Hey, I also posted an article on Pikkety today: http://hubski.com/pub?id=147291 Also, I read an article on De Correspondent (Dutch journalistic site) about Pikkety a month ago and it featured this telling graph: Red is return on capital, blue is the growth of the world economy. Notice the dip right after WW2, when lots of capital was destroyed or lost, and for the first time, capital (which Pikkety equals to wealth) dipped below the global economic growth. During that time of unusal economic equality, massive growth took place. One of his arguments is that a lot of our economic theories are based in that environment, which is historically an exception. Another argument is (I think) that equality has only decreased in the last decades and that it will continue to do so. Interesting stuff nonetheless. Anyone here has read / will read his book? kleinbl00?
I've still got a copy of Reinhart & Rogoff staring resentfully at me from the bookshelf, where I put it when I had every intention of reading it and where it stayed after they shit the bed. As such, I'm a little gunshy of radical economics texts, particularly those described as "important" and "dry." To me, though, it doesn't seem that what he's saying is that controversial. I mean, even Keynes argued that unregulated capitalism becomes feudalism. The problem we've got as capitalists is that the economists - and the people who listen to economists - tend to be the ones who benefit the most from feudalism. Meanwhile, socialism ends up subject to the exact same cronyism as capitalism so the effects of socialism end up masked. People forget that, idologically, Obama is somewhere to the right of Nixon. We've been drifting further and further towards oligarchy and authoritarian rule since Eisenhower.