JW Mason — Piketty and the Money View

I recently picked up Capital and the 21st Century again. And what's striking to me, on revisiting it, is the contrast between the descriptive material and the theory used to make sense of it. 

Piketty’s great accomplishment is the comprehensive data on wealth he has compiled, going back to the 18th century. He deserves nothing but praise for making that data easily accessible. (You could think of his project as an iceberg, with most of the substance hidden below the waterline in the online appendixes.) I have not seen any serious doubts raised about the accuracy of this data; and the descriptive generalizations he draws from it, while not above criticism, are obviously based in a deep study of the concrete historical material. But the connections between this material and the theoretical claims it's mixed in with -- r > g and all that -- are tenuous at best.…

The Slack Wire

Piketty and the Money View
JW Mason | Assistant Professor of Economics, John Jay College, City University of New York