A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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To be fair, Biden doesn't even remember what he ate for dinner tonight.
That's your front-runner. 
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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What Should The Distribution Of Wealth Be?
A 2011 survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, of Harvard’s Business School, found that the average American thinks the richest 25% of Americans own 59% of the wealth, while the bottom fifth owns 9%. In fact, the richest 20% own 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% controls only 0.3%. An avalanche of studies has since confirmed these basic facts: Americans radically underestimate the amount of wealth inequality that exists – and the level of inequality they think is fair is lower than actual inequality in America probably has ever been. As journalist Chrystia Freeland put it, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.”
Thomas Piketty ramped up the inequality debate, a couple of years later, with “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, a massive 250-year survey of wealth inequality. He discovered that r > g. That is, the rate of return on investment is always greater than growth rate of the economy. (For the USA, g was 2.1% for GDP while r was 28.5% for S&P 500 in 2019) The rich really are getting richer – and the poor? Well, not so much. The post-war middle-class, Piketty warned, may well have been a historical anomaly. Economic inequality is likely to get worse – and never get better – without coordinated political action. The good news is that not one, but two, serious candidates in the current Democratic Presidential Primary are endorsing versions of Piketty’s “Wealth Tax” – Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
More at www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2019/12/what-should-the-distribution
-of-wealth-be.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What Should The Distribution Of Wealth Be?
A 2011 survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, of Harvard’s Business School, found that the average American thinks the richest 25% of Americans own 59% of the wealth, while the bottom fifth owns 9%. In fact, the richest 20% own 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% controls only 0.3%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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6ix, "Preferential Attachment" (intuitively, "the rich get richer" or "success breeds success") fits the data describing wealth inequality far better than Zipf's Law. And the math for preferential attachment is simpler than Zipf's Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment
Also see the "Matthew Effect", a term coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968. Its name is from the Parable of the Talents in the biblical Gospel of Matthew. One person invested money and another hid his in a hole in the ground. The one who invested was praised and became wealthy while the one who dug a hole had his money taken away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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According to a report, Global Waves of Debt, pre-published by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development:
Waves of debt accumulation have been a recurrent feature of the global economy over the past fifty years. In emerging and developing countries, there have been four major debt waves since 1970. The first three waves ended in financial crises—the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Asia financial crisis of the late 1990s, and the global financial crisis of 2007-2009.
A fourth wave of debt began in 2010 and debt has reached $55 trillion in 2018, making it the largest, broadest and fastest growing of the four. Global Waves of Debt has done a signal service by reminding us that this time may be no different.
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/32809
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix, "Preferential Attachment" (intuitively, "the rich get richer" or "success breeds success") fits the data describing wealth inequality far better than Zipf's Law. And the math for preferential attachment is simpler than Zipf's Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment
Also see the "Matthew Effect", a term coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968. Its name is from the Parable of the Talents in the biblical Gospel of Matthew. One person invested money and another hid his in a hole in the ground. The one who invested was praised and became wealthy while the one who dug a hole had his money taken away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
The math might be easier, and in the case of money specifically it might explain the causality of why, but Zipf's law can be applied almost universally to any situation.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I have actually seen this play out in real life many times. For one example, I have a cousin, a Trump lover if there ever was one, who I offered a business deal to, along with a bunch of other people back when I was poor. The cousin would NOT invest, no damn way, but he has been angry for years that he did not get a "fair" share of the money. He will NEVER comprehend that because he did no work, was no help, invested nothing, all he did was run his big mouth and make stupid comments that showed he knew nothing, that his fair share was NOTHING. I gave him a few shares for his nothing contribution, but now he is angry that I didn't give him more. What a greedy dumb-ass he is, but then again, he voted for Trump and will do it again.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The math might be easier, and in the case of money specifically it might explain the causality of why, but Zipf's law can be applied almost universally to any situation.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The 2020 election will be unprecedented, no matter what. Either President Donald Trump’s victory will shatter expectations and academic theories, or his defeat will. If Trump wins in 2020, he will be the first and only impeached president to win reelection. Barring a major change in national polls, he will also be the first president to be elected twice without once winning the popular vote. And if he loses? It would mark “the greatest presidential fumble of economic and market tailwinds in modern history,” according to Michael Cembalest of J.P. Morgan. A traditional formula for predicting modern presidential elections goes like this: The national economy determines the national vote. Strong economies have historically favored the incumbent candidate or party. Weak economies, or even brief dips, have helped the challenger.
…As for 2020, unemployment is at its lowest point in more than 60 years. The S&P 500 has tripled in the past decade. Wage growth, while still somewhat disappointing, is rising fastest for full-time low-income workers. In a vacuum, this would augur a reelection landslide for the sitting president. According to Cembalest’s index of economic strength—combining data on unemployment levels, home prices, per capita GDP, stock-market growth, and inflation—“Trump as an incumbent benefits from the strongest tailwinds” since 1896. (Bill Clinton’s reelection year of 1996 comes close, but unemployment and inflation were higher, and home values and the stock market were only on the cusp of their late-’90s boom.)
www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/01/the-2020-election-will-break
-history.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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William Greider obituary
William Greider tackled gigantic subjects: the Federal Reserve (“Secrets of the Temple,” 1987), the evaporation of American democracy (“Who Will Tell the People,” 1992), globalization (“One World Ready or Not,” 1997), society’s deformation by the military-industrial complex (“Fortress America,” 1998), whether we can reinvent the U.S. economy (“The Soul of Capitalism,” 2003), and what to do when the people running this country seem determined to destroy it (“Come Home, America,” 2009).
Each of these books is still completely relevant — something that almost never can be said about aging political writing. Pick up, say, “Game Change,” the bestseller by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin about the 2008 election, and you’ll find it’s now as fascinating as gossip about the Harding administration.
Greider pulled this off because he didn’t care about the daily political garbage tornado. Instead, his focus was always on the huge subterranean battles that actually determine our lives, i.e., capital vs. labor, creditors vs. debtors, marketing vs. people, and capitalism vs. democracy.
The message running through his work is that, for decades, one side in these fights has been absolutely beating the shit out of the other. But Greider didn’t spend his life diagnosing America’s disease to make us despair. It was the opposite — he did it because he believed we can develop the cure, if we put in the work. He thought that normal humans were capable of understanding the world, and governing ourselves.
Greider made the case that the people in charge have no more idea what they’re doing than anyone else, and often less. During his career in journalism, he wrote in “Who Will Tell the People,” “I have seen up close the frailties of power. At the pinnacles of political command, whenever I have been able to peer behind the veil of platitudes, I have usually glimpsed a scene of confusion … trial and error, folly and misapprehensions.”
Meanwhile, Greider wrote, “this is a nation of people who are mostly smart and capable and, on the whole, generously disposed.” Even in the most brutalized parts of the country, “I frequently came away thinking to myself: Those people would be running things if they had been born with a bit more luck. … There is a vast pool of unrealized ability dwelling in the American population.”
Toward the end of his life, Greider was overjoyed to see the burgeoning movement behind Bernie Sanders and the rise of young politicians and activists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His case had never been that something like it would happen, but just that it could, that it was within the capability of Americans to do this and much more. As he put it, “Power can accumulate in mysterious ways, if citizens believe they possess this right.”
More at https://theintercept.com/2020/01/01/william-greider-obituary/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real
The inventor of “cyberspace” turned his attention to a strange new world: the present.
Two years ago, in December of 2017, I e-mailed Gibson to ask if he’d consent to being profiled, since his new novel was to be published that spring. He replied, explaining that the election of Donald Trump had forced him to delay the book. “I’ve had to get an extension,” he wrote. Extrapolating from current events, he had already written into his novel “a nuclear crisis involving Syria, Russia, nato, and Turkey”:
Quote:In March, 2018, I e-mailed Gibson again, but he had delayed the book a second time. “Cambridge Analytica now requires a huge rethink, major revisions,” he wrote. “This is very comical in a way, but still a huge problem.”
But then Trump started fucking with N Korea, here, so how scary can my scenario be? He keeps topping me, but I think I can handle it in rewrite. And if there’s a nuclear war, at least I won’t have to turn in the manuscript! . . .
Crazy times,
Bill
Earlier this year, we finally met, in Vancouver, to talk about the novel, “Agency,” which comes out January 2020.
More at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-sci
ence-fiction-real
www.amazon.com/Agency-William-Gibson/dp/110198693X
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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