As long as you use median instead of average...

Start leaving copies of Piketty on Metro buses.

@2) exactly. this is why need development without economic growth.

@4

"development without economic growth."

Interesting. Please expand.

global melting pot + increased centralization of government and corporate power. advocate a total retreat into self sustainable bioregions. Pull the plug on the global 1%.

"advocate a total retreat into self sustainable bioregions"

I advocate you turn off your PC or iPhone or whatever since it was not made in Western Washington.

Speaking of the World Cup, I assume Slog will not be hosting any liveblogs this year?

"without economic growth"

How about advocating zero population growth. Start with the Puget Sound Basin. All talk.

@8 the technology and resources that already exist here could easily be recycled for a thousand years.

Charles,
I found your article in Arcade but way too long, too many words. Can you please boil it down in a Tweet? Or a few?
Thanks.

I liked the vid of the reporter for one of the major US TV networks being injured by "peaceful" police grenades

I love how your entire identity is based on this implied urgent need to right the decline of civilization yet you automatically ignore the easiest and most obvious fix because: "how will I get the iphone7?" Or "who will pay my inflated pension or how will I sell my real estate off to a developer?"

Brazil is run by oligarchs, and they are robbing their country blind (especially in soccer). The poorest of the poor are much better off than they used to be, though, thanks to the Bolsa Família. It's the middle class that's getting screwed -- they are increasing dramatically in number but losing their standard of living. They're the ones protesting.

The obvious solution is to -- slight twist on Piketty -- not taxing the rich, they don't pay taxes, but de-corrupting them. Starting with football. Brazilian futebol is even more corrupt than Italian calcio.

This is one of Mudede's most fascinating posts. The idea of 'development without growth' (which basically means a conceptual end to capitalism as we know it, if not an effective end) is interesting. What other concepts might need to change, how, and just what effects would this have upon 'non-conceptual reality'? Lots to unpack there.

You are correct, @19.
It is an interesting phrase and I am dubious it is possible unless....unless

If Charles means 'complexify' society (per Teilhard de Chardin) but hold natural resource use (more-or-less) constant, then that sounds like good goal.

But what does he mean? I wonder if he discusses it in that Arcade article, which is too long for me to read. Maybe someone could read it and give us the Tweet-scale version?

oops. I mean @17.

...and so it happened, with the retreat of the richest into the international ether of networked-capital, the living standards within the borders of the global hegemon, now just a shell-entity -a brand hollowed out-, fell to join the global average, with most scrounging for cast-off leftovers, fighting amongst themselves, and eating what few meagre crops they could manage to raise in the chaotic weather of a terminally destablized climate.

When once, those who dreamed that someday sociopathic corporate executives would be forced to mine landfills for reusable resources in their business suits while the vast majority of people would live in modest comfort, with copious solar energy enabling a boundless renaissance of scientific curiosity, creative fabrication, and learning, a world where peace reigned and exploration was without exploitation. Sadly, it was not to be.

Everything real was turned into money, and that money was hoarded by the already-rich, depriving others of the ability to control their own destinies. The atmosphere eventually passed the tipping point into a madman's greenhouse and increasingly wild weather devastated crops and cities alike. Droughts, fires, floods, pestilence and unpredictable temperatures eventually reduced the population to pre-Agriculture levels. And so it was, then at last, with no one left to lord over, the rich, too, collapsed. Their insatiable greed, and dependence on an economic system based fundamentally on exploitation, was their downfall, and with them, the final downfall of 'humanity'.

It would be another 100 million years before we, the true inheritors of this planet once-called 'Earth', were able to finally establish a global civilization of harmony and peace. Tomorrow, we set off to explore the stars...

The mandibles of the gathered crowed chittered and clacked with praise and hope, as the anthropologist's story came to an end & she gestured towards the orbiting starship visible in the afternoon sky. It was the boundless, inspiring hope that they could spread their civilization of peace to the stars and to the other races they had found living in distant quadrants, that they would finally spread beyond this vulnerable single solar system and begin to explore the rest of the Galaxy, and eventually, the Universe and possibly beyond. Thanks to the 'Human's' earlier civilization, they had been able to make quantum leaps in technology, -eventually building the once-proposed Alcubierre Drive-, while avoiding blind extinction in the mortal pitfalls of a greed-based social system.

They, truly, were the lucky ones.

*claps*