Dan Kervick — The Growth of Wealth and the Rate of Return on Capital

Justin Wolfers has posted some slides purporting to deal with the arguments of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Unfortunately, the discussion outlined in Wolfers’s slides suggests that while he has read some of the more prominent recent responses to Piketty – including Lawrence Summers’sreview of Piketty in Democracy: A Journal; a recent paper by Per Krussel and Tony Smith on Piketty’s second fundamental law of capitalism; and some posted comments on Piketty by Debraj Ray – he doesn’t seem to have read much of Piketty himself. I say this because Wolfers repeats some of the same interpretive errors that appear in those other works, despite the fact that the errors are quite easy to avoid, and even obvious, to anyone who has worked directly with Piketty’s text.

Rugged Egalitarianism
The Growth of Wealth and the Rate of Return on Capital
Dan Kervick