Piketty on Economics American Style

I should perhaps add that I experienced the American dream at the age of twenty -two, when I was hired by a university near Boston just after finishing my doctorate. This experience proved to be decisive in more ways than one. It was the first time I had set foot in the United States, and it felt good to have my work recognized so quickly. Here was a country that knew how to attract immigrants when it wanted to! Yet I also realized quite soon that I wanted to return to France and Europe, which I did when I was twenty-five. Since then, I have not left Paris, except for a few brief trips. One important reason for my choice has a direct bearing on this book: I did not find the work of US economists entirely convincing. To be sure, they were all very intelligent, and I still have many friends from that period of my life. But something strange happened: I was only too aware of the fact that I knew nothing at all about the world’s economic problems . My thesis consisted of several relatively abstract mathematical theorems. Yet the profession liked my work. I quickly realized that there had been no significant effort to collect historical data on the dynamics of inequality since Kuznets, yet the profession continued to churn out purely theoretical results without even knowing what facts needed to be explained. And it expected me to do the same. When I returned to France, I set out to collect the missing data.

To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration...

Piketty, Thomas (2014-03-10). Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Kindle Locations 647-659). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

The "university near Boston" that he coyly neglects to name is MIT. He goes on to claim that economists in France have more freedom in France:

There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.

Piketty, Thomas (2014-03-10). Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Kindle Locations 661-663). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec...
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st...
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more