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Archive of posts published in the tag: Thomas Piketty

The Great Equalizer Surprise

from The Wall Street Journal by Gregory Clark
“As a bizarre consequence of this pattern, African-Americans, who have low levels of net worth on average, are the social group for which inherited wealth represents the largest share of their net worth. Another odd implication is that inheritances tend to make overall wealth-holding more equal. Were inherited wealth to be completely abolished, the wealth of the poor would decline more than that of the rich. Inherited wealth is the great equalizer. Who knew?”

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Clarifying Capitalism

From Andy Kessler in The Wall Street Journal, Quit Modifying Capitalism (paywall) State Sponsored Capitalism (China) Casino Capitalism (Bernie Sanders) Sustainable Capitalism (Al Gore) Patrimonial Capitalism (Piketty) Surveillance Capitalism ( new one for me-  Ivy League origin) Popular Capitalism Conscious Capitalism (John

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Piketty Neglects After Tax Resources

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in The Twenty First Century, has spawned a cottage industry of dissent.  Piketty uses masses of data to illuminate a growth in inequality, that he surmises is an inevitable result of capitalism and can only be resolved

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Piketty Ignores Changes in the Tax Rules

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in The Twenty First Century, has spawned a cottage industry of dissent.  Piketty uses masses of data to illuminate a growth in inequality, that he surmises is an inevitable result of capitalism and can only be resolved

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Piketty’s Serious Flaws

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in The Twenty First Century, has spawned a cottage industry of dissent.  Piketty uses masses of data to illuminate a growth in inequality, that he surmises is an inevitable result of capitalism and can only be resolved

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What is Wealth?

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in The Twenty First Century, has spawned a cottage industry of dissent.  Piketty uses masses of data to illuminate a growth in inequality, that he surmises is an inevitable result of capitalism and can only be resolved

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We Have the Data

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in The Twenty First Century, has spawned a cottage industry of dissent.  Piketty uses masses of data to illuminate a growth in inequality, that he surmises is an inevitable result of capitalism and can only be resolved

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Obscuring Intellectual Failure

Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek quotes from Deirdre McCloskey’s outstanding Bourgeois Equality in his Bonus Quotation of the Day: Members of the left clerisy, such as Tony Judt or Paul Krugman or Thomas Piketty, who are quite sure that they

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Interest Rates and Piketty’s Data

from Project Syndicate,  The Invention of Inequality by Antonio Foglia Piketty observes a rising wealth-to-income ratio from 1970 to 2010 – a period divided by a significant change in the monetary environment. From 1970 to 1980, the Western economies experienced

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The Great Enrichment

from the Cato Policy Report, Deirdre McCloskey writes How Piketty Misses the Point: What caused the Great Enrichment? It cannot be explained by the accumulation of capital, as the very name “capitalism” implies. Our riches were not made by piling

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Making Piketty Irrelevant

From Cafe Hayek, Uber vs Piketty by Don Boudreaux: Thomas Piketty famously argues that owners of capital grab ever-larger shares of wealth, and that the single best ‘solution’ to this alleged problem is a global tax on wealth and high

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Voodoo Inequality

from The Wall Street Journal, The Mumbo-Jumbo of ‘Middle-Class Economics’ by Alan Reynolds excerpts: Amazingly, these same statistics also show there has been no increase for the “bottom” 90% since 1968. Measured in 2013 dollars, average income of the bottom 90%

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Untouched by Envy

Don Boudreaux reviews Edmund Phelps’s “Mass Flourishing” at Cafe Hayek Excerpts: Piketty tells of a one-dimensional, dreary, and mechanical world in which wealth grows independently of human volition and where each person is fixated on the amount of money in

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Trickle Down Behaviorism

University of Chicago economist John Cochrane has written one of the most unique and insightful perspectives on inequality in his blog, The Grumpy Economist.  Read Why and how we care about inequality in its entirety.  It is about 6 pages long. excerpts:

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Favorite Writers of 2014

As a blogger with a day job, I often find myself curating other posts- selecting and  commenting.  Over the years I have found a few writers that I frequently return to. My Favorite writers for 2014: 1. Kevin Williamson- National

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The Gini Distortion

In The Wall Street Journal Phil Gramm and Michael Solon write How to Distort Income Inequality- The Piketty-Saez data ignore changes in tax law and fail to count noncash compensation and Social Security benefits. excerpt: An equally extraordinary distortion in the

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Inequality and The Tax Reform of 1986

In The Wall Street Journal Phil Gramm and Michael Solon write How to Distort Income Inequality- The Piketty-Saez data ignore changes in tax law and fail to count noncash compensation and Social Security benefits. excerpt: Messrs. Piketty and Saez also did

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Inequality and The Missing Data

In The Wall Street Journal Phil Gramm and Michael Solon write How to Distort Income Inequality- The Piketty-Saez data ignore changes in tax law and fail to count noncash compensation and Social Security benefits. excerpt: The chosen starting point for

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Piketty’s Absence of Historical Context

Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: Of course, America has poor people, though it has relatively few who go hungry because capitalism has failed them. The average poor person in America, in

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Relativity of Wealth

Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: Well, no. In fact, the Billy Zane character was an entirely fictional creation of James Cameron’s imagination (and the proper spelling of his name is Hockley;

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