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After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent history, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from here in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of economists and other social scientists tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty, in what is sure to be a much-debated book in its own right.
After Piketty opens with a discussion by Arthur Goldhammer, the book’s translator, of the reasons for Capital ’s phenomenal success, followed by the published reviews of Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Robert Solow. The rest of the book is devoted to newly commissioned essays that interrogate Piketty’s arguments. Suresh Naidu and other contributors ask whether Piketty said enough about power, slavery, and the complex nature of capital. Laura Tyson and Michael Spence consider the impact of technology on inequality. Heather Boushey, Branko Milanovic, and others consider topics ranging from gender to trends in the global South. Emmanuel Saez lays out an agenda for future research on inequality, while a variety of essayists examine the book’s implications for the social sciences more broadly. Piketty replies to these questions in a substantial concluding chapter.
An indispensable interdisciplinary work, After Piketty does not shy away from the seemingly intractable problems that made Capital in the Twenty-First Century so compelling for so many.
After Piketty opens with a discussion by Arthur Goldhammer, the book’s translator, of the reasons for Capital ’s phenomenal success, followed by the published reviews of Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Robert Solow. The rest of the book is devoted to newly commissioned essays that interrogate Piketty’s arguments. Suresh Naidu and other contributors ask whether Piketty said enough about power, slavery, and the complex nature of capital. Laura Tyson and Michael Spence consider the impact of technology on inequality. Heather Boushey, Branko Milanovic, and others consider topics ranging from gender to trends in the global South. Emmanuel Saez lays out an agenda for future research on inequality, while a variety of essayists examine the book’s implications for the social sciences more broadly. Piketty replies to these questions in a substantial concluding chapter.
An indispensable interdisciplinary work, After Piketty does not shy away from the seemingly intractable problems that made Capital in the Twenty-First Century so compelling for so many.
678 pages, Hardcover
Published May 8, 2017
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1311 people want to read
About the author
Heather Boushey
21 books22 followersHeather Boushey is Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 2, 2017
Articles from a wide selection of scholars relating to Thomas Piketty's modern classic "Capital in the 21st Century". Given that a Piketty's opus is viewed as a stimulus to multi-disciplinary approaches numerous academic disciplines are represented - economics, political science, sociology, geography, women's studies, etc. Contributors include Paul Krugman, Emmanuel Saez, Branko Milanovic, & Piketty himself. Content ranges from criticism of Piketty & attempts to discredit his work to homages singing his praises, to suggestions for modified or alternate methods, to just plain nitpicking & the quality of the offerings varies by a wide range. I would recommend picking & choosing rather than an attempt to read cover to cover. I found some articles to be highly specialized, esoteric & requiring a depth of background. Others will appeal to the literate lay reader. Surely you'd want to have first read Piketty tho.
February 7, 2020
This is an excellent overview of the many topics related to inequality being explored at the moment. Haha my attempt to do a causal review went rather long, but here you go if you would like a summary of all the articles in the book:
Intrigued by reports of rising inequality throughout the world, I decided to read After Piketty. This book is a collection of articles written by leading economists responding to Thomas Piketty's magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Following up on my new year's resolution, I decided to take notes from the books I read and wrote a review of the book. From my notes, I think I have cobbled together more of a summary of the interesting arguments in the book along with some basic reflections. The summary covers various aspects of inequality, so it can serve as a good overview of the key aspects of inequality. This article might be relevant for someone who would like a bird's eye view of inequality in the contemporary world.
Before moving on to the key points covered in the articles, I will briefly explore Picketty's central argument. Piketty highlighted a basic tenancy that helps us understand economic inequality. Wealth and income are two constituents of individual economic situations. However, if the rate of return from the wealth exceeds the rate of return on income from work, then the inequality will rise because it is after all the wealthy who own most of the wealth. Through extensive historical economic analysis, Piketty demonstrated that the rate of return from wealth does exceed the rate of return on income from work. The reduction in inequality during the World Wars Era was an exception caused by the destruction of wealth and an increase in the rate of return on income.
Some theorists have criticised Picketty's arguments as well. For instance, Devesh Raval identifies that higher capital taxes might result in less capital investment, and hence less returns to the overall economy. One of the problems with this line of argument is that the money from the taxes does not get thrown out into the ocean. In fact, this can be used to provide for critical infrastructure and make investments that are crucial for the overall economy but individuals might be wary in investing.
One of the central topics within the collection was the relationship between technological advancement and inequality. "As technology has become more capital augmenting and skill-based, its influence on inequality has strengthened" (Tyson/Spence 175). One nature of the recent technological advance has been that the successful platforms generate outsized returns. This is due to the well-known network effect and the trust issues being resolved through two-way evaluations. Simply put, think Air BnB, and how any competitor to Airbnb will be facing an uphill battle because while it is possible to invest in new infrastructure and do competitive pricing, but both the reviews and number of users will take time to rise, and during this period, the new competitor will be under significant disadvantage.
Additionally, considering the online firms are often giants, the wealthy have bigger shares in them and benefit more from their growth. Though, one can point out that firms like Air BnB might also help reduce inequality by providing more revenue to the middle-classes. Raval also interesting points out that the case for technology replacing the jobs has not always been clear cut. He gives the example of ATM/ Bank Teller situation whereas ATMs rose, the bank teller employment declined, but due to banks being more efficient, banks were able to employ higher-paid relationship managers (95).
Similarly, another interesting aspect of rising inequality is the existence of inequality also within work income. The upper minorities like executives are earning a lot more than the average workers. The super manager salaries are extremely high due to employees being their own bosses. They set their own 'wages' by comparing their own salaries with one another. In the process, they keep on increasing them. Picketty posits that "tax cuts strengthened the incentive for successful rent-seeking behaviour by top executives to redistribute business income from shareholders, workers, and other stakeholders to themselves" (181). Though some economists have posited that the executive pay helps align super-managers interests to the shareholders. For instance, often the higher the executive compensation the higher is the stock value of the particular company (181). Another explanation for this phenomenon has been the disintermediation which means the reduction in middle supervisors actually increase overall efficiency and management oversight thus increasing the super manager salaries. Similarly, the declining unionisation also increases wage inequality, as in an unionised workplace, there is a strong premium for skilled workers. This decline means that the skilled and unskilled workers get a smaller share of the pie, and the super-managers are able to get a larger slice.
Gender also had an impact on economic inequality. In the past few decades, higher women employment has reduced inequality across families because more women have better opportunities (Boushey 375). However, other factors have moved the situation in a different direction. Middle-class parents still have two earning members, and this allows for children to have more inheritance as compared to the working-class households. These households are more likely to have a single parent, and often that is a low-paid mother (376). Boushey notes that equal inheritance might not mean equality because parents still tend to invest more in their sons than their daughters. She also notes that among the highest-earning group there has been little progress (281). Boushey asserts that gender equality will reduce economic inequality. Additionally, race and inequality remain important for instance, "white families buy homes and start accumulating capital on average eight years earlier than similarly situated black families" (533).
The concentration of wealth has also various modern aspects which makes it difficult to reduce inequality. Firstly, the more the wealth becomes concentrated, the more it becomes invisible (Krugman 61). At the same time, "New plutocrats are highlight mobile, globally networked, and yet placeless". The rich are able to more withdraw out of the public sights, and hence it becomes difficult to keep an eye on them and enable the democratic oversight over the massive fortunes. I think this will also make it more difficult to realise the real scope of wealth. While it is easy to feel jealous of the next door wealthy neighbour, but what if the wealthy are never seen. However, this argument also goes the other way, with the rise of social media and the continued presence of the tabloids, I doubt if the wealthy are really out of the spotlight.
Suresh Naidu also points out that "the wealth holders fight so hard to translate newly found wealth into political preparatives and influence because they understand that the continued accumulation depends on maintaining the promised flow of income, a task that requires durable policy commitments" (115). This makes if difficult to fight inequality because the fight for inequality involves fighting against the wealthy. History gives an interesting example of this phenomenon. The former slaveholders experienced an economic resurgence after the Civil War after they sought and gained more political power which allowed them more control, and enabled them to achieve higher growth (501). The endowments created by the wealthy can have a long-lasting impact on the economy. Thus, as the rate of return on the wealth increases, the impact of endowments can continue increasing with time, giving the rich, even the long-dead ones, an outsized influence on contemporary society.
Perhaps, one result of this is that capital incomes are taxed at lower rates than labour income (272). According to Christoph Larkner, "finance, property and avoidance of taxation" are the "drivers of contemporary inequality" (282). The total tax avoidance in G-20 countries can be as much as 240 billion or 4 to 10 % of global tax revenues. One problem that makes it worse is the de-spacing of the economy: "Property is leased, buildings and machinery are rented, and services contracted, while connectivity with suppliers, intermediaries and markets are unencumbered by regulation and political demands" (287). In this way, perhaps, the richer one is, the more one is able to evade regulation. Similarly, Elizabeth Jacobs invites us to consider the role of space in inequality. She notes how the complexity of the tax codes helps the interests of the wealthy. She also notes how economic inequality creates political polarisation which then creates gridlock and further privileges the status quo (530).
Many theorists have written about the impacts of greater inequality on the macro-economic situation. The top 5% of the income accounts for all 1/3 of spending (Zandi 387). Considering that the wealthy people are more sensitive to changes in the market condition, this can result in bigger business cycles. Often, for working-class or even middle classes cutting spending is not an easy task, so often such spending tends to be more resilient to market changes. Zandir argues that there needs to be more research on this topic, so far the evidence shows that greater inequality does hurt long term growth a little bit.
Salvatoire Moreli argues that recessions in unequal countries are longer and that inequality leads to unsustained and short-lived growth (417). Similarly, it seems that Voitchosky shows that inequality at the top end leads to positive growth while at the lower end impairs growth. Another way that inequality tends to exacerbate economic woes is through creating unequal political power, which can result in a more inefficient allocation of resources, and also as the security of small entrepreneurs increases, their incentive to invest becomes smaller, and this impedes economic growth (421). Another factor is that with greater wealth come greater economic opportunities. With more inequality, a smaller number of people have investments in their education resulting in the waste of talent at the bottom (423). Another problem that can happen is that inequality can be one of the structural determinants of "accumulation of economic imbalances" including house indebtedness and bubbles in financial and real estate markets" (429). Similarly, inequality can disturb growth not only through political economy but also through imperfect credit markets, and consumption channels. Similarly, it seems that "inclusive institutions improve long-run economic performance while extractive institutions do the opposite" (503).
Another reason advocated by David Weil for increasing inequality is the fissured workplace hypothesis. This hypothesis explains "how wage setting norms are altered when workers are shed from lead employers to external businesses, effectively changing a wage-setting problem into a pricing problem" (211). Contracting disincentivizes unionisation of particular businesses. Also, unions "raise wages", protect workers from unfair dismissal, and increase workplace safety. This discouraging of unionisation creates more inequality. This practice also allows the employers to minimise liability and hence encourages fissuring, and the consequence: more inequality. Contracting replaces wages of labour with prices for services, and helps keeps these wages low. The employers are able to avoid the "vertical equality norms" which may lead large employers to pay lower-skill workers higher wages because of the "presence of higher-paid workers" (222). The lower one moves down the supply chain the lower the returns get, and if there are disproportionately more workers at the bottom of the chain, this will result in more lower-paid workers at the bottom while less highly paid workers at the top along with margins increasing profits of the more upper parts of the supply chain.
Often, theorists fail to consider the importance of human capital inequality. "Human capital is an important source of wealth for each generation and plays an important role in the transmission of economic advantage across generations" (Eric R. Nielson 151). One example of it is that investment in young children can lead to a very large social return. Human capital might include "inherited capital", as in social networks and cultural attitudes, but it might also include "invested capital" like musical training. Similarly, I think, it is possible to inherit low human capital and high wealth, and in this case, it might happen that the wealth might be squandered away. This type of capital difference might actually be a divide between the lower classes and all others because the former tend to invest less human capital into their children (162). Perhaps, one way to reduce inequality would be to encourage adoption by the richer families, thus transferring both human and physical capital.
I hope this regurgitating helps the reader get a bit more of a glimpse into the complexity of thinking about inequality and perhaps allows the reader to appreciate the multi-faceted and well thought out response that will be required in order to deal with inequality.
Intrigued by reports of rising inequality throughout the world, I decided to read After Piketty. This book is a collection of articles written by leading economists responding to Thomas Piketty's magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Following up on my new year's resolution, I decided to take notes from the books I read and wrote a review of the book. From my notes, I think I have cobbled together more of a summary of the interesting arguments in the book along with some basic reflections. The summary covers various aspects of inequality, so it can serve as a good overview of the key aspects of inequality. This article might be relevant for someone who would like a bird's eye view of inequality in the contemporary world.
Before moving on to the key points covered in the articles, I will briefly explore Picketty's central argument. Piketty highlighted a basic tenancy that helps us understand economic inequality. Wealth and income are two constituents of individual economic situations. However, if the rate of return from the wealth exceeds the rate of return on income from work, then the inequality will rise because it is after all the wealthy who own most of the wealth. Through extensive historical economic analysis, Piketty demonstrated that the rate of return from wealth does exceed the rate of return on income from work. The reduction in inequality during the World Wars Era was an exception caused by the destruction of wealth and an increase in the rate of return on income.
Some theorists have criticised Picketty's arguments as well. For instance, Devesh Raval identifies that higher capital taxes might result in less capital investment, and hence less returns to the overall economy. One of the problems with this line of argument is that the money from the taxes does not get thrown out into the ocean. In fact, this can be used to provide for critical infrastructure and make investments that are crucial for the overall economy but individuals might be wary in investing.
One of the central topics within the collection was the relationship between technological advancement and inequality. "As technology has become more capital augmenting and skill-based, its influence on inequality has strengthened" (Tyson/Spence 175). One nature of the recent technological advance has been that the successful platforms generate outsized returns. This is due to the well-known network effect and the trust issues being resolved through two-way evaluations. Simply put, think Air BnB, and how any competitor to Airbnb will be facing an uphill battle because while it is possible to invest in new infrastructure and do competitive pricing, but both the reviews and number of users will take time to rise, and during this period, the new competitor will be under significant disadvantage.
Additionally, considering the online firms are often giants, the wealthy have bigger shares in them and benefit more from their growth. Though, one can point out that firms like Air BnB might also help reduce inequality by providing more revenue to the middle-classes. Raval also interesting points out that the case for technology replacing the jobs has not always been clear cut. He gives the example of ATM/ Bank Teller situation whereas ATMs rose, the bank teller employment declined, but due to banks being more efficient, banks were able to employ higher-paid relationship managers (95).
Similarly, another interesting aspect of rising inequality is the existence of inequality also within work income. The upper minorities like executives are earning a lot more than the average workers. The super manager salaries are extremely high due to employees being their own bosses. They set their own 'wages' by comparing their own salaries with one another. In the process, they keep on increasing them. Picketty posits that "tax cuts strengthened the incentive for successful rent-seeking behaviour by top executives to redistribute business income from shareholders, workers, and other stakeholders to themselves" (181). Though some economists have posited that the executive pay helps align super-managers interests to the shareholders. For instance, often the higher the executive compensation the higher is the stock value of the particular company (181). Another explanation for this phenomenon has been the disintermediation which means the reduction in middle supervisors actually increase overall efficiency and management oversight thus increasing the super manager salaries. Similarly, the declining unionisation also increases wage inequality, as in an unionised workplace, there is a strong premium for skilled workers. This decline means that the skilled and unskilled workers get a smaller share of the pie, and the super-managers are able to get a larger slice.
Gender also had an impact on economic inequality. In the past few decades, higher women employment has reduced inequality across families because more women have better opportunities (Boushey 375). However, other factors have moved the situation in a different direction. Middle-class parents still have two earning members, and this allows for children to have more inheritance as compared to the working-class households. These households are more likely to have a single parent, and often that is a low-paid mother (376). Boushey notes that equal inheritance might not mean equality because parents still tend to invest more in their sons than their daughters. She also notes that among the highest-earning group there has been little progress (281). Boushey asserts that gender equality will reduce economic inequality. Additionally, race and inequality remain important for instance, "white families buy homes and start accumulating capital on average eight years earlier than similarly situated black families" (533).
The concentration of wealth has also various modern aspects which makes it difficult to reduce inequality. Firstly, the more the wealth becomes concentrated, the more it becomes invisible (Krugman 61). At the same time, "New plutocrats are highlight mobile, globally networked, and yet placeless". The rich are able to more withdraw out of the public sights, and hence it becomes difficult to keep an eye on them and enable the democratic oversight over the massive fortunes. I think this will also make it more difficult to realise the real scope of wealth. While it is easy to feel jealous of the next door wealthy neighbour, but what if the wealthy are never seen. However, this argument also goes the other way, with the rise of social media and the continued presence of the tabloids, I doubt if the wealthy are really out of the spotlight.
Suresh Naidu also points out that "the wealth holders fight so hard to translate newly found wealth into political preparatives and influence because they understand that the continued accumulation depends on maintaining the promised flow of income, a task that requires durable policy commitments" (115). This makes if difficult to fight inequality because the fight for inequality involves fighting against the wealthy. History gives an interesting example of this phenomenon. The former slaveholders experienced an economic resurgence after the Civil War after they sought and gained more political power which allowed them more control, and enabled them to achieve higher growth (501). The endowments created by the wealthy can have a long-lasting impact on the economy. Thus, as the rate of return on the wealth increases, the impact of endowments can continue increasing with time, giving the rich, even the long-dead ones, an outsized influence on contemporary society.
Perhaps, one result of this is that capital incomes are taxed at lower rates than labour income (272). According to Christoph Larkner, "finance, property and avoidance of taxation" are the "drivers of contemporary inequality" (282). The total tax avoidance in G-20 countries can be as much as 240 billion or 4 to 10 % of global tax revenues. One problem that makes it worse is the de-spacing of the economy: "Property is leased, buildings and machinery are rented, and services contracted, while connectivity with suppliers, intermediaries and markets are unencumbered by regulation and political demands" (287). In this way, perhaps, the richer one is, the more one is able to evade regulation. Similarly, Elizabeth Jacobs invites us to consider the role of space in inequality. She notes how the complexity of the tax codes helps the interests of the wealthy. She also notes how economic inequality creates political polarisation which then creates gridlock and further privileges the status quo (530).
Many theorists have written about the impacts of greater inequality on the macro-economic situation. The top 5% of the income accounts for all 1/3 of spending (Zandi 387). Considering that the wealthy people are more sensitive to changes in the market condition, this can result in bigger business cycles. Often, for working-class or even middle classes cutting spending is not an easy task, so often such spending tends to be more resilient to market changes. Zandir argues that there needs to be more research on this topic, so far the evidence shows that greater inequality does hurt long term growth a little bit.
Salvatoire Moreli argues that recessions in unequal countries are longer and that inequality leads to unsustained and short-lived growth (417). Similarly, it seems that Voitchosky shows that inequality at the top end leads to positive growth while at the lower end impairs growth. Another way that inequality tends to exacerbate economic woes is through creating unequal political power, which can result in a more inefficient allocation of resources, and also as the security of small entrepreneurs increases, their incentive to invest becomes smaller, and this impedes economic growth (421). Another factor is that with greater wealth come greater economic opportunities. With more inequality, a smaller number of people have investments in their education resulting in the waste of talent at the bottom (423). Another problem that can happen is that inequality can be one of the structural determinants of "accumulation of economic imbalances" including house indebtedness and bubbles in financial and real estate markets" (429). Similarly, inequality can disturb growth not only through political economy but also through imperfect credit markets, and consumption channels. Similarly, it seems that "inclusive institutions improve long-run economic performance while extractive institutions do the opposite" (503).
Another reason advocated by David Weil for increasing inequality is the fissured workplace hypothesis. This hypothesis explains "how wage setting norms are altered when workers are shed from lead employers to external businesses, effectively changing a wage-setting problem into a pricing problem" (211). Contracting disincentivizes unionisation of particular businesses. Also, unions "raise wages", protect workers from unfair dismissal, and increase workplace safety. This discouraging of unionisation creates more inequality. This practice also allows the employers to minimise liability and hence encourages fissuring, and the consequence: more inequality. Contracting replaces wages of labour with prices for services, and helps keeps these wages low. The employers are able to avoid the "vertical equality norms" which may lead large employers to pay lower-skill workers higher wages because of the "presence of higher-paid workers" (222). The lower one moves down the supply chain the lower the returns get, and if there are disproportionately more workers at the bottom of the chain, this will result in more lower-paid workers at the bottom while less highly paid workers at the top along with margins increasing profits of the more upper parts of the supply chain.
Often, theorists fail to consider the importance of human capital inequality. "Human capital is an important source of wealth for each generation and plays an important role in the transmission of economic advantage across generations" (Eric R. Nielson 151). One example of it is that investment in young children can lead to a very large social return. Human capital might include "inherited capital", as in social networks and cultural attitudes, but it might also include "invested capital" like musical training. Similarly, I think, it is possible to inherit low human capital and high wealth, and in this case, it might happen that the wealth might be squandered away. This type of capital difference might actually be a divide between the lower classes and all others because the former tend to invest less human capital into their children (162). Perhaps, one way to reduce inequality would be to encourage adoption by the richer families, thus transferring both human and physical capital.
I hope this regurgitating helps the reader get a bit more of a glimpse into the complexity of thinking about inequality and perhaps allows the reader to appreciate the multi-faceted and well thought out response that will be required in order to deal with inequality.
July 13, 2017
After Piketty es al mismo tiempo un repaso por aspectos clave de la dicusión sobre la desigualdad en la literatura de los ultimos años y su perspectiva historica y a la vez una revisión critica del trabajo de Piketty en el Capital en el Siglo XXI. El trabajo de Boushey, Steinbaum y De Long en editar y recolectar los distintos ensayos y papers que componen el capitulo es de gran utilidad para entender de donde viene y hacia donde va la agenda sobre la economía y la desigualdad.
El trabajo es multidisciplinario, si bien la mayoria de los capitulos son escritos por economistas que estudian la desigualdad, existen varios textos de historiadores, sociologos y polítologos que hacen una critica desde sus campos a los hallazagos de Piketty y tratan de reinterpretar el Capital en el siglo XXI desde el conocimiento de esos otros campos. En ese sentido After Piketty puede verse también como un intento de reconciliar el conocimiento económico respecto a la desigualdad con el resto de las ciencias sociales.
Es una lectura que se beneficia mucho de conocer la literatura existente sobre desigualdad y en especial de la lectura del Capital en el siglo XXI y el trabajo previo de Piketty, Saez y el resto de sus coautores. El libro es una buena forma de ilustrar el impacto que ha tenido la discusión sobre la desigualdad en los últimos años y tal como el trabajo al que referencia lo hizo hace 3 años, puede poner el tono a la discusión pública en en el futuro.
Muy recomendable.
El trabajo es multidisciplinario, si bien la mayoria de los capitulos son escritos por economistas que estudian la desigualdad, existen varios textos de historiadores, sociologos y polítologos que hacen una critica desde sus campos a los hallazagos de Piketty y tratan de reinterpretar el Capital en el siglo XXI desde el conocimiento de esos otros campos. En ese sentido After Piketty puede verse también como un intento de reconciliar el conocimiento económico respecto a la desigualdad con el resto de las ciencias sociales.
Es una lectura que se beneficia mucho de conocer la literatura existente sobre desigualdad y en especial de la lectura del Capital en el siglo XXI y el trabajo previo de Piketty, Saez y el resto de sus coautores. El libro es una buena forma de ilustrar el impacto que ha tenido la discusión sobre la desigualdad en los últimos años y tal como el trabajo al que referencia lo hizo hace 3 años, puede poner el tono a la discusión pública en en el futuro.
Muy recomendable.
February 11, 2024
I picked up After Piketty in a bout of enthusiasm a couple of years ago after reading Capital in the 21st Century. I needed some people to help me put that book into context. I read several reviews and it just wasn't enough.
I am glad I got the essays even if they sat on my shelf for a while. They are invigorating. (even if I did skip most of the math bits) I have a better understanding of why the Piketty book caused such a storm (the first essay is by the English language translator of the book and it is a wry and amusing look at the usually quiet world of academic translation) I also feel much more comfortable with the economic tradition Piketty was pushing against.
Even with a complicated subject matter many of the essays were clear and easy to follow even if they did leave me with a whole list of books and names to look up. But of course that is a good thing.
I am glad I got the essays even if they sat on my shelf for a while. They are invigorating. (even if I did skip most of the math bits) I have a better understanding of why the Piketty book caused such a storm (the first essay is by the English language translator of the book and it is a wry and amusing look at the usually quiet world of academic translation) I also feel much more comfortable with the economic tradition Piketty was pushing against.
Even with a complicated subject matter many of the essays were clear and easy to follow even if they did leave me with a whole list of books and names to look up. But of course that is a good thing.
June 29, 2018
A collection of scholarly articles about and critiquing Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Some are too technical for non-economists but many are very interesting, looking at philosophical, geopolitical, feminist and wider economic viewpoints to explain economic inequality. The overall impression is that Capital in the 21st Century is undoubtedly an important work, but perhaps "r > g" is too simplistic a catchphrase. There are many aspects to consider and a lot of future work to be done.
March 25, 2018
This book helped soo much in clarifying my understanding of Capital. Capital relied heavily on graphs that were hella hard for me to understand, whereas this book relied largely on textual explanations. In particular, I realized that limitations on growth which will necessarily happen because of physical capacity will exacerbate Piketty's' prediction that the rate of return will be higher than the rate of growth. In other words, the wealthy will get even more wealthy while the rest of the economy's growth will slow.
If you are wanting a shortcut to reading either of these, Krugman's chapter was particularly good. Morelli's chapter on rising inequality leading to economic stability is also really good. It tries to provide a more instrumental rather than only ethical explanation for why economic inequality is not desirable. I would have liked to see the case argued for more strongly, however. I'd advise skipping the chapter on macro models of wealth inequality, which is poorly written.
If you are wanting a shortcut to reading either of these, Krugman's chapter was particularly good. Morelli's chapter on rising inequality leading to economic stability is also really good. It tries to provide a more instrumental rather than only ethical explanation for why economic inequality is not desirable. I would have liked to see the case argued for more strongly, however. I'd advise skipping the chapter on macro models of wealth inequality, which is poorly written.
April 19, 2025
A great read, but the idea of a global wealth tax in Capital in the Twenty-First Century feels a bit too idealistic. While it sounds great on paper, I think it would mostly impact the upper middle class (the top 10%) rather than the ultra-wealthy (the top 0.1%). The richest people can easily dodge such taxes with financial tricks, offshore accounts, and loopholes basically turning the whole thing into a "fictional paradise" for them. It’s a solid starting point for understanding economic inequality, but when it comes to actually implementing a global wealth tax, I don’t see it making much of a difference for the super-rich. If you’re interested in a deeper look at inequality and tax policies, I’d recommend The Price of Inequality by Joseph E. Stiglitz.
November 18, 2024
Most of this book is more for economists, I think. I was hoping it would be a way for me to read essays by a variety of economists. I'm not opposed to math, but it's difficult for me to read text with a lot of formulas. Some of the essays are more readable than others. In the end, I sampled the book and did not read every word. I loved the discussion that this book can be seen as, and that Piketty responds at the end. 4 stars because I don't want to mark it down for being too technical for me.
September 14, 2017
Interesting series of essays on C21. Some of the them are a bit technical.
August 7, 2018
Prismatic discussion of Piketty's seminal work. Easier to read to than Piketty. :)
Want to read
July 18, 2021Respuestas a "El capital en el siglo XXI" de Piketty
December 26, 2021
This is a great book. It really is, wow.
October 30, 2020
This is a grand collection of essays which defies a rapid front to back reading. In this third personal journey through the book, I have focused predominantly on the section, “Dimensions of Inequality”, with a particular focus on the extent and economic growth and sustainability / financial stability implications of inequality in today’s global context.
The book is a useful reference source, both for Piketty’s classic C21, and the inequality debate more generally.
The book is a useful reference source, both for Piketty’s classic C21, and the inequality debate more generally.
Read
February 2, 2018332.041 A2588 2017
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews