January 19, 2014: Moe Tkacik: Financialization and the 99%
You can listen to the entire talk here. But here is a quick summary. Moe is a former Altbanker who, to our great regret (even more so now that we got to hear her thoughts again), now lives in DC and cannot attend our Sunday meetings. Her presentation was just a tour de force of curiosity, intensity, wide-ranging interest, and humility. She gave about a 30 minute prepared talk, and then took questions, but everything she says has an air of quizzical wonder to it: from admiring the efficiency of the restaurant at which she now works as a barista, including its relatively constricted 5-to-1 top earner to bottom earner wage differential; to analyzing statistics she personally assembled about the growth of house-building compared to vacant housing, and the relative size of both (yes, the rate of house-emptiness way outstrips the rate at which we are building them… and they are bigger on average too). What does that tell us about the real motivations behind building houses anyway? It would not seem to be about having people live in them. Enough said. Click the link above and listen to her talk.
