The most widely bought book that is seldom read through.
Reviews of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century continue to roll out, many by professional economists. Yet I continue to be frustrated by the fact that almost none of the economists’ reactions to Piketty that I have read display any close familiarity with chapters 7 through 12 of the book, where all of the actual analysis of the structure of inequality is contained. Most of these reviews seem to go no further than Chapter 6, with Piketty’s now-famous inequality r > g then tossed into the salad for good measure, on the basis of which the reviewer then attributes to Piketty large claims about the dynamics of inequality based entirely on r > g and the contents of those introductory chapters. But everything in Chapters 1 through 6 is prefatory to the analysis of the structure and dynamics of inequality that follows.
Rugged Egalitarianism
Emergency: The World Needs Much Better Piketty Reviews!
Dan Kervick
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