Argh -- I'll fix. Don't know what I was thinking.
No problem! I did say the comments were for quibbling.
I think earlier in the book Piketty says he would love to have a more comprehensive developing world data set, but there is simply no source in many cases, or the data is notoriously flawed as for China. Given the emphasis he has on empiricism, by contrast with so much of the public face of economics, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Yeah, much of this chapter feels like a run-on op-ed.
4 is fair, but he clearly had some sort of data for India at least, where he talks about cultural responses to taxes, and he makes generalizations about other parts of the world. That just felt weirdly non-specific to me when a little more detail might have made a difference.
Data in developing countries tends to be pretty bad, although I bet Chile would have a good data set, at least in recent decades. I've seen very good salary data out of Chile that came out of whatever their equivalent of a social security system is.
Why has this thread not gone anywhere? My guess, apart from the fact that half the blog was getting drunk in SF last night, is that it's because the chapter is basically disappointing. P. should be setting out his stall for how to save the world, and he signally fails to do so. How do you institute strongly progressive taxation of wealth or income in a world where the people who would be required to pay the highest rate own the government and all the institutions of power outright without (delete as appropriate) i. a damn great nuclear power nominally advocating for an ideology of expropriation; ii. a disaster, natural or man made, so great that the only possible way of overcoming it is fundamental social restructure; iii. pitchforks? Is P. going to tell us? Nothing in the book to this point suggests that he can. He has a lot of ground to make up in the last three chapters.
When Marx wrote the communist manifesto, the French Revolution was in living memory and 1848 was pretty obviously gearing up. The rentier class was seriously frightened, and yet they still did nothing to address inequality (except partially in Prussia) until after the Great War. Today, the rentier class doesn't give a shit and people of goodwill can't even think of anything useful to say about it on a boutique bloguette.
I don't think P. wants to be thought of as a pessimist, but in practice he is. Is that all?
Why has this thread not gone anywhere?
Well, for my part, I'm about a chapter-and-a-half behind. Every time I'm almost caught up, another Monday rolls around an puts me back in the hole.
But what do you expect, exactly? P has pretty clearly laid out that he is a social democrat, not a revolutionary. So it's entirely consistent with that he is advocating a big policy change through reformist parliamentary means.
9: You see, LizardBreath has structured the book group so that those that have a small early advantage can later dominate the discussion through a seemingly organic process of accumulating compound attention span at subtly higher rates.
So it's entirely consistent with that he is advocating a big policy change through reformist parliamentary means.
Yeah, but the only time the Social Democrats ever made any significant headway with their programme was in the aftermath of the mid-twentieth century crisis, and Piketty knows that. In fact he's described it in detail in this very book, and drawn U-shaped graphs to illustrate it. Also he knows that present conditions are politically very different, but he nowhere (yet) explains how those conditions enable the kinds of radical reform he advocates. Piketty lives by the data, and here I think he dies by the data, or lack of it.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favour of steeply progressive taxation, but as Piketty himself pointed out in the previous chapter, the wealthiest individuals seem to have contrived to "disappear" 4-10% of global wealth already, when there isn't the glimmering of a threat of punitive taxes. What does he imagine they would do if such a threat materialised? He should get real.
Speaking of reading the book, I'd like to thank the people who did the summarizing. I learned, despite not trying or expending effort.
The commenters, too, have been very helpful in explaining parts of the book I found difficult.
I was really disappointed with this chapter, obviously, and hope the rest of the book will pick up, though I'm almost through 14 and I'm not fully sure it has. I should probably have more to say about it, but chris y's 12 is pretty much what I'd say anyhow.
12: There's no way to technically demonstrate that a project is politically non viable, though. So where's P going to take it? "In conclusion, after 13 chapters of rigorously prepared empirical analysis, I propose that we burn the whole motherfucking thing down."
I mean the whole chapter reads a bit like a middling Paul Krugman op-ed, sure. But I don't buy that social democrats and their predecessors achieved nothing before 1946. Right now plenty of people are frustrated with the system but there has not been a serious alternative policy framework. This is perhaps one piece of that.
I think the wealth tax policy advocacy is why he wrote the book. But I guess its not as meaty as the technical intro that makes up the rest of it. Who knew readers would find that the exciting part?
Plus skimping on the pop culture references was a mistake. There's a gaping hole in his appreciation of musical theatre, for one. Les Mis, Sweeney Todd and Annie could all get a look in for a jukebox musical Broadway adaption.
If he'd wrote "lets burn the whole motherfucking thing down," all the press coverage would have been about that, and he would have been dismissed as a crank and not sold very many books. Probably more important to get his research out there, so others can use it to advocate for burning the whole motherfucking thing down.
Full disclosure: I haven't read the chapter yet. Nonetheless, with that said, and while I totally get Chris Y's point and argument (as I understand it, we can't get from here to there without political upheaval, and Piketty hasn't explained why or how we'll get that upheaval), why isn't a wealth tax a big new useful policy idea for the left? As far as I'm aware, a substantial progressive wealth tax hasn't been on anyone's main list of ideas for a long time. It's a good idea and a simple one. And it is just realistic enough to attract the social-democratic left in both Europe and the US (not a trivial political population in either hemisphere). If there's enough advocacy for one, who the hell knows what happens in the future.
Historical determinism is the weakest part of Marx, and I'm glad that Piketty doesn't buy into that. Maybe we won't get a wealth tax without political revolution -- that's not impossible! -- but if it becomes a commonly-accepted position that we'll have endless and accelerating equality without one, maybe we will.
I think the wealth tax policy advocacy is why he wrote the book.
Nah.
Bourgeois economists are very fucking strongly motivated by a fear of social disorder, and while it is not front and center, Piketty does imply that social disorder is inevitable* under current mainstream economic models and policy prescriptions, and a lack of urgency where problems are seen.
Piketty's prescription is just one of many possible (if not plausible.) Others, such as a commitment to full employment with a job guarantee, will work as well. They may be even more implausible, but Piketty isn't really doing sociology.
The point, for economists, is the caution and threat.
*The alternative, a stable equilibrium of low growth and feudalistic social structures, is possible, but probably worse than social disorder.
Historical determinism is the weakest part of Marx, and I'm glad that Piketty doesn't buy into that.
Liberals.
Maybe we get a triumvirate of Pres, 70 Dem Senators, 300 Dem Reps in 2016. Maybe in 2020. Maybe, if we don't, we aren't trying hard enough or framing the right way. Let's keep trying the old ways, because the future isn't determined, and we shouldn't be negative and pessimistic.
Or maybe inequality will just reverse itself, for we don't know why. The Future is unknown.
No, Piketty was fighting against liberal bourgeois political economy, by presenting if not a fully determined scenario, at least one requiring serious disruption.
The postwar tax regime was a long time coming. The Tories practically rose up in revolt at the "People's Budget" (1909), and the highest marginal income rate that would have imposed was 7.5% (plus a 20% capital gains tax for land and various other revenues).
Historical determinism is the weakest part of Marx, and I'm glad that Piketty doesn't buy into that.
I recently read Sheri Berman's book The Primacy of Politics, which is about the emergence of social democracy in the late 19th and early 20th century and how it's a genuine alternative to both laissez faire capitalism and to Marxism. It was interesting, especially given the tendency of some leftist commentators to portray social democracy as some kind of tepid halfway Marxism instead of a coherent ideology in its own right.
21 is also true, of course -- the US income tax came in 1913 and you saw top marginal rates north of 50% during WWI. I actually kind of agree with 19, but, Bob.
22 -- just purchased. New reading group!
22,24:Ugh. Shari Berman is a curseword in my vocabulary.
Wallerstein
The strength of this upsurge was frightening to the centrist liberals, and even though the revolutions of 1848 all petered out or were suppressed, liberals were determined to reduce the volubility of what they saw as the too radical, antisystemic demands of the dangerous classes.Their counterefforts came in three forms. First, they put forward over the next half-century a program of "concessions" that they thought would satisfy these demands sufficiently to calm the situation but in such a way that the concessions would not threaten the basic structure of the system. Second, they quite openly replaced the de facto political coalition with the left (which they had pursued in the 1815-48 period, when the left seemed tiny and they thought their primary opponent was the conservatives) with a priority to political coalition on the right, whenever and wherever the left seemed threatening. Third, they developed a discourse that subtly distinguished liberalism from democracy.
The program of concessions -- the suffrage, the beginnings of a welfare state, an integrative racist nationalism --
Now. A movie.
19: Are there any proletarian, aristocratic or ecclesiastical economists of note today?
24: Crooked Timber had a book event on it, oh, six or seven years ago, which I guess must be when it ended up on my interminable "to-read" list.
26: I am not sure how you would characterize what goes on sometimes around Kotsko's Place
In The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt attends to the fact that the sea was always located outside of territorial, juridical regulations, defined as a space that enabled and, indeed, linked the very two "practices" that Kant and Schumpeter saw as distinct and even opposite, namely, we saw, war and commerce. In the naval space ... only war and commerce take place. And all that is solid melts into blood. Both the dissolution of space ... and the liquefaction of money--its circulation as blood money, under the figure of unification in the blood of Christ--partake of the same logic and of the same transformation. 1
(Book event, Blood, Gil Anidjar, Columbia)
Several of the French I read, like Paul Virilio, call themselves Christian anarchists. Distributism is still marginally alive in Catholicism. (Pope Francis Evangelii Gaudium, 2013) There is of course much Islamic economics, and some current Confucianist and Buddhist.