Never before had so many people become so wealthy so fast. The gilded Age of the late 1800s and the Roaring Twenties in the early twentieth century may have created richer individuals relative to the economy, with John D. Rockefeller's wealth equal to 1/5 per cent of the entire U.S. gross domestic product (GDO), which would be equal to $210 billion today. Yet the Second Gilded Age of the 1990s and 2000s eclipsed all others when it came to the sheer number of new millionaires and billionaires. The combined annual incomes of the top 1 % exploded to $1.7 trillion, greater than the annual GDP of Canada. Their wealth topped $21 trillion in 2007. The High Beta Rich, Robert Frank.
It should also be noted that everyone else's prosperity was either stagnant or went down during that time. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2011 11:24 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; 'Arthur Cordell' Cc: Steve & Edith Kurtz; Mike Hollinshead Subject: [Futurework] From the Pulp sector Although newspapers are to genuine research as Broadway Shows are to Classical Music still this Princeton Nobel Economist makes some points. The clearest one that jumps out to me is within my own experience with the mining companies and my family in the oil business. They always justify their subsidies as "job creation" but never admit that there is a social contract for them to continue creating jobs even when they get less profit. Like David Koch and his theater at Lincoln Center funded 1/3 by my tax dollars while he gets the credit and as his Cato Libertarian Institute is also funded 1/3 by tax deductable donations, they all cry socialism only when the poor, the artists or the working man asks for relief against the mediocrity of the private marketplace slogan of "Economies of Scale" and "Productivity." I highlighted the part, in Krugman's article, that any Cherokee would have killed about had it happened to their relatives. The "Law of Blood" demands responsibility by one clan's actions of its members against the members of another clan. Any member of the offending clan pays until the books are balanced. No chasing the perpetrator. A clan is responsible and so they police their own lest some innocent or more valued member lose their life as payment instead of the perpetrator. American law is corrupt and based on money and has little to do with responsibility and neither does its economics. If the Law of Blood was genuinely economics 101 I would feel more a citizen of this nation than I do. Unfortunately all of this is a lot more mixed up than any economist is really willing to admit. Even Krugman. For those beloved of Ayn Rand and support the oil and gas interests, they should read "Anthem". Their Messiahatrix is not on their side. She doesn't defend the candle maker against electricity. However there is a paradox. Her disciple's councils are drawn from the accident of wealth but are just as firm for 98% of the population as her Anthem. Any Cherokee fasts and goes on a vision quest to receive his or her job description. To deny it is to deny one's potential in the face of the Lifegiver. REH November 6, 2011 Here Comes the Sun By PAUL KRUGMAN <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/pau lkrugman/index.html?inline=nyt-per> For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore's Law - in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months - has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook. Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago. But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That's right, solar power. If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives. Speaking of propaganda: Before I get to solar, let's talk briefly about hydraulic fracturing, a k a fracking. Fracking - injecting high-pressure fluid into rocks deep underground, inducing the release of fossil fuels - is an impressive technology. But it's also a technology that imposes large costs on the public. We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water; there is reason to suspect, despite industry denials, that it also contaminates groundwater; and the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads. Economics 101 tells us that an industry imposing large costs on third parties should be required to "internalize" those costs - that is, to pay for the damage it inflicts, treating that damage as a cost of production. Fracking might still be worth doing given those costs. But no industry should be held harmless from its impacts on the environment and the nation's infrastructure. [This is the same as Cherokee traditional Laws of Blood and Clanship, REH] Yet what the industry and its defenders demand is, of course, precisely that it be let off the hook for the damage it causes. Why? Because we need that energy! For example, the industry-backed organization energyfromshale.org declares that "there are only two sides in the debate: those who want our oil and natural resources developed in a safe and responsible way; and those who don't want our oil and natural gas resources developed at all." So it's worth pointing out that special treatment for fracking makes a mockery of free-market principles. Pro-fracking politicians claim to be against subsidies, yet letting an industry impose costs without paying compensation is in effect a huge subsidy. They say they oppose having the government "pick winners," yet they demand special treatment for this industry precisely because they claim it will be a winner. And now for something completely different: the success story you haven't heard about. These days, mention solar power and you'll probably hear cries of "Solyndra!" Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste - although claims of a major scandal are nonsense - and a stick with which to beat renewable energy. But Solyndra's failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn't keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it <http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-f aster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/> , "there's now frequent talk of a 'Moore's law' in solar energy," with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year. This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues - and if anything it seems to be accelerating - we're just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal. And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it's likely that we would already have passed that tipping point. But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach? Let's face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers' money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar. So what you need to know is that nothing you hear from these people is true. Fracking is not a dream come true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we're willing to let it in.
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