For your convenience, this is the criticism surrounding Capital in the 21st century and the summary of the book in the Economist (Sanjay posted this before I believe).
Below is what I find most relevant to the first 6 chapters (including intro, which provides a great overview of different schools of thoughts):
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“Capital” makes three big contributions in its 577 pages.
First, Mr Piketty, a pioneer in using tax statistics to measure
inequality, painstakingly documents the evolution of income and wealth
over the past 300 years, particularly in Europe and America. In doing
so, he shows that the period from about 1914 to the 1970s was an
historical outlier in which both income inequality and the stock of
wealth (relative to annual national income) fell dramatically. Since the
1970s both wealth and income gaps have been rising back towards their
pre-20th-century norms. There are surely a few snafus in these
statistics, but this work has transformed understanding of the history
of wealth, with eye-popping results. Who knew, for instance, that the
annual value of inheritances in France has tripled from less than 5% of
GDP in the 1950s to about 15%, not all that far from the 19th-century
peak of 25%? As a piece of empirical sleuthing, the book is indisputably
brilliant.
Mr Piketty’s second contribution is to come up with a theory
of capitalism that explains these facts and offers a prediction of
where wealth distribution is heading. His central claim is that the
free-market system has a natural tendency towards increasing the
concentration of wealth, because the rate of return on property and
investments has consistently been higher than the rate of economic
growth. Two world wars, the Depression and high taxes pushed down the
return on wealth in the 20th century, while rapid productivity and
population rises pushed up growth. But without such countervailing
factors, Mr Piketty argues, higher returns on capital will concentrate
wealth—especially when, as now, an ageing population means that growth
should slow.
Mr Piketty’s expectation of rising wealth concentration is
not outlandish. However, it is a prediction based on extrapolating from
the past, not an inherent model of capitalism. He assumes that the
returns to capital will not fall substantially even as the stock of
wealth rises. That may prove to be true, but the Piketty prediction is a
hypothesis, not an iron law.
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Interesting summary just in time to prepare us for the discussion tomorrow.
ReplyDeletegreat summary.
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