<story><title>Capital Man: Thomas Piketty is economics’ biggest sensation and fiercest critic</title><url>http://chronicle.com/article/Capital-Man/146059</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>apsec112</author><text>&amp;quot;... capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Whatever else you might say about inequality, &amp;quot;unsustainable&amp;quot; is an obvious falsehood.&lt;p&gt;Roman civilization, for example, lasted two thousand years. Eight times as long as the United States. Think about that. One hundred generations of men lived and died as Romans. And the Roman Empire featured &lt;i&gt;radical&lt;/i&gt; inequality, of the sort that we could never have in modern America, no matter what the Gini coefficient was.&lt;p&gt;On one side was the Emperor and his soldiers, who could have you and your entire family tortured to death, purely on a whim (see Caligula). On the other side were slaves, who had no human rights at all and were treated as property. And between them, countless peasants starved to death every time there was a bad harvest, while countless aristocrats taxed their lands to fund lavish banquets. (In the Roman tax system, tax collection was &lt;i&gt;outsourced&lt;/i&gt;; the tax collector was responsible for finding a certain amount, and anything above that he could &lt;i&gt;keep for himself&lt;/i&gt;.)&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s some serious fucking inequality right there. And I&amp;#x27;m certainly not saying it&amp;#x27;s a good idea, or that we should try to emulate them. But it was, as a raw historical fact, extremely sustainable, lasting eight times as long as the US has so far.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>msluyter</author><text>I would agree with the gist of your comment, which is that autarchy can be a stable equilibrium.&lt;p&gt;However, I don&amp;#x27;t read Piketty as saying that inequality itself is unsustainable. Rather, inequality tends to undermine democracy. Thus, &amp;quot;unsustainable&amp;quot; here should be read to mean &amp;quot;unsustainable in conjunction with our commonly held egalitarian, democratic values.&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Capital Man: Thomas Piketty is economics’ biggest sensation and fiercest critic</title><url>http://chronicle.com/article/Capital-Man/146059</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>apsec112</author><text>&amp;quot;... capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Whatever else you might say about inequality, &amp;quot;unsustainable&amp;quot; is an obvious falsehood.&lt;p&gt;Roman civilization, for example, lasted two thousand years. Eight times as long as the United States. Think about that. One hundred generations of men lived and died as Romans. And the Roman Empire featured &lt;i&gt;radical&lt;/i&gt; inequality, of the sort that we could never have in modern America, no matter what the Gini coefficient was.&lt;p&gt;On one side was the Emperor and his soldiers, who could have you and your entire family tortured to death, purely on a whim (see Caligula). On the other side were slaves, who had no human rights at all and were treated as property. And between them, countless peasants starved to death every time there was a bad harvest, while countless aristocrats taxed their lands to fund lavish banquets. (In the Roman tax system, tax collection was &lt;i&gt;outsourced&lt;/i&gt;; the tax collector was responsible for finding a certain amount, and anything above that he could &lt;i&gt;keep for himself&lt;/i&gt;.)&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s some serious fucking inequality right there. And I&amp;#x27;m certainly not saying it&amp;#x27;s a good idea, or that we should try to emulate them. But it was, as a raw historical fact, extremely sustainable, lasting eight times as long as the US has so far.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shoo</author><text>Regarding sustainability, Charles Stross has a fun thought experiment over here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designing_society_for_posterit.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.antipope.org&amp;#x2F;charlie&amp;#x2F;blog-static&amp;#x2F;2009&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;designin...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We humans are really bad at designing institutions that outlast the life expectancy of a single human being. The average democratically elected administration lasts 3-8 years; public corporations last 30 years; the Leninist project lasted 70 years (and went off the rails after a decade). The Catholic Church, the Japanese monarchy, and a few other institutions have lasted more than a millennium, but they&amp;#x27;re all almost unrecognizably different.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; So. You, and a quarter of a million other folks, have embarked on a 1000-year voyage aboard a hollowed-out asteroid. What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror?</text></comment>