Thomas Piketty's book has taken the economics world by storm and is now #1 on Amazon.com. It is being hailed as the most important economics book of the decade. Its rare for an economics book based so much on theory and data, and even many graphs, to be such a success. (Although I hear it is a pleasure to read.) James Galbriath and Erin Ade discuss its success and his criticisms of it. There are dozens of economics blog posts about it, often with hundreds or even thousands of comments. The book challenges fundamental assumptions about capitalism and economics ("Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves... Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything."). Piketty is a mainstream economist who has proved there is an inherent tendency towards inequality. He was only 22 years old when he came from France to teach at MIT. At the age of 22, when most econ students are sweating out their preliminaries, he had already completed his doctorate at the élite École Normale Supérieure with a dissertation dense in mathematical economics . He quit this mathematical economics, however, and returned to France to piece together data sets on inequality and wealth distribution, the result of which is this book. Here are just a few examples of the coverage this book has been receiving: His analysis includes a ratio of capital to national income. The market value of capital assets has risen since the 1970s, raising the ratio from 250-300 percent of income to 500-600 percent today. This is expressed as r is greater than g. The rate of return on capital is greater than g, the rate of return on growth. Essentially what he is saying is that if capital grows faster than income, capital will concentrate. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/kapital-for-the-twenty-first-century (Galbraiths review of the book.) Interview with Piketty. http://qz.com/200213/ten-questions-for-thomas-piketty-the-economist-who-exposed-capitalisms-fatal-flaw/#/ "Suddenly, there is a new economist making waves -- and he is not on the right. At the conference of the Institute of New Economic Thinking in Toronto last week, Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century got at least one mention at every session I attended. You have to go back to the 1970s and Milton Friedman for a single economist to have had such an impact." http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/12/capitalism-isnt-working-thomas-piketty http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/13/occupy-right-capitalism-failed-world-french-economist-thomas-piketty "In its magisterial sweep and ambition, Piketty's latest work, "Capital in the Twenty-first Century," is clearly modeled after Marx's "Das Kapital." But where Marx's research was spotty, Piketty's is prodigious. And where Marx foresaw capitalism's collapse leading to a utopian proletariat paradise, Piketty sees a future of slow growth and Gilded Age disparities in which the wealthy — owners of capital — capture a steadily larger share of global wealth and income. " http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/capital-in-the-twenty-first-century-by-thomas-piketty/2014/03/28/ea75727a-a87a-11e3-8599-ce7295b6851c_story.html Graph of the year: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/31/emmanuel-saez-and-thomas-pikettys-graph-of-the-year/ "The first is the almost always reliable and very sharp James K. Galbraith, who--for some reason I don't understand--thinks that Piketty intends his Capital to be a book about production rather than about distribution. And as a result I think his review goes awry" http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/04/thomas-piketty-attempted-smackdown-watch.html Conservatives and Libertarians have attacked the book without knowing or understanding it: "Thomas Piketty seems to have stirred up a new Red Scare... His new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is being hailed as the most important book of the decade, even the century. The French economist's 696-page tome is sold out on Amazon, where it's the No. 1 bestseller. Needless to say, conservatives are panicking, looking for any way to refute Piketty's work. " http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/piketty-amazon-reviews_n_5212386.html http://www.alternet.org/comments/economy/why-economist-thomas-piketty-has-scared-pants-american-right Was Marx right: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/03/30/was-marx-right MMT book review of piketty: http://www.bondeconomics.com/2014/03/book-review-capital-in-twenty-first.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/16/thomas-piketty-inequality_n_5159937.html http://anticap.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/capital-in-the-18th-19th-20th-and-21st-centuries/ http://www.bondeconomics.com/2014/03/book-review-capital-in-twenty-first.html http://chronicle.com/article/Capital-Man/146059/

• published: 26 Apr 2014
• views: 1747