Coronavirus News (254)

Coronavirus could kill more than 2 million people by the end of the year, researchers say It’s accelerating because the virus is so infectious and control measures aren’t coordinated and systematic, according to health expert Northern hemisphere could see a spike in cases as it moves into winter and flu season

The World's Fastest Family

Single Parents Finding Love: Over Zoom, of Course Because dating with kids wasn’t tricky enough before the pandemic.  

Covid-19 could be the start of a better era for women who work, writes Sarah O'Connor. The pandemic presents a chance to fix long-ignored problems https://t.co/kZA8lI3tG8

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) October 6, 2020

Piketty’s “Capital,” in a Lot Less than 696 Pages Over the two-plus centuries for which good records exist, the only major decline in capital’s economic share and in economic inequality was the result of World Wars I and II, which destroyed lots of capital and brought much higher taxes in the U.S. and Europe. This period of capital destruction was followed by a spectacular run of economic growth. ........ Over the two-plus centuries for which good records exist, the only major decline in capital’s economic share and in economic inequality was the result of World Wars I and II, which destroyed lots of capital and brought much higher taxes in the U.S. and Europe. This period of capital destruction was followed by a spectacular run of economic growth. ........... Piketty’s main worry seems to be that growing wealth in Europe will bring a return to 19th century circumstances in which most affluent people get that way through inheritance. ........... That’s why he spends so much time describing characters from the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Jane Austen who see inheriting money or marrying into it as the only path to a comfortable life. .............  he does offer evidence for his contention that the bigger the fortune, the faster it will grow in the future: the performance of university endowments in the U.S., where the largest endowments have earned dramatically higher percentage returns than the rest. ........... Since the 1970s, though, the U.S. has seen a sharp and unparalleled increase in the percentage of income going to the top 1% and especially 0.1%. ............ managers and financial professionals making up 60% of the top 0.1% of the income distribution in the U.S., and proposes that their skyrocketing pay is mainly the product of sharp declines in top marginal tax rates that made it worth managers’ while to bargain harder for raises. ............  this huge rise in relative income inequality has brought no discernible economic benefit ......... Per-capita economic growth has been almost identical in the U.S. and Western Europe since 1980, and because of the skew towards the top here, U.S. median income has actually lost ground relative to other nations. ............ Piketty proposes a progressive global wealth tax — at one point he suggests that it could start at 0.1% a year for small nest eggs and rise to 2% for fortunes of above 5 billion euros ($6.9 billion) — as the best response to the current dynamics of inequality. .......  central banks are redistributing wealth all the time, just not in a transparent, democratic manner .......... No longer will one be able to simply assert that rising inequality is a necessary byproduct of prosperity, or that capital deserves protected status because it brings growth.