04
Jun
2014
More Piketty Stuff
==> Piketty only regrets not jacking those trend lines up even more, because of the blockbuster March 2014 PowerPoint.
==> Scott Winship clarifies just how ambiguous the data really are, notwithstanding Krugman’s recent “denier” finger-wagging.
==> Speaking of which, in that article Krugman linked to a Kopczuk paper to bolster Krugman’s claims that everybody knows there’s little mobility among the wealthiest. Awkwardly, Kopczuk on Twitter says the paper didn’t show that, and notes the irony of Krugman calling his opponents intellectually dishonest. But it’s not like Krugman’s getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to stay on top of the inequality literature…
At this point, we need a new word or phrase to describe the phenomena of people who still give Paul Krugman outsized influence. Maybe Krugmanitive dissonance.
“Piketty only regrets not jacking those trend lines up even more”
Reminds me of master art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi. Beltracchi would still be in business today if it wasn’t for the fact that someone chose to do a chemical analysis of the paint in one of his forged works. Once caught, when he was asked by a reporter if he thought he did anything wrong he said “Yes, I used the wrong titanium white.”
(I know – probably an unfair comparison since even major critics of Piketty say he may well turn out to be correct regarding growth of wealth inequality On the other hand Beltracchi went to jail for his deception and the amount of money involved in Beltracchi’s case was microscopic compared with the kind of transfers of cash Piketty wants to bring about. )
At least Marx came up with a theory, de novo. Who knows what he might change, alter, or even scrap if he could have seen history’s unfolding after he laid his pen to rest for the last time. The man was born in1818, for crying out loud.
As far as I can make out, Piketty simply tacks on a little populism to the Keynsian brew. There’s nothing new that he has captured from his own brain, right? It sounds like he is stoking envy — nothing less and nothing more.