Skip to main content

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

I reserve the right to be wrong...



Thomas Piketty caused quite a stir with the publication of his tome 'Capital in the 21st Century'. Chris Giles, writing in the Financial Times, finds fault with the data used by Piketty to proclaim a return to 1910 levels of income inequality. What kind of errors? .

Robert P. Murphy goes over exactly what's going on and shows the feebleness of the data that have come out of Piketty's analysis.

This is on top of the easy answer we Austrians had even back when we believed the data themselves. If inequality was as historically high as claimed then it was because of inflation brought on by central banks printing money and giving it to those financiers close to them. With government, proximity is everything.

So I'm in no hurry to pooh-pooh Piketty's data. It simply turned out to be wrong. As for what's right, I'll side with Bob Murphy again and wait and see. Certainly no grand challenge to freedom has been made here. Sorry Thomas.



Again, I reserve the right to be wrong...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Zeitardation

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...

RIP Macroeconomics

This post has no intellectual rigour, but I'm posting it anyway, because neither does macroeconomics. Most economists love spending all day doing macro, preferring it to the prosaic small-scale world of microeconomics. This is where the brazen hypocrisy of many heterodox folks will make itself known, as they decry the fallacies of composition rife within neoclassical economics and then go away and commit the same daft mistakes themselves (sometimes quite well disguised) using aggregates of demand, supply, and labour time. Further friction for modern economists can be had when contending with the tripartite division of economics into land, labour, capital, and the action of classes (the 'class' praxis) of the owners of those three economic resources. So, to all of macroecon... you're drunk. Go home and rethink your life.* * Yes I know I just committed a fallacy of reification.

Doomer Eternal?

Youtuber Sarah Z talks about the Doomers, those who despair of the world. I am not trying to criticize Sarah Z's take since it is remarkably similar to mine, but I will dump my thoughts below anyway. [ 1 ] ~ ~ ~ The media has broadcast nothing but wall-to-wall doom-and-gloom for a-hundred years and then some. If things feel more hopeless now it's because so much of that media is social media generated by us, so that we are sharing the doom-and-gloom meme with each other AS WELL AS getting it from the mainstream media. Human life is in less peril than ever before (barring the possibility of WW3 between China & Russia v. NATO & SEATO) as economic development makes comfortable civilized living more and more accessible to more and more people every year, and the carbon intensity of every unit of GDP is continually declining. CO2 emissions could plausibly lead to specific calamities with identifiable bodycounts in the near future, and preventing CO2 emissions by the one plau...