Thomas Piketty

Even during the Industrial Revolution as well. And even the idealized vision of the 1950s-60s that is common on the Internet was itself a fantasy for a plurality of Americans until the Great Deal began sinking in. There was a period of slightly more income equality in the 1930s-1960s as Piketty [0] and Zucman [1] show, but this was also at the expense of racial and gender equality. The 1970s was probably the most equal period economically speaking as Zucman showed [1]. [0] - http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014FiguresTables… [1] - https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf

Some billionaires will get touched by this report and will buy a country's worth of forest to become "carbon-neutral" /s Seriously though, its not the absolute value of direct impact that matters here (or even the indirect via their investments) but the multiple negative messages that it sends to the billions of non-billionaires: - that the burden of shifting towards sustainable living will not be felt and shared fairly - that the pinnacle of "worldy success" means also not caring about your impact on the rest While countless studies have looked at corporate and consumer responsibilities at macro level, the role of individual ownership much less so. Mostly the work of Chancel and Piketty http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ChancelPiketty2015.pdf

The median might have done well, but we know for a fact that inequality has risen dramatically in the past 40 years, mostly as an effect of big tax cuts to the wealthy. I'd be interested in seeing an analysis dividing the population in bottom 50, top 10 and middle 40, post-tax. This is the most similar thing I could quickly find http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ideologie/pdf/G11.7.pdf and it seems to show that low-income salaries have largely stagnated for the last 50 years. I don't think it's debatable that places like the Greater Boston area have seen increases in rent that have gone faster than inflation. Combine the two phenomena and you'll see how many people are priced out of large attractive cities.

We just want justice. We need to ask how and why people found themselves in “underrepresented” and “marginalized” categories in first place. Piketty [1], Katznelson [2] (white people are happy to go along with set asides and actions to address class inequity, as long as no Black or Brown folk are involved) might be worth pondering. I hope that everyone is using the opportunity to understand the processes that got us to mass uprisings in most U.S. cities. Funny, I had to have drawn out argument with a white surgeon — day after day a few months back. He didn’t think my mother’s Black life was worth much. [1] http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2020SlidesLongVersion.pdf [2] http://origins.osu.edu/review/when-affirmative-action-was-white-untold…

The central thesis of Piketty's Capital[1] is that inequality is a core feature of capitalism. He backs this with meticulous research[2] into centuries of wealth, income, and tax data. You can argue about what is the "right" level of inequality or with the policy recommendations (that massive government interventionism via a global tax on wealth is required). However, the results and data are solid. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/… [2]: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014FiguresTables…

>"National wealth" is not a vague notion, it's the product of lots of government workers doing a lot of statistics Wow what a convincing justification for the need to equate the measurement of rising capital within national jurisdictions over an analysis that acknowledges the distinction between revenue among fortune 500 shareholders and the average person who is not exposed to such returns. >Income for the bottom 10% is rising. Wealth for the bottom 10% is rising. If income for the bottom majority increases at a rate slower than the income of the top minority then "income" is being concentrated upward. Money determines the distribution of resources, it is not a resource itself. If the concentration of the ability to determine resources is increasingly concentrated upwards then people are getting poorer, regardless if overall production has increased. Your idea that everyone is actually getting richer and upwardly mobile is not reflected in reality. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2015AER.pdf https://wid.world/news-article/whats-new-about-wealth-inequality-in-th… https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10888-010-9155-y >I don't doubt that quality-of-life has declined for a lot of people - but those people are a minority and the data does not support anything else. Most of their pain is almost certainly housing prices, which have been the Great Sin of the Democratic party and notably have very little to do with federal policy. How do skyrocketing…

> the number of individuals who actually pay the estate tax is pretty low A paper published in 2000 "began with an aggregate time-series analysis, and found that summary measures of the estate tax rate structure are generally negatively correlated with the reported net worth of the top estates relative to national wealth," which "is consistent with estate taxation reducing either wealth accumulation or inducing avoidance, or both" [1]. The simplest strategy for avoiding the tax involves gifting. "A couple with two children could divest itself of $1 million over a twenty-five year period simply by taking advantage of the gift tax exclusion" [2]. That grows if the couple contemplates gifts to grandchildren, spouses of children or grandchildren, et cetera. Another involves the "diversion of profitable investment opportunities" to heirs, e.g. by "arranging profitable business deals and then bring[ing] their children in as coinvestors". Lending to children at prevailing rates and guaranteeing their loans are related strategies. More sophisticated techniques include "preferred stock recapitalizations in closely held firms, installment sales, and life insurance." TL; DR The estate tax does little to reduce inequality. On a more meta level, it is interesting to observe that for "several decades, total revenues raised by estate and gift taxes have roughly equalled those raised by excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco" [3]. The estate tax attracts attention because of a fundamental…

Ah, Flexport PR again. The classic work on the history of marine insurance is "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" by Bernstein. This is heavily oriented towards Lloyds of London. It doesn't trace insurance back to the Romans. Plowing through the reference to Temin[1], there's a long discussion of wheat distribution in Rome. Too much regression analysis applied to too little data. Temen then recaps Economics 101 at some length. After jumping around through history, Temin finally focuses on the Roman era. He writes "The Roman “company” was a sophisticated information-sharing institution.", but says little about what a "company" meant. The Romans never invented the concept of the corporation. They got close. They never developed ongoing non-state institutions bigger than a rich individual. There were transient organizations such as venture groups, ("societas") where a group of people bought shares in a plan to send a ship somewhere and profit from the trade. The venture dissolved at the end of the voyage when the parties were paid off. (This is where the term "venture capital" comes from.) This is risk-sharing, but not insurance. There was something called a "societates publicanorum", which was close to a corporation, but more like a limited partnership. But the historical references are thin and questionable.[2] Those may have been special-purpose entities involved with the Roman government for tax farming. The Romans definitely had loans, and to some…

Just a heads up about the book. Its dense, like a Nassim Taleb book dense. it took me over a month to get through it so if you choose to read it, its not a weekend read. If you want the highlights, this economist article does as decent a job of summarizing 400+ pages as you can hope for in 4 paragraphs. http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-ex… As for the content, the main take away, is his r > g argument which is illustrated by the following chart: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/pdf/F10.9.pdf One of his other big ideas Bill hits on is his tax on captial. Bill proposes a tax on consumption instead. > But rather than move to a progressive tax on capital, as Piketty would like, I think we’d be best off with a progressive tax on consumption. Maybe not surprisingly since I work in finance, most of my colleges are on Bill's side and not Piketty's here. To be fair to Piketty, he chose a tax on capital because he's coming from a perspective of how do we prevent the accumulation of wealth over generations, where as Bill is coming at it from how do we raise enough taxes to pay for the the services the government needs to provide. I would recommend reading this book, its clearly a labor of love for him and he's spent the time to back it up with data, just don't expect to agree with all his conclusions.

In discussions like this the numbers matter. To quote Heinlein, “What are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"(1) Piketty's book suffers from poor numbers and bad maths, making his conclusions useless. If he is right, he needs to support it with sound numbers. Chris Giles in The Financial Times found his numbers wanting. (2) In Piketty's response(3), he downplays the importance of the questions, focusing on the European numbers. FOr5 the US numbers, he recommends substituting the numbers of Emmanuel Saez (Berkeley) and Gabriel Zucman.(4) But those numbers are based on reported capital gains taxes without adjusting for major changes in the law and changes in the definition of capital gains. I don't know if Piketty is right or wrong, but I know his Excel spreadsheets are not adequate evidence. I'd like him to be right; I think wealth disparity in the USA since 1980 is more due to legal maneuvering than merit. I also know my thinking it isn't evidence. 1) http://www.timeenoughforlove.org/Heinlein.htm 2) http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/media/FT23052014c.pdf 3) http://www.voxeu.org/article/factual-response-ft-s-fact-checking 4) http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014Slides.pdf

This NYTimes article is behind a paywall. When I click on it, I get shaken down for money, with the following message: "Thank you for visiting NYTimes.com We hope you’ve enjoyed your 10 free articles this month." Then it tells me I need to pay between $3.75 and $8.75 per week to continue. Since I'm in the bottom 20%, I can't afford this stomm! If I want to read this article, educate myself about income inequality, and become a more informed voter, then I need sacrifice something, like food. But if I were in the top 1%, I wouldn't need to think twice about subscribing. The first sentence of this op-ed is obscured but readable. I can see its about the work of a french academic named Thomas Picketty, whose website is at http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fr/ The facts published on his site don't seem controversial. His papers seem well researched and reasoned, albeit very narrowly focused, highly repetitious, and not particularly enlightening or useful. I did not see any kind of "demonization" of the rich in his work. I routinely see Fox news pundits demonize the poor, angry for example that 50 million Americans get $80 billion in Food Stamps per year, while never mentioning that Ben Bernake's QE3 prints $85 billion per month for the rich. Fed money printing seems to be the main cause of income inequality. And anyone who wants to reverse the growing income inequality should make abolishing the Fed their #1 priority.

I don't think that Piketty himself would say his views are well-represented by either party; but he does posit an ideological divide: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2018.pdf I was being deliberately facetious, I suppose, but because of our campaign finance problems any policy of major economic import has coordinated bipartisan pressure.

Economics is political, so it should come as no surprise that economists have political opinions about what should be done at the level of the economy. Or is only that which is vaguely left-wing that is "political" or "ideological", and mainstream neoliberal politics and economics are simply "objective" and "technocratic"? I think it's important to separate the empirical and analytic part, to which you can apply objective criticisms, to the political part, with which you can agree or not but which should have no bearing on the former part. Anyway if you want to be honest you can also link to Piketty's rebuttal to the criticism, e.g. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014TechnicalAppe…

I would not cite Piketty, Zucman or Saez who are the hardest fighters of the wealth inequality thesis as they usually mix political advocacy and have been criticized in their methodology and have been under a fair share of controversies. Btw I have grouped them because this is how they are usually treated, both by the fact they are all French economists but also on the fact they all push for the same inequality thesis 1: https://www.davidsplinter.com/AutenSplinter-2024-ReplyToPSZ.pdf 2: https://philmagness.com/2014/12/an-empirical-critique-of-thomas-pikett… 3: https://qz.com/1725562/elizabeth-warrens-economic-advisers-are-in-a-co… EDIT: Here is the rebuttal for 2 by Piketty himself: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014TechnicalAppe… courtesy of andrepd

Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP historically has floated around 18% https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/tax-revenue--of-gd… Here's the income percentage held by the top 1% 1950-2010 http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014FiguresTables… While its true that its higher now than it was the 1950s-1980s, its an increase of about 15%. It if was the case that the very high marginal rates were actually being paid, you would expect the percentage of income held by the top 1% to be much higher. Here's another source with more direct comparison - how much their income they actually paid in tax https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not…

Mr. Paine answers all your concerns in his wonderfully well thought-out pamphlet. If more people read it, the world would be a better place. Here's the full text: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Paine1795.pdf

After a certain level of wealth, most assets are financial and liquid cash becomes a vanishingly small part of total wealth. I've absolutely 0 info on cash distribution across the richest people, but this figure shows average asset across all people (in France). It still can be helpful as a way to "visualize" asset type property distribution across the spectrum. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ideology/pdf/F11.17.pdf

As I suspected, it counts dollars. Moreover, it attributes any subsequent income for somebody that received an inheritance as "inherited" (up to certain exponential boundary). I.e. if you received an inheritance of $1000, spent it, and in 30 years since you became a millionaire, then the amount of wealth you have up to what you could have if you invested $1000 at certain rate would be still counted as "inherited". I am very far from being qualified to understand the dense math in the underlying article (http://www.piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2017.pdf) but with such assumption, I imagine we could arrive at 60%. But it doesn't mean what you think it means.

Piketty has the goods (on page 19), and adjusted for inflation they were stable: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Schularicketal2014.pdf You can argue about his conclusions, but you cannot argue with data. People today have no idea about the percentage of income that went into housing back then. It was really small! In my corner of the nation (rural), fixer-uppers that no bank will give you a mortgage on are going for 150 kUSD and more! That's > 125 USD/ft^2! It's madness!

I do plan to go back farther in time; I think it will also be interesting. The claim about RCA seems unlikely. Radio Corporation of America stock grew very fast through the 1920s, peaking in September 1929 before the crash. However, even at the very end, it doesn't seem to even have been top 10 among industrials in the S&P index: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/McGrattanPrescott2001.pdf#page=35 Instead, on that list we have companies like General Motors, General Electric, and Standard Oil of New Jersey that were still big in 1960 (and as mentioned above, some still so in the last decade).

Piketty has a book called Capital in the 21st Century, which makes similar statements and has pointers to his reference material here: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 Also, it's a good book.

I don't know about the Forbes list, but it seems the share of wealth being inherited is pretty high & increasing at a good clip: On the Share of Inheritance in Aggregate Wealth: Europe and the USA, 1900–2010 http://www.piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2017.pdf

'Per Thomas Piketty roughly 60% of America's wealth is inherited, meaning most of America's riches are owned by people who didn't work for them.' https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1092536441819648000 http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2015.pdf

[2016] , discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13555925 Actual paper: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/BaroneMocetti2016.pdf

No, no. I don't mean that he forces the interpretation of data. That's par for the course. He makes numerous data gathering errors that all seem to make his conclusion stronger. Example: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/media/FT23052014c.pdf

> It seems that the graphs in this tweet are another confirmation of Piketty's observation. As far as I can tell, the graph is based on an earlier graph from Pikettys paper: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2015.pdf Compare to Figure 5

This is exemplary of the type of sway which massively concentrated enterprises can have over governments, and will continue to have as more and more companies engage in M&A: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Brennan2016.pdf Replace HRC with Jeff Bezos and "algorithm" with "consumer": https://busy.org/life/@blakemiles84/clinton-book-excerptish-the-cattle… At some point we're going to have to Bust the Trusts.

Here you go: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Clausing2012.pdf "At the end of the searching, I find some evidence that suggests that corporate taxation may lower wages, but the preponderance of evidence does not suggest any wage effects from corporate taxation."

Seriously, Naill Ferguson is a poor historian. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/before-european-hegemony-97801… also http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Pomeranz2000.pdf

Have you checked here? http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 Not sure if that gets you what you are looking for.