Comments on: Is the Plutonomy Killing Capitalism?

By: internet vote acct

internet vote acct — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:54:22 +0000

People are over-represented politically is the cause of all evil! To break this mold, a adoptation of citizen online voting account can be used. For appropriate issue, a weighting mechanism can be applied to each vote based on the score of issue-knowledge-test.The voting outcome referring by line-number known only by vote-account holder should be print out for lookup and eletronic PDF file copy can be email upon request. Once voters gain back some representative power to themselve everything would change.

By: Kumamotop

Kumamotop — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:02:55 +0000

I am sure Citibank revived ‘plutonomy” simply because “plutocracy”
carries such negative baggage.

By: Fourcultures

Fourcultures — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:53:41 +0000

The plutomatic economy
As I walk to work I pass the shop window of an aviation company which tells me “There’s never been a better time to buy a personal jet”. I resist the temptation, but I’m interested in the authors’ neologism ‘plutonomy’. It would be a neologism if it hadn’t been coined in 1866, [Frederic Harrison, "Industrial Co-operation", in The Fortnightly Review, vol. III, page 499].
“On this side it [Socialism] is a crude compromise between the claims of labour and of capital — the hybrid child of Plutonomy and Communism.” I think what the Citibank people are describing already has a well-established name: ‘plutocracy’- rule by the wealthy. When they write of ‘plutonomists’ they seem to be referring to what the rest of us would know as plutocrats. Having said that, there may be two more limited uses for the term. First plutonomy could be seen as a modification of the word economy to emphasise the economy’s subordination to the interests of the plutocracy, it could refer to the specifically economic sphere of a plutocratic society. Hence, armed with the right statistics (such as Brett’s, above), it could be argued that nations such as the US are moving from an economic state of democratic capitalism towards one of plutonomy. A second alternative use for the term would be to see it as a contraction of ‘pluto-autonomy’, the autonomy of the wealthy from social or any other regulatory constraints, in which the purpose of the economy becomes overwhelmingly to satisfy the interests of money itself. This latter might conceal more than it reveals, since it does not take into account the human benificiaries of such a system. Having considered these options, I think it may be best just to keep the established terms, to stick with the plutocracies and plutocrats we all know and love…
…But if we have to coin new terms, I don’t intend to get left behind. How about ‘plutomatic’? This refers to systems put in place to ensure the continuous reproduction of plutocratic forms of governance. Some examples would be political party funding mechanisms, or political lobbying regulations, or large areas of corporate law.

By: Brett Hetherington

Brett Hetherington — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:00:31 +0000

The bare facts are:

Two-thirds of the USA’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928.

As this study also found the (inflation-adjusted) income of the top 1 percent of households grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent of households.

For a graph of this, and other info go to:

http://www.bretthetherington.net/Modules/Blog/Pages/BlogEntry.aspx?BlogEntryId=397

By: rkatclu

rkatclu — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:06:39 +0000

Microsoft, pharmaceuticals and Hollywood were highly innovative at one point. Don’t venture capital investments and startups do something to offset dearth of high risk/high reward innovation on the part of the larger players? I have also heard arguments to the effect that the cost of regulatory compliance disproportionately affects smaller businesses and that regulatory barriers discourages innovation.

The”unholy alignment” of a “private sector that seeks to influence the “rules” of the market and a public sector willing to bargain” can deviate from “idealized capitalism” in another way. Firms are not above attempting to obtain regulatory advantages over their competitors.

The core problems aren’t new. Plato’s description of a plutocracy scooped the gist of the Citigroup report by 2400 years.

Regarding Moore:
While his topics are usually important, his methods and “take” tend to lack the credence needed to make meaningful contributions to serious debates about the problem.