A good discussion of why the weak economic recovery has only helped those at the very top, and why economists who know better continue to enable that.
Read more...The Piketty postulate that r > g, meaning the return on wealth exceeds overall economic growth, is simply not a universal truth. This post provides a tidy and accessible debunking.
Read more...Transfers don’t matter for investment, and most savings are transfers. Thus Piketty’s wealth tax won’t hurt investment.
Read more...The US press and newscasts make it appear that Europeans have voted against poor immigrants and foreigners. What they voted against was the super-rich, the oligarchy.
Read more...How the Vietnam War helped usher in neoliberalism, financialization of the economy, and the use of military spending as stealth stimulus.
Read more...Were the results of the European elections a tremor or an earthquake?
Read more...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”.
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