The 300 word essay is pretty much asking you to consider all 3 points of views m
The 300 word essay is pretty much asking you to consider all 3 points of views mentioned. Then ask yourself what are the shortcomings and then come up with an answer.
Essay I
Essential of International Economics
Below I present three views of the tension among equity (Lycurgus), efficiency (Smith), and prosperity (Keynes). Piketty offers his views on the status of inequality but I do not find them all that helpful to understand the trends from almost 2800 years or on how to solve the seemingly eternal inequality. Express your view in a 300-word essay.
Lycurgus (820 BCE): Thesis
“After the creation of the thirty senators, his next task, and, indeed, the most hazardous he ever undertook, was the making a new division of their lands. For there was an extreme inequality amongst them, and their state was overloaded with a multitude of indigent and necessitous persons, while its whole wealth had centered upon a very few. To the end, therefore, that he might expel from the state arrogance and envy, luxury and crime, and those yet more inveterate diseases of want and superfluity, he obtained of them to renounce their properties, and to consent to a new division of the land, and that they should live all together on an equal footing; merit to be their only road to eminence, and the disgrace of evil, and credit of worthy acts, their one measure of difference between man and man. … Not contented with this, he resolved to make a division of their movables too, that there might be no odious distinction or inequality left amongst them; but finding that it would be very dangerous to go about it openly, he took another course, and defeated their avarice by the following stratagem : he commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in, and that only a sort of money made of iron should be current, a great weight and quantity of which was but very little worth; so that to lay up twenty or thirty pounds there was required a pretty large closet, and, to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen. With the diffusion of this money, at once a number of vices were banished from Lacedaemon; for who would rob another of such a coin? Who would unjustly detain or take by force, or accept as a bribe, a thing which it was not easy to hide, nor a credit to have, nor indeed of any use to cut in pieces? For when it was just red hot, they quenched it in vinegar, and by that means spoilt it, and made it almost incapable of being worked.”[1]
Smith (1776 CE): Antithesis
At the other extreme, we have the expansion in prosperity of the 18th and 19th centuries in which Laissez-faire ruled as an economic system. During that time, productive and commercial transactions among individuals were free from any form of government interventionism not because it was not possible, but because such intervention was redundant. Indeed, individuals’ actions “…are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”[2] In other words, the workings of the invisible hand will lead, automatically and without being noticed, to an egalitarian society.
Keynes (1936 CE): Synthesis
Keynes extends the list of functions of the government to include prosperity. Specifically, he indicates that it would “…be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease [inequities] whilst preserving efficiency [prosperity] and freedom.”[3] The crux of Keynes’ middle of the road is that “I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment; ….”[4]
Piketty (2022 CE): Progress?
““Give me a reason to be optimistic?” By looking at my historical evidence, by thinking about the big picture, I have become more optimistic. I was a bit puzzled that many people looking at “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” came away with a pessimistic conclusion. I’m trying to show that the key in history is not the big catastrophes but the positive political construction of an alternative, and this process started with the French Revolution, the U.S. revolution. This process toward more equality is more deeply rooted in our modern ethos and modern political cultures than most people believe. I remember in 2014 having a public discussion with Elizabeth Warren in Boston. I was talking about a progressive wealth tax with a rate of 5 percent per year or 10 percent per year on billionaires. She looked at me like, Wow, that’s too much. Joe Biden today, a centrist Democrat — who voted for Tax Reform Act — is coming in with a wealth tax. Things can change pretty fast.” See the whole interview at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview.html Links to an external site.
[1] Plutarch’s Lives, Lycurgus, p. 94
[2] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations page 181; emphasis added
[3] Keynes, General Theory page 372.
[4] Keynes, General Theory page 378.Emphasis added