Hacker Cinema
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
2019 · Film · documentary · 103 min
Directed by Justin Pemberton
Film adaptation of French economist Thomas Piketty's ground-breaking global bestseller of the same name: an eye-opening journey through wealth and power.
1 neutralfrom 1 commenter
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
1 comment on Hacker News
I don't disagree with you about the problems related to wealth distribution. (I just watched the documentary "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" about 2 days ago and so I'm feeling primed there.)
I do think you're being excessively cynical about electoral reform.
Ultimately, we live in a democracy, and voters have power. The parties you're criticizing are advocating for things like democracy vouchers:
https://democracypolicy.network/agenda/open-country/open-government/democracy-vouchers
which is a very anti-oligarchic/anti-plutocratic measure.
Reforms like instant runoff voting make third parties more viable by eliminating spoiler effects. In our present system, if you run as (or vote for) (say) a socialist candidate, you end up helping the right-wing by preferentially stealing votes from the moderate left-wing candidate. In this scenario, it's not rational for you to participate in politics because you end up hurting your own interests. Electoral reform can eliminate the perverse incentives here. In this scenario you can imagine the socialist candidate would say, "Hi, I'm the socialist, I care about issue X; and make your option 2 the green party candidate because of issue Y; or your option 3 the democrat because of issue Z". There are incentives for politicians to act civilly (since transferable votes mean they no longer strictly compete) and to offer better options to voters.
See: "Electoral rules discourage problem-solving and reward conflict" in https://www.americanprogress.org/article/its-time-to-talk-about-electoral-reform/