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But it’s income that mostly interests us, not wealth, because income is the currency of the modern economy. Gone are the days when the only way to acquire an upper-class income was to marry into a family fortune.

Being born into or marrying wealth never stopped being the easiest path to acquiring a fortune

A fanatical miser, Getty was ever-fearful that his fortune would dissipate.

The return on capital (r) almost always exceeds economic growth (g).

“a very large share, perhaps a majority, of corporate profit hinges on rules and regulations that could in principle be altered.”

The clearest such pattern is that r really was, at most points in history, greater than g, if only because g was seldom much to write home about, especially back when economies were primarily agricultural. (Inflation, I learned from reading this book, didn’t really exist before the 20th century.)

The big driver of income inequality, Piketty says, isn’t labor income. It’s capital.

Only when you add in capital income does the gap widen to 15 percentage points

really, the 0.01 percent, a cohort Piketty dubs “supermanagers”—to receive much of its remuneration in the form of stock options and other capital holdings.

Typically, r is four to five times g, but the ratio gets larger as capital accumulates across generations

Baker also suggests that the tendency for large amounts of capital to realize a higher return isn’t solely attributable to the superior financial instruments they have access to; it may also have something to do with rampant insider trading, which could be policed more closely.

everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place

in a capitalist system, ‘civil society’ is not directly productive of the goods and services that we need to survive, live and thrive

Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.

democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons

infrastructures of collaboration, which are managed by a new type of ‘for-benefit associations’

consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons

which are not derived or secondary from either the private or state forms.

civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.

democratically decide

the ‘common good’ of society as a whole

The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.

Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.

true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.

Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.

Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.

designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders

mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.

surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners

ethical mechanism that subsumes profit making under the social goal of strengthening the commons.

because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .

A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.

mobilization of social forces to obtain a new social contract

that foundations perpetuate First World interests and free-market capitalism, thus preserving many of the problems radical activists wish to eradicate, such as the unregulated concentration of wealth.

Foundations were created in the early 20th century by multimillionaire robber barons, such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, to evade corporate and estate taxes.

foundations divert money away from the collective tax base

who are more interested in supporting milquetoast reformers than social-justice organizations

federal and state funding for education and healthcare has shrunk

This is a culture of noblesse oblige, Ahn writes, where the “privileged are obliged to help those less fortunate, without examining how that wealth was created or the dangerous implications of conceding such power to the wealthy.”

is the power those with money wield over community leaders.

consequently realigning their interests (i.e., maintaining their jobs) with maintaining the system

This allegiance keeps community leaders from challenging the root causes of social inequities–the social-change work–at the same time that they pedal to keep up by providing for the needs of individuals devastated by institutional exploitation.

Kivel concedes this is valuable work, but points out the inherent injustice of this paradigm: “When temporary shelter becomes a substitute for permanent housing, emergency food a substitute for a decent job … we have shifted our attention from the redistribution of wealth to the temporary provision of social services to keep people alive.”

University of Southern California Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore urges contemporary grassroots activists to stop seeking a “pure way of doing things.” “Many are looking for an organizational structure and a resource capability that will somehow be impervious to co-optation,”

transitioning from foundation support to a volunteer collective reliant solely on grassroots dollars