Piketty - Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Tags: books, finance, economics

Introduction

• Frames the discussion around wealth issues
• Attempts to pull together data
  • world top incomes database

History

• Talks about malthus and his consideration of too many peasants
• arthur young
• david ricardo
• marx and the prediction of industrial aggregate wealth
• simon kuznets

Conclusions

• Piketty states that inequality is not necessarily an unstable state

  • path dependency exists, inequality can reduce over time or increase over time

• also states that modern american economists are too infatuated with mathematics and physics

  Hence they must set aside their concept for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything