Chicken🐔Whisperer

Proposal: trend is for capital to get more of GDP pie. Let's fight back thru ANY transfer of ownership to normal ppl, ideally independently of the state.

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

AB's a good soul, which means he sees how envy eats at people, how much of what we envy is truly undesirable, & rehearses arguments as old as Dickens.

I'd say hate this kid. Hate that he doesn't work & has everything. Hate societal conditions depriving ppl who work of enjoyment.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

[Tony Annett @tonyannett]

Why have working class wages stagnated since 1980? It's the labor market institutions. Here's a long list of culprits:

- Unions became weaker. This is the big one. Private sector unionization is now down to 6%.

- The abandonment of full employment reduced the bargaining power of labor (the Kalecki channel).

- Welfare reforms that forced recipients to accept low wage work also reduced bargaining power.

- Financialization—especially the focus on maximizing shareholder value—boosted the willingness of capital to suppress wages.

- The increasing dominance of large corporations—especially in sectors such as retail, food services, and gig work—creates local monopolies that bid down wages (the Dube channel).

- The erosion of the minimum wage also lowered worker power.

- The fissuring of workplaces led firms to contract out a whole class of workers, breaking norms of within-firm solidarity.

- Employees are misclassified as independent contractors.

- The erosion of overtime protections,

- The rise of non-competes.

- The rise of compulsory corporate-friendly arbitration.

- The increasing tolerance of wage theft.

[Jeremy Loffredo @loffredojeremy]

“[equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis] would be the end of the state of Israel and I support Israel” - Bernie Sanders

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@ATondowsky @WiddowsWeb17 @jdcmedlock @StatisticUrban No one questions that real wages have risen & that much of that occurred during the postwar boom. But, booms end & when that one ended, labor's share began to shrink after making small gains that, apparently, continue to have an outsized ideological significance.

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@jdcmedlock @StatisticUrban is this a reference to Joan Robinson?

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@LittleKeegs0 @postsenjoyer @jdcmedlock @StatisticUrban Well, that's interesting as Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes' mentor Alfred Marshall, & the young Keynes himself all thought that prices moved erratically due to 'animal spirits' but that these fluctuations led prices toward values (determined by either labor or costs of production).

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@WiddowsWeb17 @jdcmedlock @StatisticUrban "just currently" as in for just the last several centuries

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@weebittystar75 @TorontoStar All bosses, Soviets or capitalists, hate the same thing about labor action: interrupts plans for labor & wealth-creation

Neither the liberal nor 'socialist' revolutions have overcome need to beat the competition at creating wealth (ie factories&bombs)- macroeconomics & Cold Wars

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@weebittystar75 @TorontoStar Many Marxists agree with you.

For example, in From Consent to Coercion, the late Leo Panitch of York University argued that regulating labor action has encouraged the growth of the labor bureaucracy & cut off workers from union leadership.

https://t.co/lnOydZWIHL

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@damn_jehu I thought twitter was the social media platform for informed discussion...

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

Keynes racially stereotyping Berliners

[Insane Economist Quotes @Insane_Econ]

On Berlin:
"Yet if I lived there, I felt I might turn anti-Semite."

-John M. Keynes, "My Visit to Berlin" (1926)

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@pmcondon2 @joelgombiner Through what mechanism would increased supply increase prices?

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@TherynDArnold @die_rizzen @beverlymantle1 @damn_jehu Hey, I think you DM'd me, but twitter's acting up & I can't retrieve my DMs rn. If it's time sensitive, please email me.

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@Eleven_twenT2 @gudenevil @damn_jehu @Eleven_twenT2 Matt's tweets could have been better thought out, but I'd suggest interpreting everything through this tweet

Seems to be saying capitalism is about power far more than💰& capitalists are pursuing power first

💰 is just a means to that end

https://t.co/W2tWLzDhKx

[Matt Gilbert @gudenevil]

@InformedObserv1 @damn_jehu His position here is basically the same as mine. We agree. A succinct answer to your question.

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@gudenevil @damn_jehu production as driving the system. I agree. Marx agrees.

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@gudenevil @damn_jehu predictable ways. Most of us would say the individual capitalist is motivated by profit while the system has 'a logic of its own'- the outcomes are the result of a struggle between wills rather than what anyone intends.

You see the control of ever increasing means of

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@TherynDArnold @die_rizzen @beverlymantle1 I also agree with @damn_jehu on inflation lowering real wages, probably intentionally. If real wages start increasing, central banks may see that as destabilizing or inflationary, so they raise rates.

[Chicken🐔Whisperer @InformedObserv1]

@TherynDArnold @die_rizzen @beverlymantle1 is right that the Austrians seek to naturalize CAP, ie subsume it under the categories of nature & subjective action.

Everything is nature & transitory. Cap's tendencies are only 1 way that the need to allocate labor & produce might be met