Capital & Interest

Archive for Capital & Interest

Reader Survey

There are no tricks here, I genuinely want to know: What do you teeming masses think Tyler, DeLong, and Krugman mean when they all refer to the “positive marginal product of capital” (in reference to possibly negative natural rates of interest)? For example, here’s DeLong, who in turn link to Tyler. I’m going to write […]

Phil Magness on the Tom Woods Show Discussing Our Piketty Paper

Tom does a good job of pulling out the news you can use. Here are the show notes for this episode, and here is the link to get the paper. The neat thing about this episode is even I learned something: At the end Tom asks Phil how he got interested in this. Phil answers […]

Ultra Magness and Optimus Murphy Fight Piketty

Phil Magness (GMU historian) and I have a working paper up, critiquing the empirical contribution of Thomas Piketty’s bestseller. If you religiously follow this blog, the stuff I added to the paper won’t be new, but when you combine it with what Phil dug up, I think it’s pretty compelling. If you have serious questions […]

Accounting for Capital and Income

In my latest EconLib article, I first walk through the basics of income and capital accounting. (Even if you think this is standard stuff, you might want to skim it because there are some subtleties.) Then I give three examples of how people often get mixed up about what the empirical evidence means. In particular, […]

Do “Productivity” and Lagging Wage Growth Disprove Marginal Productivity Theory?

In response to my book review of Piketty, where I claimed in my cutesy “Jetsons” example that a slow-down in capital accumulation would reduce the growth in workers’ real incomes, people have been throwing BLS charts in my face. To take an example from today, on Twitter: @libertarianJ @PorphyConob @BobMurphyEcon "more physically productive per hour, […]

Full Review of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century

Carlos Lara and I put out a monthly financial magazine, the Lara-Murphy Report. In May I had a full-length review of Piketty. The best way I could think to showcase it here, was to do screen shots of the pages. So here ya go:

Yawn Two More Experts on Growth and Inequality Say Piketty Is Totally Wrong

Steve Landsburg links to this Note by Krussell and Smith on Piketty. These guys are experts in this field; for example here’s one of their joint papers on wealth and income inequality in the JPE. Short version of their current Note: Like Larry Summers, they claim that once you account for depreciation, Piketty’s whole case […]

BTW, That New and Allegedly Definitive Saez-Zucman Result IS A POWERPOINT SHOW

Phil Magness tipped me off to this with his innocent Facebook query, wherein he politely asked: Can anyone find an actual paper that explains how Saez-Zucman (2014) gets their results, which–we are assured by Piketty and by Krugman, plus a host of lesser fans–demonstrate quite definitively that Piketty gets the basic story right in his […]