[Peace-discuss] The Leveller

[Brussel, Morton K]

The New Yorker piece goes on to nitpick Piketty’s formulation… as one might expect.

> On Mar 6, 2020, at 11:23 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> Thomas Piketty Goes Global
> Now that the celebrity economist’s boldest ideas have been adopted by mainstream politicians, he has an even more provocative vision for transcending capitalism and overcoming our “inequality regime.”
> By Idrees Kahloon  [ U.S. policy correspondent for The Economist ]
> New Yorker   March 9, 2020  [Blindfolded Donald Trump on the cover, pages 75-78]  
> 
> Speaking in 1918, with Europe ravaged by the horrors of modern warfare and Russia in the hands of the Bolsheviks, Irving Fisher warned his colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association of “a great peril.” That peril, which risked “perverting the democracy for which we have just been fighting,” was extreme inequality. “We may be sure that there will be a bitter struggle over the distribution of wealth,” Fisher, perhaps the most celebrated economist of his day, maintained. More than a century later—at another annual meeting of the American Economic Association—the spectre once more loomed over the discipline. “American capitalism and democracy are not working for people without a college degree,” Anne Case, an economist at Princeton, declared in January, as she flipped through slides in a large, windowless conference room. On a screen, charts showed breathtaking increases in suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholism among less-educated whites over the past two decades. These “deaths of despair,” as she and her husband-collaborator, Angus Deaton, call them, originated in the deep unfairness of American society. When Fisher issued his warning, the richest ten per cent of Americans were taking home forty-one per cent of all domestic income. Today, they take forty-eight per cent.
> 
> If inequality has become the subject of intense public attention, a good deal of the credit goes to the French economist Thomas Piketty. In 2014, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” a dense tome published in English by an academic press, became an unlikely global best-seller; there are more than two million copies in print. Previously, Piketty, who teaches at the Paris School of Economics, had been an academic luminary but not a public one; the focus of his research, inequality, had long been a niche subject. Timing and talent catapulted him to fame. His book perfectly fit the post-Occupy Wall Street ethos, providing empirical rigor for the upswell in anger. The wounds of the Great Recession had hardly scabbed over; disillusionment with the rich and powerful verged on Jacobinism. The moment was ripe for a grand, iconoclastic theory, and that’s exactly what Piketty provided, with detailed figures and lucid prose. In earlier work, he and a frequent collaborator, the economist Emmanuel Saez, had the innovative idea of framing inequality in terms of the top one per cent’s share versus everyone else’s—eschewing the discipline’s usual formula of Gini coefficients, which are meaningless to the masses, and identifying a clear, common enemy. The problem was inherent in capitalism itself. Over the past century, the rate of return on capital (r) and existing wealth, owned disproportionately by the rich, had exceeded the rate of growth in the economy (g) as a whole. That had created a chasm of inequality comparable to what existed during the Gilded Age, before the gilding was removed by two cataclysmic world wars and the Great Depression. You could distill the core of Piketty’s theory down to three characters (r > g) and emblazon the formula on a T-shirt—something that nerdier subgroups of the population actually did.   
>   . . .   [ continues ]
> 
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