An article in Salon.com about Economist Thomas Piketty's study

[tiredtoo]

"There is hard data that shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate"

snip
This shifted in the past 70 years: "high-education elites now vote for the 'left', while high- income/high-wealth elites still vote for the 'right' (though less and less so)," Piketty notes. Note the scare quotes around "left": part of Piketty's point is that the so-called left parties, like the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Socialists in France and Labour in the U.K., have in the past two decades not really been that left, at least on economic issues. With the exception of Jeremy Corbyn's contemporary Labour Party, the aforementioned are aligned with the same kind of neoliberal economic policies that rich elites favor.
end snip

more at link

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/02/there-is-hard-data-that-shows-that-a-centrist-democrat-would-be-a-losing-candidate/?fbclid=IwAR3thWB4z3723xJ58Cut90coHUY3kCuUXXxP6D2MRKeRaWp0QJ5m6Ng1seA

[highplainsdem]

1. That's at least the 4th time the article's been posted here since it was published last June. If you

want to see the responses, including what's wrong with the analysis, I suggest you use the Google search in the upper right corner to search for

piketty "hard data"

[still_one]

2. Salon was one of the worst anti-Hillary rags around, and never missed a chance to bash her

I put them in the same category as Glen Greenwald's Intercept

[left-of-center2012]

3. The article is from JUNE 2, 2019

And has posted on DU repeatedly.

We get it. Someone doesn't like 'centrist Democrats'.

[Just_Vote_Dem]

4. And they still won't explain "centrist"

I'm a Democrat who supports the LIBERAL Democratic platform. So that makes me a "centrist"?

[Bradshaw3]

5. Many things have been posted over and over on here

Including ones by centrists and your own many criticisms of Warren. The same ones repeated over and over. You don't seem to have a problem with those.

[left-of-center2012]

7. GASP ! I don't criticize Warren

I just post articles from the internet, and some see it as criticism.

[Bradshaw3]

8. Fail

Try harder, maybe someone will believe you.

[left-of-center2012]

9. "maybe someone will believe you"

Count my valentines.

[Bradshaw3]

10. Our president gets lots of love

Do you want to emulate him? Not a good look.

[Gothmog]

6. This is the sixth or seventh time this bogus study has been posted-No one believes this study

Most economists are ignoring the work that this article is based on http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-why-are-economists-giving-piketty-cold-shoulder

But despite Piketty’s resonance with public experience and apparent applicability to the economic environment of global finance, his book was mostly greeted with hostility by the academic economics profession. There was a sense among academic economists that the book was a hostile action from within, and aside from Nobel Prize–winners Robert Solow and Paul Krugman, who both published reasonably favorable reviews in the highbrow popular press, the reaction was, in general, quite harsh.

In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson wrote, “If the history of grand pronouncements of the general laws of capitalism repeats itself—perhaps first as tragedy and then as farce as Marx colorfully put it—then we may expect the same sort of frustration with Piketty’s sweeping predictions as they fail to come true, in the same way that those of Ricardo and Marx similarly failed in the past.” In the Journal of Political Economy, after praising Piketty’s lifelong research agenda assembling inequality statistics for income and wealth (as do all the reviewers named here), Lawrence Blume and Steven Durlauf wrote, “Capital is, nonetheless, unpersuasive when it turns from description to analysis. . . . Both of us are very liberal (in the contemporary as opposed to classical sense), and we regard ourselves as egalitarians. We are therefore disturbed that Piketty has undermined the egalitarian case with weak empirical, analytical, and ethical arguments.”....

But perhaps the greatest rebuke of Piketty to be found among academic economics is not contained in any of these overt or veiled attacks on his scholarship and interpretation, but rather in the deafening silence that greets it, as well as inequality in general, in broad swathes of the field—even to this day. You can search through the websites of several leading economics departments or the official lists of working papers curated by federal agencies and not come across a single publication that has any obvious or even secondary bearing on the themes raised by Capital in the Twenty-First Century, even in order to oppose them. It is as though the central facts, controversies, and policy proposals that have consumed our public debate about the economy for three years are of little-to-no importance to the people who are paid and tenured to conduct a lifetime’s research into how the economy works.

This dearth of reaction to such a critical work is not healthy. It is as if the rapturous reception by the public increased the resentment among Piketty’s academic economist colleagues. As an appeal to the public to resolve, or at least have a say in, what the experts consider their own domain, Piketty appears to have questioned the very value of having a credentialed economics elite empowered to make policy in the name of the public interest but not answerable to public opinion. The economics elite, it seems, answered by stonewalling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so it would not have the impact on economics research agendas that it merits.

No one in academia is taking this book seriously and so it is hard to base election results on this book

[tiredtoo]

11. Thank you all for replying to my thought provoking op.

The only way to learn is to listen.
VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO

[beastie boy]

12. There is a glaring problem with Pickety's premise, leading to a totally faulty conclusion.

According to the article, Picketty's thesis is that in the past 70 years the intellectual/financial elite class of the past had split into the intellectual part that votes for the "left" and the financial part that votes for the "right". Now that the elites have co-opted both the political "left" and the political "right", the class division between the rich and the poor that galvanized the poor to defend their interests against the rich in the past has largely disintegrated. To simplify things, Piketty maintains that neither the "left" nor the "right" can represent the "egalitarian-internationalist platform", the kind of political platform that articulates a shared, global struggle among all of the poor and working-class people around the world. He sees candidates like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren as being able to rebuild this egalitarian-internationalist platform".

So far so good. But Picketty doesn't even address how any of what he postulates would make a centrist Democrat a losing candidate. Furthermore, a simple questionremains unanswered: how does he, or the candidates, propose to rebuild this egalitarian-international platform? Never mind that the so-called educational elites comprise a huge chunk of the working class. College education has become a must in the past 70 years. How do you build an egalitarian-internationalist platform that excludes educational elites who work for a living, often at a minimum wage? Or how, being as class-conscious as Piketty, do you build one with them included? The article is silent about it, mainly because the task is impossible. The irony is, both Sanders and Warren are most popular with the aforementioned "educational elites".

So a cursory glance at the content not only raises huge doubts in the unflattering assessment of a centrist Democratic candidate, but of a leftist candidate to deliver on what Piketty considers achievable for the sake of the working class. While he sees the splintering of the elites into the left and the right, he doesn't seem to notice the splintering of the working class into the educated and the uneducated.