[p2p-research] Building Alliances

[Michel Bauwens]

hi andrew,

you write:

Concentrations of wealth are extraordinarily useful for real progress.
It is how most really great ideas get funded.


While I can see the logic of a surplus funding a creative (and managerial)
class, as well as the historical evidence for patronage, I think there is a
golden mean there, indeed, the increased inequality of the neoliberal era
has slowed down average growth by two-thirds in the West, and the much
hailed growth in east asia, happened with systems with intensive state
intervention (korea, china)

I also suspect, that in an era where capital can be distributed and
re-aggregrated, these concentrations of wealth may be less and less
necessary for innovation,

and as Kevin argues, as innovation becomes more and more immaterial, i.e. a
function of internetworked brains with access to networks, the amount of
capital needed to fund them decreases dramatically,

Michel

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 1:39 AM, J. Andrew Rogers <reality.miner at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Paul D. Fernhout
> <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> > Taxes are often talked about in terms of incentives and disincentives, as
> > theory. Your comments buy into that premise. From there, endless
> economists
> > will create a flurry of fancy sounding mathematical statements to show
> why
> > the rich need more money.
>
>
> The basic political problem with tax structures is that their
> real-world properties are very poorly aligned with ideological
> preferences at a pretty fundamental level. We can't change the
> function, only alter the parameters, and yet many tax policies are
> essentially an exercise in willful denial that the function even
> exists.  These functions are extremely robust across every
> socio-political construct for which we have empirical data. This is
> not particularly surprising since the similarity between
> thermodynamics and economics is more than superficial at the
> theoretical level.
>
> The vast majority of people are in deep denial about the necessary
> tradeoffs of their preferred tax structure, whichever it may be.
>
>
> > If you look at taxes from a human rights perspective, as well as a way to
> > control for systemic risks resulting from concentration of wealth, then
> you
> > get to the same practical suggestion (tax the rich a lot on a progressive
> > scale) but for different theoretical reasons.
>
>
> c
>
> --
> J. Andrew Rogers
> realityminer.blogspot.com
>
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