Capital Architecture

The New Scientist has an interesting article that uses mathematical modeling of transnational corporation ownership data to map the concentration of economic wealth.

Neat, right?

The article mentions what's useful (mapping the architecture of the economy, checking for stability, calculating exposure) and what's not (determining which individuals actually control the capital).

Protestors that allegedly claim that there is a vast global conspiracy are used as an argumentative foil. The article chortles that such a conspiracy is highly unlikely. I think that most of the protestors and the 99% would completely agree. We have to remember that the 99% is a highly diverse group, with a wide variety of different beliefs, some of which are more well-founded than others. We ought to be very careful when representing the entire group in a certain light based on the beliefs of very few. The way that the paragraph was written, it's ambiguous. One way of reading the sentence is that the protestors are a unified group with some coherent set of claims, one of which is belief in a global conspiracy. By highlighting the conspiracy claim, it suggests that the belief is somehow indicative of the group as a whole, or at least widespread enough to merit mention. Otherwise, the sentence might have been written, "one thing won't chime with conspiracy theorists' claims".

There is one major flaw in reasoning in the article, made by Dan Braha of NECSI: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

Quite simply, this statement is false.

Occupy Rawls Street

Steven V. Mazie over at the Stone today talks about how `those' Occupiers ought to read and discuss Rawls. First, as an associate professor, I'm fairly certain he's one of us 99%ers. Second, `we' do. I agree that more of us should; Rawls shaped contemporary moral and political philosophy and has much to say on political equality and distributive justice. For those that are not familiar, however, I'd like to offer a few points of clarification.

He writes, "Some individuals may be more motivated and harder working, and thus can legitimately expect greater rewards for their efforts." This is part of a section of the article that is purportedly representing Rawls' view. But that was not Rawls' view.

It is not that individuals that work harder deserve a greater share of resources. After all, Rawls explicitly says that one does not deserve one's natural endowments. One's work ethic is one such character trait. It may be caused simply by good genes and/or the right sort of environment: in short, luck.

It's also not that individuals ought to expect greater reward for their efforts. The only proper motivation for individuals, on Rawls' view, is to uphold and affirm the principles of justice (including the difference principle). They believe that we ought to make the worst off as best off as we can (with some important restrictions.)

It is rather that, for whichever reason we might end up with an inequality, it can be justified (preferred to other distributions) because it benefits the worst off. If anyone can object to inequality, it's those disfavored by that inequality. Ex hypothesi, those very same worst off are better off than they would be under any other distribution. The fact that they are better off gives them a reason to prefer the unequal distribution.