Dan Kervick — Cooper on r > g and the Return to Capital

George Cooper continues to have doubts about Thomas Piketty’s famous inequality r > g, which says that the rate of return to capital is greater than the rate of growth of national income. Cooper raises those doubts in connection with a recent post of mine in which I attempted to dispel some of the confusion surrounding Piketty’s inequality by making it clear that the rate of return to capital is not any kind of growth rate. But Cooper doesn’t raise any serious objections to Piketty’s inequality, at least so far as I can tell. In fact, Piketty’s inequality ought to be regarded as among the least controversial points Piketty makes inCapital in the Twenty-First Century.

The thought experiment I introduced was designed to clarify certain fundamental points about the conceptual relationship between wealth, income, the rates at which wealth and income grow, and the rate at which the ownership of capital is rewarded by income. Without going back over the whole thought experiment, let me summarize what I take to be the essential takeaway points:

Rugged Egalitarianism
Cooper on r > g and the Return to Capital
Dan Kervick