Here’s a guy who was a natural for cranking out theoretical models in economics. His career was jet-propelled, and at an age when most econ grad students are sweating out their prelims he was already on the tenure track at MIT. He could spend the rest of his life among the elite of the elite, playing cleverly with algebraic puzzles for a living. Instead, he quit, returned to France, and spent the next decade digging through archives, laboriously piecing together datasets on income and wealth distribution.Piketty with everything to look forward to, essentially dropped out and pursued what he thought was actually important with no assurance of success. As Barkley Rosser points out in a comment, so did Karl Marx. Surely the influence of Marx exceeded his wildest dreams, even though he did not live to see it. Well, have to wait to find out what Piketty's influence on economics, politics and society will be.
EconoSpeak
Piketty’s Unlikely Path
Peter Dorman
Peter Dorman
"Piketty with everything to look forward to, essentially dropped out"
ReplyDeleteisn't he a professor at the Paris School of Economics?
Life is pretty good for the French upper middle class you know.
As he said in the Chronicle review, he was a hot-shot mathematician whiz kid with a solid career at MIT and he walked away from it when he realized that he was great at solving theorems but didn't know anything about economics. I call that dropping out.
ReplyDeleteDropping out doesn’t mean giving up. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to pursue Microsoft. Worked out pretty well for him. Lot of other tech entrepreneurs have done the same.
We just here about the one that made it subsequently. I lot risk all and don't.
Whether it was heroic or not, he deserves a lot of credit for spending years doing painstaking empirical research rather than just spinning a priori models out of his own mind.
ReplyDeleteI walked out on my thesis advisor - who later joined the ranks of the "annointed ones" for what I considered to be intellectual dishonesty. That decision did impact my future career - whether for the better or the worse, we don't know - it was just an alternate possible future. Picketty did not risk as much, for he was already fairly well established, and had a position in France.
ReplyDeleteI was first exposed to Saez and Picketty's work in 2003-2004 time frame, when I first started looking at inequality in the US, when I was noticing the loss of well paying jobs at the lower end, and a shrinking upper end. That work, along with the work of William Domhoff a sociologist at UC Santa Cruz - Power in America were very influential to form my views on poverty and inequality.