Chris Giles of the Financial Times has charged Thomas Piketty with making Reinhart and Rogoff-like data and methodological errors in his best-selling book on wealth inequality, Capital in the 21st Century.
Read more...How America facilitates a labor and environmental race to the bottom, helping companies based in Europe, Canada, and Mexico.
Read more...Although Piketty’s Capital has garnered a great deal of praise, the criticisms were initially overlooked. They are finally getting the attention they warrant.
Read more...Yves here. A lot of people argue for redistributive taxes, contending that they were very successful in the golden age of the American middle class, from the end of World War II through the Reagan era, in constraining the concentration of income and wealth at the top. However, that tax structure reflected a broad social consensus in favor of fostering prosperity for ordinary Americans, in no small measure to keep Communist impulses at bay.
In Yankee terms, Wray’s argument against using taxes to create a more egalitarian distribution of income is “You can’t get there from here”.
Read more...High levels of un- and underemployment among the young are undermining their mental health. And the damage might be lasting.
Read more...How Democrats are using Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, to bolster the party’s flagging fortunes.
Read more...Most economists deride Thomas Piketty’s recommendation of a wealth tax as the remedy to inequality. It might help if they did some empirical research.
Read more...Why Rhode Island’s maximum wage proposal is a potential big step toward reducing income inequality.
Read more...Yves here. I managed to miss this VoxEU post from last month, and it is still timely. It argues that economists have generally been using the wrong measure of relative dollar strength to assess how the level of the currency played into the loss of manufacturing jobs and insufficient internal demand, now better known as “secular stagnation”.
Read more...How Latvia, a test case for neoliberal colonialism, has proven to be a test case of how finance-serving policies crush labor and enterprise.
Read more...It’s been creepy to see economists and the financial media cheering the re-levering by American households as a sign that they economy is on the mend and consumers are regaining their will to shop. The number of Americans who are tapping into their 401 (k) accounts is proof that the financial health of ordinary Americans is far from robust.
Read more...How Blackstone’ single family home rental business, Invitation Homes, is proving to be more slumlord than landlord.
Read more...One of my pet peeves is the degree to which the notion that corporations exist only to serve the interests of shareholders is accepted as dogma and recited uncritically by the business press
Read more...By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his website. From an interview for Jornal de Negócios by Jorge N. Rodrigues Europe is in the clasp of the deflationary forces that resulted directly from its inane handling of the Eurozone crisis. In this interview, I discuss deflation and […]
Read more...By Peter Van Buren, who blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. He writes at his blog, We Meant Well and has a new book Ghosts of Tom […]
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