The true extent of wealth disparity in the USA

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but a distinct and powerful minority are motivated by money to the point where they will sell their neighbors down the river for a bit more. those are the people destroying this world along with all the people who are motivated by more edifying memes.

Viper give me an example of a sentence that is incomprehensible to you. I will make it elementary for you as I have done before. Why do you have trouble understanding sentences everybody understands. Since you accuse me of not being able to construct a sentence,please give an example and then everyone will see how anal you are.
Perhaps I have made an occasional spelling error. So your argument is that Wittgenstein makes an occasional spelling error,therefore cooperatives do not give economic power to those that create value.
Anyway, everyone knows that you are a troll. Congratulations!. You once again turned civilized debate into personal attacks. Those threads (where one can rant insults) free you from making a rational argument.
OK, bring on the cases where I misspelled a word (sometimes I use a tablet and my big fat fingers sometimes click the wrong letter ) or forgot to put in a comma. If you cannot find a particular case that is more yhen such trivial examples, show it. I already pointed out ( from another thread that "We are all familiar with misdirection. They tried to slip in TPP while everyone was distracted by the government shutdown" is not difficult for a normal IQ person to understand. So if you are goinhg* to rant insults at least back them up with actual examples.
* Oh dear a typo! No one could tell that my word was "going"! Gee! I guess you are right I am totally indecipherable!

wittgenstein, either you start using the quote function, or I start ignoring your posts... I will not respond to misrepresentations of my posts. If you want to address a point made by me, quote it.

If you are going to use the CEO example, well OK I'm as bad a writer as the professional journalists at the Wall Street Journal and most publications. I'll accept that!

Viper,
See page 5 the post 4th from the top. I did not misquote you. You did say "grow up" in a childish rant against another poster not me.
I really hate what you do to threads. Interesting debates become personal attacks. And yes, it is partly my fault. I responded to your insults rather then ignore them.

Real economists take externalities seriously. The mass media plays a large role in maintaining this economic system.

All of which are great provided you can pay your bills.

ruveyn

OK viper,
Demonstrate, how Chomsky's insights are inferior to your rants.
The father of modern linguistics vs. you. Lets rock!
PS: Please an actual argument with particular evidence. Not your typical, Chomsky is a poopy head.

Last edited by wittgenstein on 07 Nov 2013, 8:52 pm, edited 2 times in total.

if you watch the video, it specifically makes the point that people's concerns over money are generally satisfied provided they can comfortably make ends meet. Anything beyond that isn't the great incentive that Taylorists want us to believe.

the fact that wittgenstein personally has not created a multinational corporation does not disprove that claim, any more than the fact that you personally have not created a multinational corporation proves the idea that multi-nationals are necessary to create value (nor even that they create more value than they destroy, inhibit, or prevent).

But Chomsky is not an economist. He has no economic credentials whatsoever. And I'm not going to waste 2 hours, 47 minutes and 38 seconds watching a Youtube clip from some over-hyped "intellectual" who has made a career out of stating opinions on subjects way outside his field of expertise.

If you were serious about externalities, you would refer to someone like Arthur Pigou, Ronald Coase or Elinor Ostrom instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

It is deceptively easy to criticize the current state of affairs by invoking an idealized alternative (in this case, worker cooperatives). But as I have already demonstrated, such an alternative is not realistic.

Whether or not I have started a multi-national conglomeration based on the classical model of capitalistic firms is irrelevant, because some people have.
Whether or not wittgenstein has started a multi-national conglomeration based on the model of worker cooperatives is relevant, because no one else has.

While not to come down too heavily on the side of the worker cooperative, the democratization of the corporate model will probably happen on its own accord due to changes in technology. The gigantic corporate entity, born of the industrial era, that owns the methods of production and then seeks to control distribution will face fundamental challenges from entrepreneurs who develop products and then contract out distribution. Think of it as Walter White, he has the product and then has to look to a completely different enterprise, with its own needs, for distribution.

I seriously doubt that. Those areas most likely to produce economic growth in the future are generally high tech, and require significant and increasing capital investments to be successful. Raising capital is the Achilles heel of cooperative enterprises (not just the marginal worker cooperatives, but even producer cooperatives, as they are unable/unwilling to enter the stock market).

And the concentration of capital in fewer hands is likely a contributing factor to being able to raise capital. Why? Well, look at this chart (US data only):


Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-sa ... vel-2013-3
Original source: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jskinner/docu ... heRich.pdf (see table 3 on page 416)

Under standard economic assumptions, the savings rate is equal the investment rate. Even if we assume that this is unrealistic (apparently, some people actually still stuff cash in their pillows, walls etc. as a way of saving), there is a clear tendency for higher income individuals to allocate a greater portion of their income to investment.

Since more "democratic" companies have an incentive to allocate a greater portion of company income to wages of ordinary workers, they will have a hard time competing in the global economy with the filthy-rich billionaire residual claimants of the capitalist firms, simply because the latter reinvest so much of their income.

To illustrate on the basis of the graph above: If I allocate company profits of $ 1,000,000 to 100 workers in the 3rd quintile ($ 10,000) each, I would expect $ 111,000 to be saved in total and made available for investment. If I allocated the entire $ 1,000,000 to a single member of the infamous 1 percent club, $ 512,000 would be saved and made available for investment. That's 4.6 times more investment capital from the same bag of Benjamins. Obviously, the latter distribution of profits is unlikely to occur in a company with significant worker control.

This is especially relevant in the United States, which has a conspicuously low savings rate in international comparison, and thus relative lower access to investment capital compared to its GDP.

Or, to address the OP in this context:

Puppets and stew meat...

THAT GUY is just starving his market. That's a stupid, self-defeating strategy in the long term. Real economies don't work without real consumers.

Did you read my post? Because I did not mention accumulation of capital I was talking about corporate structures. Raising capital is one of the most important components of starting a high tech business but it has pretty much nothing to do with my post about the corporate structures inherent to the distribution of industrial era products being challenged by changes in technology. Democratization of corporate structure =/= democratization of capital.



Democratic structures lower barriers to entry. Most of the angel investing structures that are used to fund the development of tech products involve highly flexible capital and workplace environments where innovation and results are necessary components of development. The corporate structure of the multinational conglomerate simply is not needed in many of those structures.

One of the more interesting examples I have encountered was 12 biotech companies who cooperated to build a single large incubator. None could raise the capital necessary to finance it alone, nor satisfied the risk for that level of capitalization from outside investors, but by working together they were able to achieve great innovation and capitalization. Angel investors who engage with these sorts of companies know the risk rate is quite high and as a result attempt to spread their investment over a large range of companies. It works for them to support cooperative development because one idea, given access to single piece of decisive infrastructure can meet the needs of multiple companies. Even if only one makes it to the point of being economical independent, the structures are there waiting for them when they grow and the less successful ideas recede. The development of new systems of distribution and innovation will challenge corporate structures and force new norms in new industries.

As for the wages of 'ordinary workers', in a modern high tech enterprises, there are very few such people. As such many companies find themselves competing for a very small number of high expertise workers. New fields require specialized knowledge and at the leading edge of industry, if you don't pay well, you are not even in the labor market. The idea of preparing people for low-skill high productivity jobs simply will not really cut it in a modern business. New companies, will have to compete for employees of high skill sets and those people can be the decisive edge in a high risk enterprise and as a result paying employees is a vital consideration. Such businesses also have a different corporate atmosphere, walk around a GM plant then visit Google and you will see the difference instantly.