CapitalistImperialistPig

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...

Thomas Piketty states his principal conclusions early in his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century: What are the major conclusions to which these novel historical sources have led me? The first is that one should be wary of any economic determinism in regard to inequalities of wealth and income. The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political, and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanisms. In particular, the reduction of inequality that took place in most developed countries between 1910 and 1950 was above all a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war. Similarly, the resurgence of inequality after 1980 is due largely to the political shifts of the past several decades, especially in regard to taxation and finance. The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices tha...

Thomas Piketty begins his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century , with a look at some prophets of economic doom: Malthus, Ricardo, and Marx. Their points of view were very different: Malthus and Ricardo feared the social upheaval caused by increasing inequality while Marx cheered it on, but there was a common thread - seemingly ineluctable forces in demography and capitalism that immiserated the poor while increasing the concentration of wealth at the top. All of them ultimately proved wrong - at least in the medium run - for somewhat related reasons: the industrial revolution and the rapid progress of technology. Of course Marx did ultimately get his revolution, only, as Piketty points out it only happened in the most backward nation in Europe, while the advanced countries found other ways to deal with increasing capital accumulation. Piketty makes the point that all three were severely limited by the paucity of good data on what was happening and what had happened. The cent...