WOW!!Dollars and Sense
That one word best sums up my impression of this book so far. Piketty is absolutely charming and, whether or not you agree with everything he has to say, you cannot deny that he has something to say and that this message is important. But, of course, I am slightly biased since the book is about a topic that I have spent a good deal of my professional career studying— the inequality of income and wealth.
Live-Blogging Piketty: Reading the Book (Pt. 1)
Steven Pressman | Professor of Economics and Finance at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, NJ, co-editor of the Review of Political Economy, Associate Editor and Book Review Editor of the Eastern Economic Journal, and member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Basic Income Studies
Another key point, and another key way that the aggregate story differs from the individual story, is that over time capital income grows for some people but not for others– since the distribution of capital income is much more skewed than the distribution of labor or wage income. In the US, the bottom half of the wealth distribution effectively have no wealth. The little bit that they do have is sitting in checking and saving accounts for emergency purposes, and earns very little or nothing. The next 40% in the wealth distribution have small amounts of capital, and most of that capital consists of home ownership. The richest 10% have 80% of national wealth. Even in the top 10%, most wealth sits with the top 1% or really the top .1% or top .2%. There are very few haves and very many have-nots when it comes to wealth.
And this, Piketty thinks, is a matter of concern for many reasons. It hurts economic growth; it counters our notions of fairness; and it he worries about the political influence of those people with so much money. Is democracy at stake? Can capitalism and democracy survive together? These are surely big questions.
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