Until recently, however, there was one major group that hadn’t visibly weighed in on Piketty’s brilliant and disturbing book, and that is the neoliberal policy elites that dominate the Democratic Party establishment.
Among the most important members of the neoliberal mafia are former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Jason Furman, who is currently the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. In the past week, both Furman and Summers have delivered substantive critiques of the book.Institutional power.
Like it or not, what people like Furman and Summers think matters. This pair and their cohort steer American economic policy today, they controlled it the last Democratic administration, and unfortunately, Hillary Clinton or whomever the next Democratic president ends up being will likely put the same people in the driver’s seat once again. To the extent that anything substantial gets done to address economic inequality in this country in the near future, it will be because people like Larry Summers and Jason Furman—or, to be more precise, the economic interests they so faithfully serve—allow it to happen.
The Baffler
What Piketty’s Neoliberal Critics Get Wrong [2]
Kathleen Geier
1 comment:
So Obama's successor, be it Hilary or whoever, will position themselves between Summers(cough) on the left) and someone like this Furman, and think themselves to we wise pragmatists, just like O thinks himself to be.
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