If he doesn't claim to be a competent theorist, what is this middle out theory he is propounding supposed to be? Incompetent theory? His claims about competitors are false - trickle down is not economic orthodoxy anywhere, and nobody who should be taken seriously is claiming that markets are "perfectly efficient". These things are both canards - unless our new definition of what is orthodox is to be the extreme wing of the Tea Party.
He claims that there are no examples of societies that saw rising income inequality without resorting to pitchforks. Then he pointed to FDR - a man whose New Deal policy (no pitchfoks required) reduced inequality. There are a [LIFTED] load of other examples. Including the minimum wage which he is primarily concerned with, and which also was not a product of revolution. He's completely wrong - what staggers is that he didn't even notice he was admitting that with his own counterexamples.
FDR is actually not even nearly the best example of such by the way, and neither is the minimum wage. Universal education; unemployment insurance; the NHS (Medicare and Medicaid at a pinch); inheritance taxes, and trust busting are much more important in the context of equality of consumption. Capitalism's inbuilt (but annoyingly cyclical and unpredictable) mechanisms for redistributing labour into higher wage, more productive, industries is a more technical example, and whether he acknowledges it or not, his minimum wage argument actually depends upon this latter mechanism.
Minimum wages are part of that obviously - and I am in favour of a high MW myself - but this guy's claims for it amount to a false promise, because he hasn't taken any of those other things into account, he is expecting $15 /hr to do much more than it possibly can. When it inevitably disappoints, such people usually blame everyone else for not reacting to their great plan appropriately and they move onto a bad plan (the Chavez strategy, which will eventually end in pitchforks).
Henry Ford didn't provide the $5 wage out of altruism. He had a new type of factory with much higher productivity than GM. In order to make best use of it he needed to retain staff who knew how to work on it, and could be relied upon to turn up every day. So he paid more. He wasn't preventing revolution, he was splitting the difference and in so doing he amassed a larger fortune than he would have with cheaper labour.
I don't understand. Are you claiming that capitalism hasn't delivered a higher standard of living for rich and poor alike since 1867? Before asserting the negative - I suggest you consider when was the last time you ever darned a sock. This was common for your predecessors, for whom socks were quite expensive.
Capitalism has already given you a ridiculous range of consumer choices, totally unprecedented in Marx's day, and which he did not predict you would be able to afford, yet you can afford to throw much of it away rather than repair even a sock with a hole in it. If you compare what proportion of your income is spent on food compared to your equivalent at the time of Das Kapital's publication, you will note that you are fed much more cheaply, if you compare what you get to eat with their diet of bread and margarine with a dollop of jam on Sundays, you might consider yourself more lucky than they were. You are the beneficiary of expensive and valuable schooling, you get medicines they couldn't possibly have afforded, and when you go to the dentist you get to keep your teeth in your head.
This appears to have made us rather decadent, people have developed some notion that if they don't receive a 2.7 % higher income each year than the last, they have been ripped off and somebody has to be overthrown. What did capitalism do for me this week that it didn't do last week? Nothing - [LIFTED] it. Marx was right. Let's kill someone.
4 day weeks are not imminent on the timescales in which you are thinking, but are a racing certainty in the longer term anyway.
One of this guy's other empirical claims is that financial sector workers earn a high wage multiple, but are immune to automation. He is behind the times, automation for financial and legal sector jobs is rapidly increasing and over the next couple of decades there will be a lot of it as funds switch away from "Smart Alpha" to "Smart Beta" (these are marketing terms used to describe the way funds pick assets to purchase, the first is done by people, mostly with Excel, the second is done by computers - possibly still with Excel, those guys really love a spreadsheet). Lawyers are likewise being replaced by software, left, right and centre. A lot of legal jobs are a matter of sifting through documents. Those docs are electronic, and so, increasingly, are the eyes that read them.
The result of this is that, like socks, legal and financial services are now starting to become cheaper. If you, or your pension fund administrator, take the effort to choose wisely, you can now get the same returns as of old from a fund that
should return less cash than of old in a slower market, because it absorbs less of your return in fees.
Automation is taking workloads away from people in more and more industries. Under a rigid Marxist interpretation this leads to exploitation of the underemployed. On less fanatical terms it means that people are freed up even though our economy can produce as many or more goods and services - more cheaply. That means we can have more teachers, doctors and social workers. It means that the rewards of well paid jobs will be more easily realizable in quality of life considerations such as job sharing, paternity leave and so on.
