real utopias

A Very British Revolution proposes using a pledge bank to gather a million people together for a protest to address democracy, inequality and the environment.

So how exactly can we address income inequality by simply asking everyone to learn new skills and find a better job, avoiding the reality of the need for a re-distribution of social resources? We can't.

The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.

But Piketty's work raises fundamental issues concerning both economic theory and the future of capitalism.

It is well known that globalization has put strong downward pressure on wages and benefits of workers in wealthy countries, as companies have offshored and outsourced labor to lower-wage locations and justified wage cuts to try to stay competitive. But politicians and economists have yet to come to terms with the fact that in the rich world the income distribution system itself has broken down irretrievably.

The most obvious explanation is that the increase in measured wealth does not correspond to an increase in productive capital — and the data seem consistent with this interpretation.

Wall Street is celebrating, but much of America is still struggling with declining household income, higher prices for products and low interest rates for savings.

Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our .... After awhile people forgot the struggles that went into creating the reforms of the 1930s and decided that was all ancient history.