Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.
Well, it wasn't biden that posted record profits was it? It was the grocery stores.
> And the record profits Professor Weber mentions? Groundwork Collaborative recently found that corporate profits accounted for 53% of 2023 inflation. EPI likewise concluded that over 51% of the drastically higher inflationary pressures of 2020 and 2021 were also direct results of profits. The Kansas City Federal Reserve even pegged this around 40%, indicating that sellers’ inflation is now a pretty mainstream idea.
I'll never understand this "corporate greed" theory of inflation. Are corporations not usually trying to maximize profits? Are prices not normally as high as the market will bear? The interesting question is not "did they?" but "why were they able to?". What's different now, that nothing kept it in check?
I think you're getting at it with that last chart (though, note: It's top 0.1%, not 0.01%). The last few years has been a story of the haves (with wealth in the stock market) who got richer and the have nots who got decimated by inflation. In other words, corporations were able to raise prices because a lot of people got richer and had more money to spend.
I'm a data scientist, and my impression is that the growth of data science as a profession over the last ~decade has enabled companies to price more efficiently than they used to. That in turn was enabled by technical improvements like cheaper storage and compute and commoditized data infrastructure. I don't have a strong opinion on how much of the inflation this explains, but directionally I'm very confident that companies have gotten significantly more efficient at pricing over that time period, and pretty confident that that would lead to price increases for a lot of businesses.
Supply chain and price shocks during COVID probably accelerated this trend quite a bit - McDonald's would have eventually figured out that the profit-maximizing price of a burger is closer to $4 than $1, but COVID shocks gave it license to raise prices much faster. The good news is that I think of this largely as a one-time shock: once companies have perfectly set profit-maximizing prices, there's no room for more price-optimization-driven inflation, except to the extent that consumers get richer or less price-sensitive over time.
Quoting Matt Levine, "a good unified theory of modern society’s anxieties might be 'everything is too efficient and it’s exhausting.'"
The solution is to stop the redistribution of wealth to the billionaire class. Something that is not going to happen under any American administration.
You don't need an administration to make it happen, just a tiny fraction of the electorate sufficiently organized and radicalized. Not advocating for that option, just pointing out that it is entirely a possibility.
Sanders correctly identifies the problem most of the time, and I mostly even agree with his solutions. However, he is one of the least effective legislators in the entire senate.
Winning, as we have recently and very painfully seen AGAIN, depends on building coalitions. It does not help that Bernie is not a Democrat. You could argue that he should be considered a Democrat for the sake of party self-preservation, but he literally is not one. My opinion is that his unwillingness to declare himself a Democrat is a reflection of his inability to find and muster support for his causes. Hard pass.
> Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.
I think most people who are poor who voted for Trump expect him to eliminate unnecessary rent-seekers while also putting up barriers to free trade, thus increasing domestic spending, which (waves hands) leads to lower prices.
> think most people who are poor who voted for Trump expect him to eliminate unnecessary rent-seekers (...)
You mean people vote for a slum lord who is lauded by billionaires expecting and who funelled Whitehouse budget to his own hotels expecting him to eliminate rent-seekers?
> (...) while also putting up barriers to free trade, thus increasing domestic spending (...)
You mean the same guy who sold them cheap made in China golden sneakers for a small fortune, and bragged he got all his loans from Russia?
This train of thought defies any and all reasoning.
I don't think getting so emotionally charged about these things is a useful approach. Personally, I'm glad to have a good understanding of what made so many people vote this way (even if I very strongly disagree with their fundamental approach and philosophy and behavior).
Do you want prices to deflate? That's terrible for many reasons.
Do you want regular responsible economic management? That was Harris. Inflation is back to normal now.
Or do you want a president who wants a huge tariff on everything that will result in crazy much larger inflation than we've had in decades? That's Trump.
How is Harris not listening? How is Trump listening better?
There are zero actual reasons to think that food price deflation would be terrible. You can look back through decades of consumer price history and find many cases where at least certain foodstuffs got cheaper. It wasn't a problem.
The US President has little power to lower food prices anyway though, so this discussion is kind of moot.
Only if the deflation gets out of control. We could probably use some housing price deflation. But we'd only get it if we had a pretty serious economic downturn - that's the tradeoff.
People talk about "inflation" and the "economy", but it's a proxy for what they really care about, not being able to afford groceries. Universal basic income address the real problem.
Ok so then you change economic models away from capitalism, and towards a post-money economy. There are plenty of ways to do it, it merely requires the complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period.
> complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period
That is almost the definition of totalitarianism.
That's how hundreds of millions of people died (either by execution, war, work camps, or starvation[0]) as dictators pursued Marxist ideals during the 20th century.
Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up! Considering your own sources, seems like that work of scholarship may have not been an entirely impartial view. Particularly, from your own wiki link,
>Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed, which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship",[38] faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries,[6][39]: 194 [40]: 123
I appreciate your deep dive into these scholastic studies. I always appreciate learning new things.
You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.
When an idea has resulted in the deaths of a significant portion of the world's population at the time, it's healthy to regard it (and similar ideas) with a bit of skepticism.
>You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.
I'm specifically trying to avoid the whole "no true Scottsman" argument by saying these aren't necessarily examples of how an actually functional communism economy would be, but I do wish you could be consistent with your terminology as socialism and communism are distinctly different ideas. I'd also like to emphasize the mild sarcasm when I used words such as "merely" and "complete and total cooperation",to close out this conversation which I have little more to contribute to.
I must have missed the part where, at birth, I signed the social contract saying that I approve of the governance and monetary policy. That, or I'm not free.
Understood. I think those terms are so easily confused.
Philosophically, communism is the goal of Marxist theory -- where no ruling class even exists, ownership of the means of production doesn't exist, and everyone shares everything.
Socialism as a form of government (and not socialist economic policy within a republic or democracy) is an intentional, totalitarian stepping stone to that theoretical end goal. When I said "socialism" I meant these totalitarian governments and not anything that exists in northern Europe today. The communist parties of the "communist" (but really socialist) nations of the 20th century promised that the socialist totalitarianism was a stepping-stone and that it would be temporary until true communism was achieved (which has only ever actually occurred in small religious communities like monasteries, and which are often subsidized from the outside anyway). Those promises of temporary totalitarianism were part of how the dictators gained power.
What we call "socialist" economic policy (like the nationalized services in many European nations today) is an entirely separate and mostly unrelated issue (to me at least). I think many Americans' concern here is not a fear of totalitarianism (at least not as an immediate consequence), but that the more things are nationalized, the less freedom people have to choose where their money goes, and the less efficient the economy becomes -- but that's all entirely distinct from and unrelated to the evils of Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.
The only modern, truly "socialist" nation I know of is North Korea.
> What we call "socialist" economic policy (like the nationalized services in many European nations today) is an entirely separate and mostly unrelated issue (to me at least).
Look, I mean this in the nicest possible way, but that's a pretty weird definition of socialism which seems likely to perpetuate confusion and disagreement with people who don't share your definition.
If you want to keep using the word like that, I'd suggest defining it the first time you use it.
