I figured we could have a casual thread to talk about what we're reading. That's the main part of literature after all, in a way. I'll make a start in the comments; feel free to post something!

  • MF_COOM [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I'm reading Capital in the 21st Century (2014) by Thomas Piketty. There is some really good and useful data that he cooks up and I'm generally supportive of his project even though he is a lib.

    It is very frustrating how in his effort to peer deeply into the data and mechanisms of inequality he so profoundly ignores socialist states. Like he'll use superlatives to describe how Sweden in the 70s had the lowest inequality of any country in the data anywhere like mf I'm fucking begging you to look at the USSR, or Cuba, or China. Or he'll use France, Germany, the UK and Sweden to represent wealth inequality in Europe in the 20th century like mf there was like a whole half of Europe that was on a completely different program for like half of that time period.

    But yeah, hot take socialist finds Piketty annoying.

    I'm also reading The Humans (2013) by Matt Haig, which is cute and light.

    Oh and I'm also reading Climate Change as Class War (2022) by Matthew Huber, and he's kind of a knob and his writing sucks.

    • Utter_Karate [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I've read Capital in the 21st Century and I agree completely. Piketty has a very liberal worldview, and that can be annoying at times, but the book is at least written in good faith. From what I hear Piketty has also been moving left since then pretty steadily, just at a snail's pace. I think he is pretty focused on wealth redistribution these days, which is good, but stuck thinking only in terms of what liberal western democracies could do without really changing their system. Can't say for sure since I haven't read anything he has written since then, but Capital is if nothing else interesting as an enormous pile of interesting data.

      • JuneFall [none/use name]
        ·
        1 year ago

        The good thing is that Piketty's world view started to shift. He isn't quite there yet, but his newer works and newer interviews do show him having moved quite a bit on the ideological map. He also doesn't believe anymore that what governments need is data to change their ways. He is more aware of the class conflict that is going on.

        • Utter_Karate [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Like I said: a snail's pace. I will give him credit for not actually stopping yet, but he is walking next to the train tracks. Could have gotten there much faster, but so long as he keeps walking in the same direction I won't complain too much. Plenty of designated stops along the way though. I hope he keeps walking past them.

    • JuneFall [none/use name]
      ·
      1 year ago

      If you are into stuff like that I would like to recommend you the "new" Hickel paper posted here a couple of days ago:

      https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2023.2217087

      Capitalist reforms and extreme poverty in China: unprecedented progress or income deflation? Dylan Sullivan, Michail Moatsos & Jason Hickel

      ABSTRACT

      It is widely believed that China's socialist economy had relatively high rates of extreme poverty while the capitalist reforms of the 1980s and 1990s delivered rapid progress.

      This narrative relies on World Bank estimates of the share of people living on less than $1.90 a day (2011 PPP), which show a sharp decline from 88 per cent in 1981 to zero by 2018.

      However, the World Bank’s poverty line has been critiqued for ignoring variations in the actual cost of meeting basic needs.

      In this paper we review data published by the OECD on the share of people unable to afford a subsistence basket.

      These estimates indicate that from 1981 to 1990, when most of China’s socialist provisioning systems were still in place, the country’s extreme poverty rate was on average only 5.6 per cent, substantially lower than in capitalist economies of comparable size and income at the time: 51 per cent in India, 36.5 per cent in Indonesia, and 29.5 per cent in Brazil.

      China's comparatively strong performance is corroborated by data on other social indicators.

      Moreover, extreme poverty in China increased during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, reaching a peak of 68 per cent, as privatisation inflated the prices of essential goods and thus deflated the incomes of the working classes.

      These results indicate that socialist provisioning policies can be effective at preventing extreme poverty, while market reforms may threaten people's ability to meet basic needs.

      It is a quick 20-ish page read and some of the critiques you level are in the paper and its sources, too.