David Glasner — Thomas Piketty and Joseph Schumpeter (and Gerard Debreu)

Everybody else seems to have an opinion about Thomas Piketty, so why not me? As if the last two months of Piketty-mania (reminiscent, to those of a certain age, of an earlier invasion of American shores, exactly 50 years ago, by four European rock-stars) were not enough, there has been a renewed flurry of interest this week about Piketty’s blockbuster book triggered by Chris Giles’s recent criticism in the Financial Times of Piketty’s use of income data, which mainly goes to show that, love him or hate him, people cannot get enough of Professor Piketty. Now I will admit upfront that I have not read Piketty’s book, and from my superficial perusal of the recent criticisms, they seem less problematic than the missteps of Reinhart and Rogoff in claiming that, beyond a critical 90% ratio of national debt to national income, the burden of national debt begins to significantly depress economic growth. But in any event, my comments in this post are directed at Piketty’s conceptual approach, not on his use of the data in his empirical work. In fact, I think that Larry Summers in his superficially laudatory, but substantively critical, review has already made most of the essential points about Piketty’s book. But I think that Summers left out a couple of important issues – issues touched upon usefully by George Cooper in a recent blog post about Piketty — which bear further emphasis.

So he is commenting on a work based only on reviews?

Uneasy Money
Thomas Piketty and Joseph Schumpeter (and Gerard Debreu)
David Glasner | economist at the Federal Trade Commission