scholarly journals Some problems in Piketty: an internal critique

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Alan Tapper
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Wealth Distribution ◽  
National Income ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Income Ratio ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Distribution Trends

Thomas Piketty’s evidence on wealth distribution trends in Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows that – contra his own interpretation – there has been little rise in wealth inequality in Europe and America since the 1970s. This article relates that finding to the other principal trends in Piketty’s analysis: the capital/national income ratio trend, the capital-labor split of total incomes and the income inequality trend. Given that wealth inequality is not rising markedly, what can we deduce about the putative causes that might be operating upstream? Only the capital-labor split looks like a plausible explanation of the wealth inequality trend.

scholarly journals Some problems in Piketty: An internal critique

2017 ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Alan Tapper
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Wealth Distribution ◽  
National Income ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Income Ratio ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Distribution Trends

Thomas Piketty’s evidence on wealth distribution trends in Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows that – contra his own interpretation – there has been little rise in wealth inequality in Europe and America since the 1970s. This article relates that finding to the other principal trends in Piketty’s analysis: the capital/national income ratio trend, the capital-labor split of total incomes and the income inequality trend. Given that wealth inequality is not rising markedly, what can we deduce about the putative causes that might be operating upstream? Only the capital-labor split looks like a plausible explanation of the wealth inequality trend.

scholarly journals Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Piketty
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Wealth Distribution ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
International Tax Competition ◽  
Return On Capital ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

When a lengthy book is widely discussed in academic circles and the popular media, it is probably inevitable that the arguments of the book will be simplified in the telling and retelling. In the case of my book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), a common simplification of the main theme is that because the rate of return on capital r exceeds the growth rate of the economy g, the inequality of wealth is destined to increase indefinitely over time. In my view, the magnitude of the gap between r and g is indeed one of the important forces that can explain historical magnitudes and variations in wealth inequality. However, I do not view r > g as the only or even the primary tool for considering changes in income and wealth in the 20th century, or for forecasting the path of income and wealth inequality in the 21st century. In this essay, I will take up several themes from my book that have perhaps become attenuated or garbled in the ongoing discussions of the book, and will seek to re-explain and re-frame these themes. First, I stress the key role played in my book by the interaction between beliefs systems, institutions, and the dynamics of inequality. Second, I briefly describe my multidimensional approach to the history of capital and inequality. Third, I review the relationship and differing causes between wealth inequality and income inequality. Fourth, I turn to the specific role of r > g in the dynamics of wealth inequality: specifically, a larger r − g gap will amplify the steady-state inequality of a wealth distribution that arises out of a given mixture of shocks. Fifth, I consider some of the scenarios that affect how r − g might evolve in the 21st century, including rising international tax competition, a growth slowdown, and differential access by the wealthy to higher returns on capital. Finally, I seek to clarify what is distinctive in my historical and political economy approach to institutions and inequality dynamics, and the complementarity with other approaches.

scholarly journals Income inequality in the 21st century — A biased summary of Piketty’s capital in the twenty-first century

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (02) ◽  
pp. 1630001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dietrich Stauffer
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
21St Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Income Distributions ◽  
Twenty First Century

Capital usually leads to income and income is more accurately and easily measured. Thus, we summarize income distributions in USA, Germany, etc.

scholarly journals DANTES LITTERÆRE ATMOSFÆROLOGI

1970 ◽  
Vol 41 (116) ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Dennis Meyhoff Brink
Keyword(s):  
Divine Comedy ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The One ◽  
Atmospheric Phenomena ◽  
Lauren Berlant

DANTE’S LITERARY ATMOSPHEROLOGY | The article argues that recent theories on affect and atmosphere by, for instance, Teresa Brennan, Lauren Berlant, and Peter Sloterdijk, can enter into an extraordinarily fruitful interchange with Dante’s Divine Comedy. On the one hand, these theories can direct our attention to the hitherto overlooked atmospheric phenomena that occur ubiquitously in Dante’s Comedy and provide us with concepts that render them legible as products of human emissions. On the other hand, the numerous descriptions of different atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy can contribute to overcoming the lack of linguistic specifications and distinctions which – according to theorists such as Brian Massumi and Peter Sloterdijk – characterizes today’s Western understanding of affective atmospheres and impedes its ongoing theorization. Based on readings of a selected number of atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy, the article argues that the Comedy not only anticipated insights that were not articulated theoretically until the twentieth and twenty-first century, butalso makes up an exceptional encyclopedia of affective atmospheres that have not yet been examined, neither by Dante researchers, nor by theorists of affects and atmospheres. Therefore, both camps have much to learn from Dante’s literary atmospherology, which the article aims to make explicit.

The Imagined War between Secularism and Religion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Juergensmeyer
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Charlie Hebdo

The case of the 2015 attack on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris illustrates the imagined war between secularism and religion that is in the background of many incidents of violence at the turn of the twenty-first century. The Enlightenment idea that there are two different worldviews—two distinctly different spheres of understanding about reality, one of them secular and the other religious—is inherently problematic. This dichotomy creates an arena of discord that is easily exploited by people who feel isolated and marginalized for whatever reason and look for someone to blame and some battle to join. It is a false conflict that extremists on both sides, religious and secular, have exacerbated.

Jan Hasištejnský z Lobkovic: A Fifteenth-Century Czech Traveler to the Mediterranean World

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Lisy-Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Multinational Group ◽  
Central European ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Twenty First Century

In 1493, a Czech nobleman named Jan Hasištejnský z Lobkovic embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. As nearly all Central European pilgrims did, he traveled south through the Tyrol to Venice and joined a large, multinational group there before setting out across the Mediterranean. He remained nearly a month in Venice, meeting prominent political figures, visiting churches and cloisters, and admiring the realism of the painting and sculpture of the Venetian quattrocento. Among all the other marvels of Venice that he describes in his 1505 travelogue is the memory of his day trip to the island of Murano. “In this little town,” he writes, “there are, I think, close to seventy artisans or more, and all are glass makers.” He describes some of the fine works that he saw there, and eagerly adds, “and there is always a great quantity of these various things completed, so that whoever arrives wants to buy something of it.” In this moment, the fifteenth-century tourist is not that far removed from his counterpart in the twenty-first century.

Capital and Wealth in the Twenty-First Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (5) ◽  
pp. 34-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
David N. Weil
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Capital Stock ◽  
Market Value ◽  
Capital Gains ◽  
First Century ◽  
Discount Rates ◽  
Income Ratio ◽  
Last 300 Years ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Thomas Piketty

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty uses the market value of tradable assets to measure both productive capital and wealth. As a measure of wealth this is problematic because it ignores the value of human capital and transfer wealth, which have grown enormously over the last 300 years. Thus the constancy of the wealth/income ratio as portrayed in his data is an illusion. Further, the types of wealth that he does not measure are more equally distributed than tradable assets. The approach also incorrectly identifies capital gains due to reduced discount rates as increases in the capital stock.

scholarly journals Introduction: Postcolonial Reading Publics

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ankhi Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
British India ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Writing Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Given ◽  
Discursive Context

AbstractIn this introduction to the special issue, “Postcolonial Reading Publics,” Mukherjee charts the history of reception of two texts, one a Bengali novel published in British India, the other a Shakespeare adaptation staged in twenty-first-century Kolkata, to examine the fortuitous ways in which reading publics baffle or exceed authorial intention and the given text’s addressable objects. Offering summaries of and continuities among the four essays that constitute the volume, the introduction ends with an analysis of the salience of this discursive context for postcolonial writing, theory, and critique in a world literary frame.

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