Knjiga Thomasa Pikettyja “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” ter predlogi po uvedbi enkratnega kapitalskega davka so neprijetno prizadeli desničarsko sceno v ZDA, zato so lansirali precej negativnih komentarjev na knjigo. Toda problem teh komentarjev je, da so vsebinsko izjemno šibki. Da ne rečem – nedostojni iz vidika akademskih standardov. Kar nakazuje na to, da pravih, vsebinskih argumentov proti ugotovitvam Pikettyja glede naravne tendence kapitalizma po koncentraciji bogastva v zgornjih 5% in 1% nimajo.

Brad DeLong v Project Syndicate takole povzema brezzobe desničarske napade na Pikettyjevo knjigo:

In the online journal The Baffler, Kathleen Geier recently attempted a roundup of conservative criticism of Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The astonishing thing to me is how weak the right’s appraisal of Piketty’s arguments has turned out to be.

…

Combining these strands of conservative criticism, the real problem with Piketty’s book becomes clear: its author is a mentally unstable foreign communist. This revives an old line of attack on the US right, one that destroyed thousands of lives and careers during the McCarthy era. But the depiction of ideas as being somehow “un-American” has always been an epithet, not an argument.

Now, in center-left American communities like Berkeley, California, where I live and work, Piketty’s book has been received with praise bordering on reverence. We are impressed with the amount of work that he and his colleagues have put into collecting, assembling, and cleaning the data; the intelligence and skill with which he has constructed and presented his arguments; and how much blood Arthur Goldhammer sweated over the translation.

To be sure, everyone disagrees with 10-20% of Piketty’s argument, and everyone is unsure about perhaps another 10-20%. But, in both cases, everyone has a different 10-20%. In other words, there is majority agreement that each piece of the book is roughly correct, which means that there is near-consensus that the overall argument of the book is, broadly, right.

Unless Piketty’s right-wing critics step up their game and actually make some valid points, that will be the default judgment on his book.

Vir: Brad DeLong, Project Syndicate

Noah Smith pa si je vzel čas in naredil časovno premico pretežno negativnih objav Tylerja Cowena glede Pikettyjeve knjige:

In the three weeks since April 9, Tyler Cowen has written at least 13 blog posts on Piketty, all but one of them negative. Here is a timeline:

4/9: Cowen links approvingly to a mildly negative Krugman review of Piketty.

4/10: Cowen reposts some Matt Rognlie comments that are critical of Piketty.

4/20: Cowen gives his advice on how to read books like Piketty’s. This is the one non-critical Piketty-related Cowen post I could find.

4/20: Cowen links to a negative review of Piketty by Clive Crook, and calls it “correct”.

4/21: Cowen summarizes his Foreign Affairs review of Piketty, which is quite negative.

4/22: Cowen posts excerpts from a Suresh Naidu piece on Piketty, which details a bunch of policy ideas that Piketty allegedly “forgot”.

4/25: Cowen links to a piece claiming that pre-modern times were more equal than now.

4/26: Cowen links approvingly to a negative Garrett Jones review of Piketty.

4/28: Cowen finds a macro model from 2003 claiming that capital taxation won’t help inequality. He then claims that Piketty did not cite that paper. Cowen later posts an update admitting that Piketty did cite that paper in a 2010 paper that is in turn cited in Piketty’s book (and which is posted on Piketty’s website).

4/29: Cowen links to another negative piece he wrote about Piketty, this time co-authored with Veronique de Rugy.

4/30: Cowen claims that Americans don’t really care about inequality, and that “swing voters” are chiefly worried about inflation.

5/2: Cowen reposts an Aaron Hedlund email that criticizes Piketty heavily, though it seems to mistake Piketty’s “r” for the safe rate of return (rather than the return on capital) in a Solow-type growth model.

5/3: Cowen links to a negative Stefan Homburg review of Piketty.

In addition, during that three-week time frame, Cowen included negative comments about Piketty, and/or links to anti-Piketty pieces, in his daily link list here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, while linking to positive Piketty-related comments here and here, and to a profile of Piketty here.

In short, Tyler Cowen’s portion of Marginal Revolution has become your one-stop-shop for anti-Piketty links and analysis.

This is interesting, because Cowen himself recently wrote a book called Average is Over, which makes predictions somewhat similar to those made by Piketty. From the Wikipedia article about Average is Over:

Cowen forecasts that modern economies are delaminating into two groups: a small minority of highly educated and capable of working collaboratively with automated systems will become a wealthy aristocracy; the vast majority will earn little or nothing, surviving on low-priced goods created by the first group, living in shantytowns working with highly automated production systems.

There is a difference, of course. Piketty forecasts that wealth inequality will go up because of an increase in capital’s share of income, while Cowen forecasts that wealth inequality will go up because of increased inequality in labor income. But the basic future foretold by the two is the same.

So why has Tyler turned into an anti-Piketty crusader? Well, Piketty is a popular topic, and his thesis is encountering a huge amount of skepticism, so there is demand out there for a one-stop anti-Piketty shop.

But it also seems possible that Piketty has deeply worried economists and pundits who thought that concern over inequality was a thing of the past, and that laissez-faire had basically won the battle of ideas. Piketty’s immense popularity might seem, to these folks, to threaten to drag us back into a dark age when radical wealth redistribution was taken seriously, not only by large segments of the public, but by a number of prominent economists as well. Piketty might seem like the vanguard of an onrushing wave of socialist thought that could succeed in turning back the tide of neoliberalism that had been advancing for at least 40 years. So Cowen – and the numerous anti-Piketty writers he links to – may simply be worried about Piketty and what he represents.