As yet more reviews pour out on Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the 21st century, and Piketty does video conferences galore online with an assembly of the great and good among mainstream economists, I thought that I might help the followers of my blog by presenting the following reviews that offer the most perceptive analyses that I have seen so far.
http://www.vox.com/2014/4/8/5592198/the-short-guide-to-capital-in-the-21st-century
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/andrews220314.html
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/kapital-for-the-twenty-first-century
and you can find all the data for his tables here:
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fr/capital21c
except the one that really matters, the sources for estimating the r. The search for the r continues (see my previous post, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/04/15/thomas-piketty-and-the-search-for-r/).
One thought: it seems that rising inequality has become both the flagship for opposition to neo-liberal economics and at the same time the explanation for crises under capitalism – although Piketty says nothing about the latter at all in 677 pages.
For my view on inequality and Piketty on inequality, see https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/is-inequality-the-cause-of-capitalist-crises/
ADDENDUM
The fest continued with a hugely laudatory review from Paul Krugman http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/piketty-day-notes/. Krugman makes some good points about how Piketty has exposed the deniers of rising inequality: “But there’s something else: this analysis isn’t just important, it’s beautiful. Piketty gives us something we didn’t know we needed — a sweeping, elegant integration of growth theory, the factor distribution of income, and the personal distribution of income and wealth. He even (in work linked to but not presented in the book) shows how to derive the power laws that we know govern the distribution of income and wealth at the top, and shows how r-g determines the crucial exponents.” It is precisely because Piketty relies on mainstream noeclassical analysis that he falls well short of Marx in explaining the laws of motion of capitalism. My review will explain why.
April 17, 2014 at 6:04 am |
Reblogged this on Alejandro Valle Baeza.
April 19, 2014 at 9:36 pm |
Michael,
In Piketty’s discussion of Marx, he says the following: ‘Like his predecessors, Marx totally neglected the possibility of durable technological progress and steadily increasing productivity, which is a force that can to some extent serve as counterweight to the process of accumulation and concentration of private capital.’
I suspect I am going to have to skip what mainstream economist,-no matter how liberal- have to say about Marx’s critique of capitalism if I am going to be able to read those economist who may make a useful empirical contribution on an important question such as inequality.
The idea that Marx ‘totally ignored the possibility of durable technological progress’ is absurd. Marx’s whole theory of capitalist accumulation was base on the assertion that capitalist would be constantly driven to ‘revolutionize’ the means production and means capitalism would have to expand production (accumulate) to counter the fall in the rate of profit. Technological change is not the ‘counterweight’ to the ‘infinite accumulation’, the concentration and centralization of capital, and inequality, it is the cause of those phenomena.
April 19, 2014 at 10:26 pm |
Hi, Mike. I want to remember you that the profit rate series for Germany 1869-2010 in that paper I sent to you, I mean ALL from the first to the last year, is based on Piketty´s dataset.
So, It is not a matter of data, it´s about, due to ideological issues, not seeing what is in front of your own nose.
Piketty prepared a dataset that allowes anybody to estimate the rate of profit for Germany in a very long period but he didn´t notice because as a mainstream economist he has a “particular” view.
April 20, 2014 at 4:02 pm |
Hi! I knnow this is kinda off topic but I’d figured I’d ask.
Would you be interested in traading links or maybe guest writing a blog post or vice-versa?
My site discusses a lot of the same topics as yours and I believe
we could greatly benefit from each other.
If you are interested feel free to send me an e-mail. I look forward to hearing from you!
Wonderful blog by the way!
April 21, 2014 at 11:34 pm |
the link to his book doesn’t work
April 22, 2014 at 1:55 pm |
Unfortunately, wordpress, my blog host, has blocked access for copyright reasons.
April 22, 2014 at 1:51 pm |
I commented that the index was incomplete. And now I find I can’t access the text using your link.
April 22, 2014 at 1:54 pm |
Unfortunately, wordpress, the host to my blog, have blocked access for copyright reasons.
May 2, 2014 at 4:37 pm |
There’s a libertarian website, http://www.libcom.org, that appears to be willing to host academic texts, such as this one on Marx’s Grundrisse:
http://www.libcom.org/library/capital-organic-unity-role-hegels-science-logic-marxs-grundrisse