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Comment by whiddershins | Hacker News Reader

This is an intrinsically Marxist framing.

Even if inequality is rising, so is wealth overall. That’s what Marx misestimated, although it wasn’t his most grievous error.

Poor people in the United States are far richer than rich people of 150 years ago.

I am personally willing to accept the he existence of some billionaires if that’s the price we pay for all this wonderful ness.

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> Poor people in the United States are far richer than rich people of 150 years ago.

There is no material improvement in wealth over the past 20 years, but inequality has grown.

Wealth is produced by innovation, and greater concentratuon of wealth will lead to less innovation.

There’s certainly been a technological improvement in which increasing numbers of people have access to the internet and smart phones, with an explosion of information, communication and entertainment.

Compare to 30 years ago instead. Wealth in terms of being able to buy property is decreasing in many countries, which can be more significant than any increased ability to buy consumer gadgets (that will spy on you). And the countries with less wealth inequality don't in principle have less wealthy common people.

Nah [0]. If you live in a NIMBY hellhole you can always move somewhere more affordable.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

"Yah". Few generations ago, you could buy property cash in a "NIMBY hellhole", that is a place where you can find gainful employment, on a few years worth of savings. Not the case anymore. Property prices inflated much more than CPI.

On one hand, as long as your political opinions align with those of the ultra-wealthy then the inequality shouldn't bother you.

On the other, high inequality is socially unstable because that is not generally the case.

Marx didn't predict that capitalism wouldn't generate wealth. On the contrary, he believed it was the most economically revolutionary structure the world had yet devised and would create untold wealth. That's entirely consistent with the world we see.

To be very specific, where he fell short was predicting a secular decline in the rate of profit. This wasn't a crazy error--most early economists also believed it--but it was very wrong, and his analysis of the failure of capitalism rests on that false premise.

He's referring to marx belief in the "tendency for the rate of profit to fall" which is literally objectively wrong and the opposite of it is accepted within economics.

This is the accepted explanation, which implies that the rate of profit rises over time

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okishio%27s_theorem

Btw, marx predicted that capitalism is inevitably destroyed due to tendency for the rate of profit to fall. I believe capitalism is the strongest that it's ever been right now.

I'd emphasize not only that there have been advances in theory but also in, more importantly, the empirical evidence. Marxism is a scientific theory in the sense that it can be falsified, and if you look at the rate of profit over time in most countries and periods, the evidence very strongly falsifies Marxism. Even if someone refuted Okishio, Marxism makes predictions about capitalist economics that simply aren't consistent with the world we see.

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