Robert Kuttner se v analizi Pikettyjeve knjige “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” fokusira predvsem na to, česar Piketty v knjigi ne pove. In sicer, da v analizi obdobja, ki je izjema od “naravne tendence” kapitalizma po koncentraciji bogastva (obdobje 1941-1973 v ZDA in 1945-1973 v Evropi), ne gre globlje in ne razloži, katere značilnosti tega obdobja in katere ekonomske politike so privedle do zmanjševanja ekstremne neenakosti. Gre seveda za politike socialne države, politiko visokih davčnih stopenj na najvišje dohodke in veliko moč sindikatov. Nadaljujte z branjem→

The flimflam defense of mainstream economics – Thomas Palley:

The teaching of economics has recently been in the news. One reason is the activities of Manchester University undergraduates who have formed the Post-Crash Economics Society to protest the monopoly of mainstream neoclassical economics in university lecture halls. A second reason is criticism of the neoclassical reasoning in Thomas Piketty’s runaway best seller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”.

This criticism and calls for including heterodox economic theory in the curriculum have prompted a defense of mainstream economics from Princeton University’s Paul Krugman and Oxford University’s Simon Wren-Lewis. Both hail from the mainstream’s liberal wing, which muddies the issue because it is easy to conflate the liberal wing with the critics. In fact, the two are significantly different and their defense of mainstream economics is pure flimflam. Nadaljujte z branjem→

Vsi poznate prigodo o žabi, ki čez vodo na hrbtu nese škorpijona. Škorpijon si ne more kaj, da žabe sredi poti ne ne bi pičil in tako svojih možnosti preživetja zmanjšal na ničlo. Enako je Zoran Janković svoje opcije političnega preživetja zakockal v petek. Pred petkom smo, tudi jaz, močno precenjevali njegov mešetarski racio. Toda ni si mogel pomagati. Škorpijon v njemu, gromozanski egotrip, je bil močnejši od racia. Ne glede na razpad vlade in povratek politične nestabilnosti in ne glede na razpad lastne stranke. Janković je uprizoril umor vlade in svoj samomor (kot je lepo sumariziral Rajko Pirnat).

Toda nacionalna škoda zaradi Jankovićevega “umora s samomorom“ bo relativno majhna, pa še njega se bomo znebili. Nadaljujte z branjem→

Gibanje za prenovo študija ekonomije je sicer hvalevredno. Mainstream ekonomisti so res naredili dokaj slabo nalogo pri napovedi te zadnje velike recesije, kot tudi pri vseh prejšnjih. Ekonomisti smo pač boljši pri razlagi, zakaj se je nekaj zgodilo kot pa pri napovedovanju bodočih dogodkov. Objektivno premalo vemo o kompleksnih relacijah med ekonomskimi subjekti (čeprav si domišljamo, da vemo zelo veliko), uporabljamo v bistvu zelo poenostavljene  teoretske modele za njihovo razumevanje (čeprav so izjemno sofisticirani in kompleksni), hkrati pa ne znamo in ne bomo nikoli mogli rešiti problema negotovosti. Tega razen Boga nihče ne more.
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Simon Wren-Lewis (Oxford) je skeptičen do navdušenosti nad dramatično prenovo študija ekonomije:

At its heart the critique is an appeal for plurality in economics. Rather than pretend that there is one right way to do economics (what the critique calls neoclassical), the critique says we should recognise that there are many alternative perspectives which have significant worth (and which therefore undergraduates should have significant exposure to). These alternative perspectives have become marginalised within economics over the last few decades, and the critique suggests that the financial crisis is evidence that this process should be reversed. This is not an unusual complaint, and I hear it frequently from those working in other social sciences. Nadaljujte z branjem→

Arthur Goldhammer je stopil v bran Pikettyjeve knjige Capital in the Twenty-First Century, ki jo je prevedel iz francoščine v angleščino, pred rokohitrskimi komentatorji, ki knjige sploh niso prebrali:

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been an immense success. As the book’s translator, I’m not surprised it has found an audience. Having spent many months with the text, I know the depth of the research it embodies and the importance of its argument for our current political debate about inequality. Since publication, I have followed the reviews with great interest. Some, like Robert Solow’s, have engaged with the deep structure of the argument, performing a real service to readers who may not be fully prepared to digest the sheer volume of material that Piketty presents in 655 pages replete with graphs, tables, and the necessary minimum of mathematical formulas. Other commentators have preferred to ride their own personal hobby horses rather than engage with the challenge of Piketty. An article that falls into the latter category, by James Poulos, appeared here on The Daily Beast. Nadaljujte z branjem→

Five years ago, a team of researchers from Google announced a remarkable achievement in one of the world’s top scientific journals, Nature. Without needing the results of a single medical check-up, they were nevertheless able to track the spread of influenza across the US. What’s more, they could do it more quickly than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Google’s tracking had only a day’s delay, compared with the week or more it took for the CDC to assemble a picture based on reports from doctors’ surgeries. Google was faster because it was tracking the outbreak by finding a correlation between what people searched for online and whether they had flu symptoms.
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What would a perfect meritocracy look like? Suppose we could all agree on a definition of “merit” as “ability to contribute to the common good”.

Suppose that each individual was born with a certain quantity of “merit”, and that we could observe and measure each individual’s “merit” perfectly. It’s indelibly stamped on their foreheads.

Suppose that we had an economic system where each individual’s income was strictly and perfectly proportional to that individual’s “merit”.

That perfect meritocracy is not a good economic system. Not in my eyes, anyway. Because, for example, it would mean that an individual who was unlucky enough to be born with zero “merit” would get zero income. 

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Najbrž že od Keynesove “Splošne teorije” (1936) nobena knjiga ni tako vznemirila ekonomistov kot letošnja knjiga Thomasa Pikettyja “Capital in the Twenty-First Century“. Piketty knjigo ne samo predstavlja po najbolj uglednih akademskih inštitucijah širom sveta, pač pa je knjiga celo postala top 1 bestseller na Amazonu. Knjiga se res odlično bere, je odlična mešanica 200 let zgodovine ekonomike neenakosti, napisane v “ljudskem jeziku”, vendar podkrepljene z goro podatkov in podrobnih razlag v fusnotah, hkrati pa s številnimi referencami na književnost (na Jane Austen in Honorea Balzaca itd.) in filme. Res odlično branje.

V knjigi si Piketty privošči kolege ekonomiste. Pravi, da ekonomisti “ne vedo nič o ničemer”, da se spogledujejo z otročjo strastjo do matematike, namesto da bi se ukvarjali z vsebinskimi analizami in da je kot profesor na MIT sanjal o tem, da bi bil profesor na EHESS, saj francoske sociologe spoštuje bolj kot kolege ekonomiste, ovenčane z Nobelovo nagrado.

Predrzno, mar ne? Toda Piketty si to lahko privošči. Nadaljujte z branjem→