Richard D. Wolff and the ice cream cones
[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited version of a previous post.]
Here’s an interview that includes some remarks by a leftist academic named Richard D. Wolff. Wolff’s credentials are impressive, if you’re impressed by this sort of thing:
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City.
Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne)…
BA in History from Harvard College (1963);
MA in Economics from Stanford University (1964);
MA in History from Yale University (1967); and a
PhD in Economics from Yale University (1969)
Published work
Now that we’ve established that, here is a paragraph from that Wolff interview that especially caught my eye:
We don’t need and we don’t want — because it’s socially destructive and socially divisive — to have one group of people who work and another group of people who don’t. Give everyone reasonable work, and give everyone reasonable pay.
Work and money—doled out by a bunch of overseers who “give” people these things—perhaps from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs.
More:
Our societies are being torn apart by struggles over redistribution. Do we take [there’s that “we” again], and from whom, to give to those less fortunate — as if it was a matter of fortune, rather than an economic system that doesn’t work.
To translate—taxation and the social welfare benefits that come from the proceeds are a form of “redistribution” that is just a bandaid on a suppurating sore. The wound is the entire economic system that “doesn’t work.” I wonder who decides what’s working? Obviously it would be Richard Wolff, for starters.
But here’s my very favorite part:
Redistribution tears societies apart, it’s— here’s the parallel: you’re going into the park on a Sunday afternoon, you’re a married couple, you have two children. One is six and one is seven, and you stop because there’s [a] man selling ice cream cones. And you give one of your children an ice cream cone, it’s got four scoops. And the other one, an ice cream cone with one scoop. And you continue walking. Those children are going to murder each other. They’re gonna struggle. What are you doing? And don’t then come up — ‘okay, you’ve had — you’ve eaten this part of your scoop, so give the other part of your scoop to your sister, or your brother,’ — stop. The resentment of the one who hose [???] his ice cream or her ice cream — you see where I’m going? Every parent that isn’t a ghoul understands, give each child the same damn ice cream cone—two scoops each. You don’t need redistribution if you don’t distribute it unequally in the first place. Capitalism is congenitally incapable of distributing equally
I find that passage quite fascinating. First of all, because it uses an example we all can understand: being a parent and getting your kids ice cream cones. And secondly, because it is such a piss poor analogy it shouldn’t be acceptable even from a freshman in an econ course. And yet this is a professor whose credentials seem impeccable. And I bet a lot of people nod in agreement when they read it, thinking yes, I understand that; that’s just the way it works.
Perhaps Wolff is aware of the absurdity of his analogy and hopes his readers and listeners aren’t, and assumes that they will nevertheless find it a convincing argument. We are generally trained in school to take down what teacher says without thinking about it overly, just accepting it and learning it for the test. Perhaps he’s used to being listened to with great respect and acceptance.
Or perhaps he himself thinks he’s made a very good analogy between parents, two kids, and two ice cream cones; and a country’s economy. I don’t see into his mind, so I don’t know.
But if you think for just a moment about what Wolff said there, you can’t help but notice the following problems, which are not difficult to spot:
(1) Manipulating an entire society by any means, including that of a guaranteed Universal Basic Income, is completely and utterly different in scale, scope, intent, and almost every single other way possible from buying your young kids ice cream cones.
(2) Among other things, the parent is an adult and children are children, and the parent or parents control the entire economy of the children (in this example, two children). The parent is in charge and—unless a child is remarkably entrepreneurial—all the child’s income and possessions ordinarily come completely and directly from the parent[s] and a fairly small number of relatives and friends of the parents.
(3) An ice cream cone is an extra, a gift, a treat. Sometimes it’s even a reward (I’ll return to that thought in a minute).
(4) No one would be able to take a society and ensure equality without an amount of control that is unconscionable. It’s been tried, too, and that’s the way it ends up: a horror show. It cannot be achieved even with the best of intentions (which are not often present, and certainly are never present in more than a percentage of the people in charge). Some people will always manage to get more than others, a la Orwell’s great parable Animal Farm. The history of every supposedly or actually Utopian-inspired leftist society, from the small ones such as communes and kibbutzim, to the large ones such as the the USSR, is one of breakdown and/or inequality at best and terrible brutality at worst. Human nature will out, and no amount of social engineering from the likes of the Wolffs of this world will change that—as history has amply and continually demonstrated.
Ah, but this time it will be different.
(5) An ice cream cone is a treat bestowed on a child by a parent, and completely at the parent’s discretion. Some parents might choose to give a child a cone as a reward, however, for something—chores done, grades achieved, something of the sort. If there’s a sibling who didn’t do his or her chores—didn’t fulfill his or her end of the bargain—should that child also get the cone? The same size cone? Not just a smaller or lesser cone than the other one, but exactly and precisely the same cone?
What sort of resentment would ensue then, I wonder? I bet it would be formidable, and rightly so. And next time the parent asks the children to do a chore or improve their grades with a cone for reward, what will be the result?
Now it’s probably best not to use bribes such as cones for efforts like that. But we’re talking cones here. And a salary is not a bribe or a gift from a benevolent parent, it is a payment for services rendered. If it doesn’t reflect the quality of the work done—well, then you get the old Soviet system, where “so long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.”
And we all know how productive the Soviet Union became. Why, the Five Year Plans said so!
Perhaps my favorite part of that quote from Wolff is this part:
You don’t need redistribution if you don’t distribute it unequally in the first place. Capitalism is congenitally incapable of distributing equally.
And socialism is capable of doing it? It would be funny if it weren’t so tragically horrific—that a supposedly intelligent person can still believe this, and is treated as some sort of sage.
One last thing—did anyone notice the number of scoops in Wolff’s little example? I think it’s telling. The parent who is fostering inequality and resentment gives one kid four scoops and one kid gets one. The total is five scoops. But when he makes it equal, they each get two scoops. The total is four. What happened to the other scoop? Couldn’t they each have gotten two and a half? Or maybe even three? It reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s famous moment:
Now we know where JoJo gets his fondness for ice cream cones (sorry– the first image that came to mind when I read Wolff’s analogy was a news story about Biden and an ice cream cone):
https://www.eonline.com/news/587270/joe-biden-licks-ice-cream-cone-flashes-cash-and-wears-aviator-sunglasses-in-viral-all-american-pic
“The snap, which quickly went viral, shows Biden looking about as all-American as they come. He’s effortlessly cool in his signature Ray-Ban aviators, with an ice cream cone in one hand and two ten-dollar bills in the other.”
About the two ten-dollar bills: “Per the Washington Post, Biden indulged in one scoop of ‘Chocolate Woodblock’ and another of ‘Double-Fold Vanilla.’ He gave a $12 tip on his $8 tab, telling the server he was ‘the last of the big spenders.'”
Can we now call Bidenflation the ice cream cone economy?
To sum up Richard D. Wolff:
He’s an economics professor who has never actually worked in the private sector. The closest he’s come is publishing some books that relatively few ever bought and read, but here’s the “tell” for Professor Wolff.
According to his own website, he wrote a total of four books between 1974 and 2006. That’s four books in 32 years. He’s written seven books in the last 10 years. He’s written almost twice as many books since he turned 70 than he did between 32 and 64, or basically the bulk of his actual career in academia.
He’s an old man who spent his life being largely wrong about most things and has now given up even trying to be a serious intellectual. He’s just a hack.
Mike
Irrefutable evidence of the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the West’s ‘higher’ educational institutions.
I think I posted this before, but I like it and it’s largely on-point.
I can guess what Prof. Wolff’s solution to the above dilemma would be. We would decide that Mr. Jones is much too much of a lazy slacker and we would have to whip him into shape. Literally, if necessary. And what’s with that darned Dr. Smith? She is working much too hard and making the rest of us look bad. Three month mandatory vacations and high taxation for her.
“One size fits all” is a fantasy of socialists, bureaucrats and clothing makers. Guess what? This never works with government or, as far as I can tell, just about anything in life. Those pesky humans mess everything up by being individuals! The center of my state is 3200 miles from Washington DC. How can a bureaucrat know what is best for my state when the needs and realities here change drastically north to south and east to west? Smart people know one size does not fit everyone or anything. And act accordingly.
Those who want “equality” want THEIR opinions to have greater weight than those who disagree with them.
Regarding equal pay, I’d consider it a good idea to pay tenured lefty professors what dishwashers get. After all, a dishwasher’s contribution to society is at least as great as the contribution of a lefty tenured professor.
Oddly enough, I have a pretty big disconnect with the men or x getting paid more than women or y for the same work. Every job I’ve had in my life it was the position that paid and paid the same, with the same metrics for advancement. Of course, if you couldn’t do the work you would be let go. I’ve always felt that keeping pay secret was stupid and vaguely un-American.
I cannot help but wonder if Wolff fell asleep around 200 years ago, after a stimulating discussion with Charles Fourier and only woke up five minutes before writing that drivel.
Who is truly so ignorant, uncritical and uncurious as to swallow such simplistic garbage? Oh right…thousands of high school students and undergraduates. Tens of thousands.
Even though, as neo points out, Professor Wolff writes about children his analogy does get one thing correct about adults, “Those children are going to murder each other.”
Socialism and Communism do not eliminate the very human trait of envy; but neither does Capitalism and it is something those in favor of Capitalism need to address. Yes, “life is truly not fair,” but words are cold comfort when life hands you one scoop.
Even in a Democratic/Capitalist system when the gap between the “lucky” and “unlucky” gets too big the peasants revolt. We all assess our own well being by comparing ourselves to our surroundings. Most people who are in the 1% of wealth holders, but live among the 0.1% of wealth holders become miserable. I guarantee you there are more high earners on anti-depressants than folks in the middle class. Even if very few people have one scoop of ice cream, if one has one scoop yet is surrounded by the rare people who have five; “those children are going to murder each other.”
It is chilling to think that people who think like that, ideologically and with such simplistic certainty, have influenced young minds for decades.
The man is either a charlatan (I use that word a lot the past few years) or else he is totally ignorant about the history of economic systems. I have to rule out the latter, unless he slept through many years of class–and received social promotions and degrees. Always possible, of course. But, he didn’t have to be in a PHD program to have a cursory knowledge of the factual world in which he lived.
You would think that such institutions as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, et al would cringe whenever they are cited as part of his curriculum vitae. That they don’t, tells another even more disturbing story.
Mike and JFM get the sheer ferocious destructiveness of politics fueled by Procrustean outrage. All MUST be made equal.
What’s different in Wolff’s early career is that this impulse and doctrine were coherent and reinforced each other forcefully. But in the past decade, the Age When All Must Have Prizes the point has been changed to a feminazis bumper sticker: “All Must Be [EQUALLY] Happy.”
I believe this is why Wolff uses children and parents for examples: to insinuate that the people are children, and the government is tasked to be ideal rulers.
And thus, instead of actual history being absorbed and teaching us about the best and worst within us and humanity, we’re instead freed from that heuristic and serious reckoning; instead we’re free to project out most utopian impulses on his schematic, and feminist ethic perpetuated childish ethos, in place of real parents with three year old who must gruffly say “No” again and again until limits settings are internalized.
This, I believe, is why this hack has become the popular voice of-democratic socialism of late. And why, for those paying attention longer decades, his “wisdom” amounts to thin gruel at best.
Yet the Wolf feasts on the young’s ignorance with aplomb.
On a personal level, Wolff’s story brings me a chuckle, because it’s true.
A few years back, I went out to dinner with a good friend of mine, his wife, and their two young daughters. After dinner the waitress brought each of the girls a dish with one scoop of ice cream. Problem was, the scoop given to the younger girl was slightly smaller than the one given to the older girl.
The younger girl threw a fit and burst into tears. No amount of consolation or explanation sufficed. She just bawled and screamed “It’s not fair!” The ironic thing was, she got so angry she wouldn’t even eat the ice cream she had.
But as funny as an anecdote that involves children and ice cream can be, Wolff’s use of it is very telling. Because after having hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations with liberals about economics — both in-person and online — I’ve come to conclude that it is this notion of fairness that drives the Western left on nearly every issue.
It’s not fair that you deplorables grew up with indoor plumbing and big-screen TVs when millions of stereotypical third-worlders grew up in mud huts and got their drinking water directly from the river. It’s not fair that you deplorables work at desks in air-conditioned offices while they toil in sweatshops. It’s not fair that you deplorables send your children to college while those third-worlders send their children out into the fields at an early age. It’s just not fair!
It doesn’t even matter that as the third world is industrialized the stereotype isn’t even true any more. Just the *idea* of a deplorable being comfortable while non-Americans live in poverty drives them into a rage at the inherent unfairness of it all.
I’ve even had some liberals tell me that they’d burn the whole world down if they couldn’t fix it. “I don’t want to live in a world that’s so unfair.”
It sounds silly that a grown man could build both his politics and his sense of worth around such a childish notion. But the sheer number of those that do and the ferocity with which they act on that notion makes it a very serious issue.
Eventually my friend’s daughters outgrew their overwrought concerns over ice cream. Most children do. How to get liberals to do the same is a vexing question, but dismissing it as unserious is not the answer. They have too much power and influence for that, and I believe them when they say that they will burn the world down before they give up their childish notions of fairness.
I had something to say about Robert Peter Wolff, whose books were a staple in used bookstores for years, but now I see that this is Richard David Wolff, a less-known figure. This was interesting from his wikipage.
One of his students, George Papandreou, became Prime Minister of Greece serving from 2009 to 2011. Wolff remembers Papandreou as a student who “sought then to become both a sophisticated and a socialist economist.” However, CUNY Economics professor Costas Panayotakis observed that “after being elected Greek prime minister in the fall of 2009 on a platform that excoriated austerity as the wrong kind of policy to be adopted at a time of deep economic crisis, George Papandreou has reversed himself and, faced with a debt crisis, called in the International Monetary Fund and imposed the most brutal austerity program the country has ever seen.”
Reality has a way of catching up with you if you leave academia.
Translation: People who are beneath me doing jobs that are beneath me shouldn’t make more money than me.
mkent:
Sowell has a LOT to say about that in his book The Quest For Cosmic Jusice.
Socialism is a Wolff and a classroom full of sheep, making plans for lunch.
He’s an economics professor who has never actually worked in the private sector. The closest he’s come is publishing some books that relatively few ever bought and read, but here’s the “tell” for Professor Wolff. According to his own website, he wrote a total of four books between 1974 and 2006. That’s four books in 32 years. He’s written seven books in the last 10 years. He’s written almost twice as many books since he turned 70 than he did between 32 and 64, or basically the bulk of his actual career in academia.
In economics, the primary channel of scholarly communication would be articles in academic journals. Material published in monographic format would commonly be collections of essays with various authors. An actual monograph would be fairly unusual and favored by certain subsets, eg economic historians. Economic historians are economists who piece together datasets from whatever primary and secondary sources they can locate, though these are nestled in narratives. He placed quite a lot of work in journals of various sorts over the years, but not in economics journals bar niche publications like Review of Radical Political Economy.
If you look at his bibliography, you see this fellow Wolff as a researcher is primarily a purveyor of ‘social theory’ who had published some work which might make it under the envelope to be classified as ‘economic history’. He’s never published any economic theory nor any observational studies in economics. The smart money says that his teaching assignments seldom if ever included 300 level courses in any subdiscipline of economics per se. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that he was excused from teaching the introductory sequence as well. For over 50 years, he’s been ensconced in economics departments, but he has only a thin filament of attachment to the discipline. Mostly what he’s done is chatter about Marxism, which is a unusual activity in economics faculties. The job market in higher education was quite soft when he entered it in 1969. I suspect if he’d entered academe ten years later, he’d have spent his career at a more obscure institution and been billeted in the sociology department, which is where he actually belonged.
YMMV, but I’ve never seen any evidence from mundane life that ‘inequality’ bothered many people. You see discussions of it in small audience opinion journalism, but it’s not a commonplace anywhere else. Professors in their mundane life have no problem with it. They work in institutions suffused with office politics, conventional stratification, and patronage and are at home with it. They are quite jealous of their status in their little world.
Well, there is one place you do see a related discourse, and that’s the Bernie blather which is pushed on Fakebook. Robert Reich and Elizabeth Warren produce copious verbiage of this sort. Complaints about this persons tax returns and that person or this corporations tax returns and that one. The tax code is a boulliabaise of rent-seeking, but they haven’t any complaint about that but that ‘the rich’ should pay more. We know a couple of people who subscribe to this discourse. They both seem to be animated by resentments of obscure origin.
The Thatcher clip is brilliant. I had not seen that one before. She was a formidable force for positive change.
mkent, might one presume that ALL of your equality-loving (and aspiring) interlocutors had given away all, or most of, their savings and were living in hovels with neither electricity nor indoor plumbing?
(…or that if they didn’t, they were planning to eventually, if not immediately, move to such, um, invigorating lodgings?…)
That is, before destroying the world, wouldn’t it make sense to destroy their own lives first? To be sure, it’s not as large-scale, dramatic…or heroic, I guess….but still..
Speaking of which, might one wonder if Prof. Wolff, the great man himself, lives in a cardboard box over a steam vent?…or the equivalent…
}}} First of all, because it uses an example we all can understand: being a parent and getting your kids ice cream cones. And secondly, because it is such a piss poor analogy it shouldn’t be acceptable even from a freshman in an econ course.
Exactly. IF, on the other hand, your children are twins, in the same grade — “You get four scoops, because you averaged an ‘A’ in school on your last report card…but you only get one scoop, because you averaged a ‘D’ on your report card…”
THAT is a moderately apt analogy. The father is society, rewarding the two children for their accomplishments in measure with that accomplishment.
They both get at least a minimum, but the one who put in more work and did a better job gets the better reward.
If you instead went, “You worked hard and got an ‘A’, you get one scoop. And you, who did substandard work and got a ‘D’, you also get one scoop.” Does the ‘A’ twin continue to work hard, when they find out they are getting the same reward as the ‘D’ twin, who goofed off and gets as much as the harder working ‘other’?
P.S., Neo, thanks for digging out the Thatcher speech. It’s one of the favorite pieces ever by a Brit PM, esp. one since Churchill.
It seems that the lefties subscribe to the theory of the “zero-sum game,” where they believe there is only so much wealth in the world, and it is not fair that some folks control more wealth than others. Of course, they are fools to believe such an easily discredited theory. I tell those folks that “wealth” can be created or destroyed. If a government adopts policies that allow freedom and competition, then everyone will enjoy more wealth in circulation. If a government establishes punitive policies (like the modern day Democratic party), then everyone is less well off.
As an example, Biden and his cronies want to limit the amount of gasoline available. Of course, even though they are in denial about the hard “law” of “supply and demand,” that will of course raise the price of fuel. And, when many people have to pay a much larger percentage of their income towards fuel, they have less money to spend on other items. Then the folks who formerly made those other items lose their jobs, and have less money to spend on even necessities. It is a downward spiral, and “wealth” has truly been destroyed. And that’s not even counting that everything will cost more because shippers, having to pay more for fuel, must pass that extra cost on to their customers.
A lot of lefties are always spouting things like “raise taxes on businesses!” But they do not realize that businesses really don’t pay any taxes. When you raise the taxes on a business, they must pass that tax increase on to their customers, and the customers are then effectively paying that increased tax.
Capitalism does address it, and quite directly. Capitalism tells you exactly what to do if you want more, and it’s beneficial to society to boot: produce something somebody else wants.
As opposed to socialism, where you need to suborn the political process if you think you should get more than you have.
Economists who write for the public are more or less prostitutes. I do not know of a single one who does not flagrantly distort mainstream economic theory whenever convenient to advance their pet policies. Doesn’t seem to matter if they’re on the left or the right.
I don’t have much use for Ayn Rand, either her philosophy or her fiction, but I give her credit for getting the perverse incentives of communism right–not only the fact that they exist, but that they are very powerful: disincentives for working, incentives for not working. And the people who advocate for communism (if not by that name) seem to live in a dream world where human nature can just be written out of the plan. Which naturally leads to the necessity of compulsion.
I think the “we” part of the professor’s plan is maybe the most significant part. Consciously or unconsciously he envisions rule by a group, necessarily small, of people who essentially own everything and decide who gets which parts of it. And of course he will be in that group.
Doesn’t seem to matter if they’re on the left or the right.
Care to name names?
A lot of lefties are always spouting things like “raise taxes on businesses!” But they do not realize that businesses really don’t pay any taxes. When you raise the taxes on a business, they must pass that tax increase on to their customers, and the customers are then effectively paying that increased tax.
The cost is apportioned between the vendor and the consumer according to the properties of the goods and services being traded. The only theoretical occasion when costs are borne entirely by the consumer is (IIRC) when the supply of a good or service is completely inelastic.
}}} Economists who write for the public are more or less prostitutes. I do not know of a single one who does not flagrantly distort mainstream economic theory whenever convenient to advance their pet policies. Doesn’t seem to matter if they’re on the left or the right.
Sorry, neither Thomas Sowell, nor the late Walter Williams, does/did anything of the sort.
Which “economist” who is “on the right” were you thinking of?
Now, if you look at “on the left”, the obvious poster boy is Nobel Prize winner Krugman, who, at least twice, has openly promoted the Broken Window Fallacy in his columns, a fallacy that anyone can understand, is a bonehead 101 econ class lesson, and has been known/acked ever since Bastiat wrote about it in 1850.
I think it’s clear he does qualify as a flagrant violator.
}}} The cost is apportioned between the vendor and the consumer according to the properties of the goods and services being traded.
No, Art, they aren’t. No business is going to lower their profits if they have the option to pass them on to the consumer. This is pretty “duh”. If you are a plumber, and they pass a $50 “fee” for every job you take on (e.g., a “tax”), then you’re going to add 50 bucks to each bill. You’re not going to add on $40, and take $10 less. Your prices are already at their nominal minimum just due to competition.
The problem with the “ice cream paradigm” is that if you argue—whether justifiedly or not—too long about it, it just melts….
(Or maybe that’s its strength? IOW, STOP arguing/complaining/bellyaching and GET TO WORK!!…in this case, lick.)
}}} Most people who are in the 1% of wealth holders, but live among the 0.1% of wealth holders become miserable.
In my experience, most of the people who make >200k a year (current PPP) for non-government work are usually people who do 50, 60, or 70h of work per week. They posdef earn their higher pay. I’ve never had any issue with them making that.
“No business is going to lower their profits if they have the option to pass them on to the consumer.”
Then why don’t plumbers charge $1,000 an hour?
Businesses can pass SOME of their costs onto the consumer but if they charge too much, they get consumer resistance and wind up losing money that way. It’s an extremely complicated and fundamentally intuitive dynamic, which is why government should largely stay out of it, but “it’ll just be passed onto consumers” is also largely a dodge employed by businesses for their own benefit.
Mike
No, Art, they aren’t.
Yes they are, Obloodyhell. Vendors are seldom price-makers to the degree you imagine, even in markets with just a few producers.
Speaking of ice cream, anyone else remembering Nancy, with her freezer full of 97 varieties of Haagen Daz?
Seems she’s managed to get even more than four scoops, somehow…
}}} Vendors are seldom price-makers to the degree you imagine, even in markets with just a few producers.
Art, you need more than a “NUHH UHHH” to make your case.
“Vendors are seldom price makers”
They are if they are the creator of the product, and it’s a product people need (as opposed to “want”).
There are books out there that cost $200 to buy.
They cost less than 5 bucks to make, the same as any other book costing $20, but they are charging $200 for them… how? Because they have a captive market, and are charging what the market will bear.
The $20 bookseller has a less captive market, so they are forced to minimax profits because their product is a choice.
Competition can affect this, of course — but when everyone is getting taxed, there is no competition to deal with. Either you pass it on to the consumer or you eat it and get less profit. The only hope you have in this instance is that if you charge 5 bucks less (and eat the five bucks tax) that you will make it up on the extra business you get by making your price lower than that of others.
In short, unless you think you can make more profits by eating part of the defacto cost-of-business increase the taxes represent, you aren’t going to do anything other than pass it on to the consumer. Why the hell would you?
Your assertion simply does not hold water. It’s a pie in the sky view of how business operates.
Oldflyer:
}}} I have to rule out the latter, unless he slept through many years of class–and received social promotions and degrees. Always possible, of course.
Hey, AOC graduated with a degree “cum laude” in Economics from BU.
She has openly demonstrated, not merely with her Marxism, but by showing she has no grasp, even, of where money comes from, that she has not so much as a bonehead level of understanding of basic economics.
Clearly, there are places to get a degree without actually learning anything at all, just parroting the words back to a professor when squawks are demanded.
}}} Complaints about this persons tax returns and that person or this corporations tax returns and that one.
Subnote about this one, note that they will go on and on about Roger Goodell making 25 million a year as Pro Football Commissioner, despite the fact that he is responsible for 5000+ people and operating an entertainment industry that earns $11B in annual revenue.
Meanwhile, not a word is said about Taylor Swift earning 80m a year for singing decently and looking attractive**, even as she whines about how she’s not making enough so Spotify needs to pay her more (she hides it by claiming she’s whining to benefit the Little guy, but if she actually gave a shit, she would simply challenge other artists, making shittons of money, as she does, to match a donation to be distributed to those “less well off” artists.
But, as with all the left, “I am VERY charitable… with Other Peoples’ Money”.
Summary:
1 — don’t care about actual income, they just “hate corporations”
2 — don’t care about actually benefiting the hoi-polloi, they just use that as an excuse.
====
** And yes, that IS a huge part of her draw, or else you would still be hearing about Susan Boyle (remember her? Right. Great voice, not particularly attractive. She got 15m of fame and then “buhh-bye!!”).
Your assertion simply does not hold water. It’s a pie in the sky view of how business operates.
It’s an absolutely standard piece of microeconomic modeling. You fancy vendors can simply charge any price they want. They cannot, no matter how many assertions you make.
Oh, and then there was the singer for Romeo Void, Debbie Iyall. They had a significant hit in “Never Say Never”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x0fPZrPV3M
Note that they focus the camera for the official music video on the more handsome guys than on her, even though they can’t really avoid her completely.
The band had limited success, beyond “Never Say Never” and “A Girl In Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)”
Because, face it, bands led by hefty girls are not promoted by bands.
Then there’s Kosheen, which has a really really good singer in Sian Evans, but, while far from ugly, does not win beauty contests…. So for the official video of “Harder They Fall” they subbed in a blonde and made it kinda sorta almost look as though it was her singing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ0_W6vpilg
This is a video with the real singer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHqWUSYDg0U
(p.s., it’s posdef dance music in the electronica style. Notable for strong use of Breakbeats).
It is unfortunate that one strong indicator of success in music is how attractive a female you are. Talent matters far less than it should.
Not certain how much of that is derived from fan preferences and how much by music execs being ageist, sexist jackwads.
The former might have made some semblance of sense in the days of music videos, but much less before or since.
@ mkent > “A few years back, I went out to dinner with a good friend of mine, his wife, and their two young daughters. After dinner the waitress brought each of the girls a dish with one scoop of ice cream. Problem was, the scoop given to the younger girl was slightly smaller than the one given to the older girl.
The younger girl threw a fit and burst into tears. No amount of consolation or explanation sufficed. She just bawled and screamed “It’s not fair!” The ironic thing was, she got so angry she wouldn’t even eat the ice cream she had.”
Well, now, there’s your problem — too many kids brought up with parents substituting consolation and explanation when the solution to the tantrum is simple:
“We are not influenced by whining. Eat what you have, or it will be removed. Continue with inappropriate behavior, and YOU will be removed.”
The follow-up is mandatory, but it works very well within one or two lessons.
I can bring testimonials from our five kids, whose psyches do not appear to have been damaged in the process (I asked them).
The explanations can be given at home later, by letting the kids practice scooping ice cream for each other and seeing that you just can’t make identical portions.
The important point of the exercise, however, is the rule that if Kid A scoops, Kids B-E pick their bowls first.
My favorite quote, attributed to either Russians or Cubans–“we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”–sums up compulsory redistributive socialism/communism nicely.
Art Deco on September 29, 2022 at 8:02 am said:
“The tax code is a bouillabaisse of rent-seeking…” +10!
Out of a weird sense of curiosity, I sometimes dial up the local hard-left Pacifica radio station while tootling around in the car. Wolff hosts a radio show on the network, though I can’t tell if runs with any regularity.
I have no idea what his actual biography is but he’s always left me with the distinct impression that the vast majority of his life experience is confined to the academic world (Wikipedia’s account of his life seems to back this up) and he has no real practical sense or knowledge of how the private sector actually works.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all children are treated equally, that they are endowed by their Government with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Ice Cream.
he has no real practical sense or knowledge of how the private sector actually works
Keep in mind that professors will lecture for 7 or 8 hours a week, devote two or three hours a week to conferring with students during office hours, and perhaps an hour a week to meetings. They seldom dress for work. If they land tenure (and those who succeed at that put in about 7-8 years before they do), they have a job until they elect to retire. Diligent professors are preparing lectures, correcting student submissions, and researching in their off hours, but they control their schedule. It’s not anyone else’s experience of the workplace.
In regard to his work history, he has a CV available. I assume he had p/t and seasonable positions in local businesses during the period running from 1957 to 1967. That aside, he was on campuses as a student or as a teacher from 1960 to 2008.
That aside, he was on campuses as a student or as a teacher from 1960 to 2008.
Sort of like Joe Biden and Senators of both parties.
@ CapitalistRoader – excellent.