Robert M. Solow — Thomas Piketty Is Right— Everything you need to know about 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'

Solow gives a summary explanation of Piketty's economics from the neoclassical POV and endorses its overall correctness, adding that predictions a century in advance are hypothetical but this is a plausible scenario unless conditions change.

In any case, it is pretty clear that the class of supermanagers belongs socially and politically with the rentiers, not with the larger body of salaried and independent professionals and middle managers. So Piketty’s foreboding vision of the twenty-first century remains to be dealt with: slower growth of population and productivity, a rate of return on capital distinctly higher than the growth rate, the wealth-income ratio rising back to nineteenth-century heights, probably a somewhat higher capital share in national income, an increasing dominance of inherited wealth over earned wealth, and a still wider gap between the top incomes and all the others. Maybe a little skepticism is in order. For instance, the historically fairly stable long-run rate of return has been the balanced outcome of a tension between diminishing returns and technological progress; perhaps a slower rate of growth in the future will pull the rate of return down drastically. Perhaps. But suppose that Piketty is on the whole right. What, if anything, is to be done?

The New York Review of Books
Thomas Piketty Is Right— Everything you need to know about 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'
Robert M. Solow |  Institute Professor of Economics emeritus at MIT,  Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987