Nit-Piketty
A Comment on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century [For a pdf version with an appendix, click here .] Thomas Piketty’s heart is definitely in the right place. Capital in the Twenty First Century addresses the great question of our times: the phenomenon of persistent and rising inequality. Piketty has amassed data — both from a motley collection of sources and from his own empirical work — that shows how inequality has not just been high, but on the rise. Piketty purports to provide an integrated explanation of it all. Paul Krugman calls it “the unified field theory of inequality.” Comparisons to Marx’s great Capital abound (perhaps not entirely unsolicited). Even in this quick-moving bite-hungry world, everyone is still cheering, weeks after the English translation has appeared. That’s pretty amazing. Amazing, but at another level, unsurprising. We’ve been handed a Messiah — in the form of a sizable tome that contains the laws of capitalism, yes, ...