit.

Wegman's said that if they raised wages they would lower turnover thereby decreasing the cost of re-hiring and training. (They also included the employees in the discussion) The people staying longer meant that they developed personal relationships with the customers which increased the volume. They further trained the employees and raised their wages again and the employees further increased the quality of customer interactions and increased the volume. The better paid employees, feeling better about themselves and their work, were also able to increase the quality of the products being sold and increase the margins. They are the industry leader in profits and yet they are paying grocery store workers over $40,000 and providing benefits in health and education. By incorporating the social benefits due the employees and the customers, (and they have also incorporated environmental well-being as well) they were able to create more value rather than the kind of thinking that robs Peter (profits or competitive ricing) to pay Paul (raise the wages). The management has also consciously curbed higher (read that outrageous) compensation packages.

This lands up in people who are traditionally at the bottom of the ladder rising up and not continuing the unconscionable redistribution of wealth to the wealthy from the poor.

Acting with values (The golden rule) generates more value.

Should we be thinking about increasing salaries, or reducing living costs in society to the less well off? Perhaps the government could offer vouchers to companies employing staff on lower salaries, to allow them to offer their employees access to health care etc. rather than the employers justifying higher salaries.

I think most research suggests that salary is not the biggest driver for retention (at least in the UK). Instead "valuing" employees in other ways is more important.

I also feel that high salaries for people has led to many insidious elements in society. While this sounds very right wing (which I am not), we have been talking often about people with little having little idea how to best spend their money, which they have received as a result of a changing society. Rich people may not have much idea either, though. An example of the insidious aspects has been the "pampering" of children, creating a new breed of young person, who has little understanding of hardship.

Is not "wanting to see employees earn more money" a rather shortsighted, "capitalist-orientated" albeit positive objective?

It's funny how discussion threads work. I think in essence there is really little daylight between Linda's and my own views of economics. But I think that how we tend to think of it is really different from how many authorities on economics and indeed many people in general think about it. So sometimes in threads we point to the differences in economic viewpoints of others, and sometimes engage in trying to hone our own thinking. I'm afraid that I too often come across as quarrelsome. I don't really mean to be.

Linda points to Wegman's as one of the "firms of endearment." I think the scenario of owning a regional grocery business is a bit different from the scenario I was thinking about of Linda and I owing a business together. One difference is that Wegman's can point to nearly 100 years of operations, that business own assets that took many years to create. Any business that Linda and I might own would be a much younger business.

The subject of this thread concerns the increasing disparity of wealth ownership. The subject of business cycles is perhaps somewhat tangential to it; and besides I don't know much about business cycles. Still a rather simple observation is that established companies often have greater financial power over startup companies. That in itself isn't inherently unfair, nevertheless the relative financial strength of established companies tends to foster adoption of rent seeking strategies which I've criticized in earlier remarks.

The important point about the example of Wegman's is that part of their business success owes to a broader view of the value they create than many of their peers in the industry take.

I stopped following Harry Lyme on Twitter because I was getting his tweets at Facebook. Harry is relentless in his attacks on Umair Haque. From what I can gather from Harry's tweets is his stance vis a vis Haque is one of a conventional realist. I read Haque so see lots of critical comments and I also remember hearing Stirling Newberry who comes at things from a decidedly progressive perspective be quite dismissive of Haque. I'm not quit sure why Umair Haque seem to grate at people.

Hague's most recent post is an argument "why doing good is in our own interest." I certainly quibble with some of Haque's business examples and sometimes I imagine inconsistencies in his arguments, but his main premise that business ought to create something good seems unassailable.

Dave Snowden had a post Sunday which among other things touched on Snowden's Cynefin framework in re a resent post by Clay Shirky, "The Collapse of Complex Business Models." And he politely points to an argument he's had with Stephen Downes. All these folks are roughly on the same page, and Snowden knows that in re Downes or he wouldn't spend the time. Still it's odd how much online dialog follows the format of arguing. I think often the broad areas of agreement are obscured by that. I don't have a clue about how to change the situation.

I certainly think that vast disparities of wealth distribution are not a good for society. In theory capitalism is nonpareil among economic systems in producing "goods." So viewing the trends for ever increasing concentration of wealth seems "bad" to me, and I wonder why more people aren't saying so. Why are we so complacent?

So Linda this whole post is rather off topic, or perhaps meta. Is capitalism the cause of increasing concentration of wealth? That's an urgent question to discuss in my view. LOL my sense is that David Braden thinks the question not so important, or at least that he doesn't see much profit in pursuing the question. For him us versus them talk is part of the problem. It seems Ben and David both turn the old quote inside out: "The rich will always be with us." That's a bit of putting words into another's mouth I should properly avoid. Ach! What I really want to do is to make sure I'm signaling that I want to play nice ;-)

I will contend that there is a difference in how a business operates if you do what you do because it is the right thing to do and if you do the same things because it will make you more money.

(I have to be short to balance John!)

Linda Nowakowski said:

I will contend that there is a difference in how a business operates if you do what you do because it is the right thing to do and if you do the same things because it will make you more money.

(I have to be short to balance John!)

I think what you are stating is the essence of social enterprise and has little place in the necessary evil of traditional enterprise. What I would argue for is a balance more in favour of social enterprise and a recognition that social impact needs recognition through some financial compensation methodology.

Why Are 25 Hedge Fund Managers Worth 658,000 Teachers?

John Powers said:

Why Are 25 Hedge Fund Managers Worth 658,000 Teachers?

Fixed the link - a misspelling in the link.

Thanks Linda! I was so pleased to see the article because just the title drives home how out of wack things have become.

15 graphics showing wealth and inequality in the USA. (Avoid putting the cursor anywhere near the Bank of America ad at the right, it cannot be closed.)

I'm not as concerned about how wealth is accumulated, as I am about how this wealth can be passed on to organizations trying to do good in the world, either during the life time of the wealthy person, or after he/she moves on.

You can't take it with you is something we all understand. Thus, can we influence where it goes?

Do any of you know of a web site that does a great job of enabling wealth people to bequest money to non profits? Or who use their wealth as social investors, helping start up SEs get off the ground? Does anyone have a web site that aggregates a list of great examples.

Seems to me that such a list would be useful for many of us, and could be used to encourage others to do more with their wealth than give to their kids, or to the government.