The withering away of unions as a working class movement @nzlabour @FairnessNZ
09 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
@MaxRashbrooke The top 1% in New Zealand are lazy and incompetent as a ruling class
24 Jun 2015 1 Comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economic history, entrepreneurship, health and safety, human capital, industrial organisation, liberalism, Marxist economics, poverty and inequality, Rawls and Nozick, unions Tags: capitalism and freedom, Class war, Joan Robinson, Joseph Schumpeter, social insurance, The Great Enrichment, top 1%, welfare state, withering away in the proletariat
New work by Chris Ball and John Creedy shows substantial *declines* in NZ inequality.
initiativeblog.com/2015/06/24/ine… http://t.co/f94fw4Bhae—
Eric Crampton (@EricCrampton) June 24, 2015
The top 1% in New Zealand really have been dropping the class war ball for at least a generation.
Source: The World Top Incomes Database.
Not only have the New Zealand top 1% been pretty miserable at increasing their share of incomes, hardly any change since 1990 and not much before that, the top 1% allowed inequality in both consumption and disposable income to actually fall since 1990 as shown by Treasury analysis published today.
Joan Robinson was on to this in the 1940s when she said the battle cry of Marxists would have to change from the 1848 version “rise up ye workers, rise up for you have nothing to lose but your chains” to “rise up ye workers, rise up for you have nothing to lose but the prospect of a suburban home and a motorcar”.
Today that battle cry of the Marxist revolution would have to be “rise up ye workers rise up for you have nothing to lose but your iPhone and your air points”. As Joan Robinson observed in the 1940s, that’s not much of a basis for a revolutionary movement.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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