Less Milk

The Financial Times came out of the banking holiday with a putdown on Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” and its tenet that income inequality has increased to disparities unseen since before the Great Depression. According to Al-Jazeera the FT’s Chris Giles says Piketty has “got his sums wrong.” Giles writes that the book’s U.S. data contains mistakes and “unexplained entries in spreadsheets,” and accuses the French economist of cherry picking. He also says FT has “cleaned up” Piketty’s work and found that “European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970.” The numbers don't add up the way Free Marketeers want the public to see them. We are supposedly heading out of the Greater Recession, but little has been done to address salary stagnations, job displacement in favor of profit, and more importantly the effect of speculation on common-day commodities. This morning I went into the deli on Fulton Street. A quart of milk had jumped twenty cents to $1.99 and a half-gallon also increased twenty cents. Equality? Poorer people buy smaller quantities and the shared twenty cent increase is actually a penalty on the poor to subsidize the rich. It's simple math that the purchasers of a quart were subjected to a 200% increase in comparison to that sought from the buyers of a half-gallon. Simple math and no matter how many mathematicians ponder the problem, the truth of the matter is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting more numerous. No one reads the FT in Fort Greene. We know our math.