In the world, there is only Capital, and its presence or absence.
NRIII
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of bitch Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 10:47 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] UN: Richest 2% of adults own more than half ofglobal household wealth
At 10:25 AM 12/5/2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
>On Dec 5, 2006, at 9:46 AM, bitch wrote:
>
>>I remember that, the other thing they'd said was that, were we to
>>disburse the world's wealth evenly, everyone would have $60k a year
>>-- which was a fuckload of money in 1985.
>
>This is about wealth, not income.
Which is why I wrote "disburse the world's wealth evenly". I actually learned that in a frosh poli sci class, yessirree, the diff between income and wealth. Which is why I was all over Annalee Newitz for not knowing the difference oh so long ago -- yet she was teaching a course using a book for which it would help to know the difference. :) (It's how I earned the name snit, because she described me as snitgrrRl for being on her case about what the fuck English TA and adjuncts were doing teaching the stuff I was supposed to teach. Off my turf! heh.)
>World per capita GDP is around $9,500. So I don't know where that
>$60k comes from, unless it's global wealth divided evenly. Since the
>US has about a quarter of world GDP, if you multiply US household
>assets ($66b) by 4 and divide by the world pop, you get around
>$45,000 per person. Maybe that's it?
I can remember what the book looks like but couldn't possibly tell you the title as it's been 20 years. It was a hardback, dark green, gold lettering. Very frayed b/c used. It was a course in 1985 and the book was available as frayed used editions, so I presume that the data was pulled from 70s or maybe even 60s. But that still doesn't square with your current numbers since, presumably, it was lower back then -- though perhaps you're using an adjusted value to account for that.
At any rate, I also learned in that book that the US political spectrum still landed to the right, even then, when looking at the political spectrum of the entire world and considering their politics (e.g., the commies at the time). This is something I notice is surprsing even to college-educated political types who think the US is the center of the universe and what the word 'liberal' means here isn't what it means elsewhere.
I don't recall that the book was particularly lefty and I can't imagine this jackass libertarian using a textbook so obviously biased to the left. Coz seriously, we're talking a town that put the word "libertarian" on the map back then because, every year, a woman would mount a horse and ride naked through Main St. a la Lady Godiva, to protest taxes. HE was part of that gang.
By contrast, it was plenty apparent when I took a survey econ course that the book I was using was blantantly presenting a 'radical' perspective because that's what it did, give a different side to each economic problem drawing on Milton Friedman et al for cons, Keynesian economist for liberal and Marxist and Marxish types for radical.
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