Ada PalmerSometimes people ask me (as a historian of the period) about the super rich in Renaissance Florence, whether the art/culture/science boom was an example of trickle-down working. (A) Florence had a wealth tax, (B) its richest man Palla Strozzi had the equivalent of only $250 million. Want more Leonardos? Tax the Rich. 🎨🧑🎨🖌🎭🔭🖼📚📐🏛🎻💰
Luis Villa@adapalmer is there any good deeper writing on this? Would be very curious to go deep on just about any aspect of it.
@luis_in_brief My forthcoming book “Inventing the Renaissance” dives into it a bunch. For the technical side you can try Richard Goldthweit’s “The Economy of Renaissance Florence” but it’s a very dry read, alas, though brilliant!
@adapalmer this level of nerdery probably doesn’t surprise coming from an avid reader of your stuff, but I have read Goldthwaite, albeit ages ago—so that I mostly remember the discussions of double-entry bookkeeping, of all things. Look forward to your new book! And looks like perhaps this other Goldthwaite might be right up my alley as well: https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Demand-Art-Italy-1300-1600/dp/0801852358/
Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴♂️📷 🗺️@adapalmer
Isn't a wealth tax state enforced trickle down, the alternative being take it all.
Isn't a wealth tax state enforced trickle down, the alternative being take it all.
Dave Neary@the5thColumnist @adapalmer No - "trickle down" aka supply-side economics is the theory that the wealthy, left to their own devices, create wealth and opportunity for the poor. It is false, however. They have a low marginal propensity to spend, and businesses do not create jobs because of cash on hand, they do it when demand exceeds capacity to supply.
Alon@adapalmer I like what you said when you still blogged anonymously, about how they decided to give Cesare Borgia the title of Duke of Valentinois because he was already nicknamed Valentino for his Valencian origin, because that's how little the era's royalty and high nobility cared about the commoners they governed.
Virginicus@adapalmer I have wondered about that.
Chris Adams@adapalmer oh neat! I’m a following you here on Fedi now - is there another better way to sign up for a notification to know when the book is available for pre-order / order?
Oggie@adapalmer
I mean, normalizing patronage of the artists wouldn't be an awful step either, I would think!
Why aren't some of our billionares taking artists they like and just saying 'Hey, here's a few million bucks and a house you can stay in. Make something cool in a year'.
Do that for 50 artists they dig, and odds are some of them will have really interesting things!
I even tried to frame this in the lowest effort most capitalist friendly way I could, and still...feels unlikely.
Simon Spanton@adapal to oloooooo9ololoollo the is the [email protected] grgd be if we is grg
AlexxKay@adapalmer
Contra Florence, whenever you post a Something Beautiful from the d'Este estate, it makes me a little ill, thinking about how much wealth got sunk into art that, even today, is difficult to access, and largely only experienced by the wealthy.
Contra Florence, whenever you post a Something Beautiful from the d'Este estate, it makes me a little ill, thinking about how much wealth got sunk into art that, even today, is difficult to access, and largely only experienced by the wealthy.
kechpaja@adapalmer So... I'm all for taxing the rich to fund social programs, and for making those taxes progressive enough that the bulk of the tax burden falls on those most able to pay. I'm being a nerd here, rather than trying to make any political point.
That said, my understanding of probability is making my brain twitch at comparing the total adjusted wealth of the richest citizen of a city with a 5 (or low 6?) figure population against that of either the entire modern world (8 billion) or the entire modern United States (1/3 of a billion). Wouldn't you expect both the number of very rich people _and the highest level of wealth attained by an individual_ to correlate with the size of the society that they live in and draw their wealth from?
(Has anyone ever done an actual rigorous statistical analysis like this of different societies, both modern and historical?)
@kechpaja @adapalmer Branko Milanovic has inequality figures for Early Modern Europe. Inequality had to be lower then, because average incomes were so low that there wasn't enough surplus to extract. For this he came up with the extraction ratio: actual inequality divided by the maximum possible inequality if everyone but a narrow elite is at subsistence. These societies' ratio was near 1, and inequality rose during early industrialization, before falling thanks to modern social democracy.