Eric A. Posner and Glen Weyl — Thomas Piketty Is Wrong: America Will Never Look Like a Jane Austen Novel

Piketty’s conjecture that we will reach the same or worse levels of wealth inequality than in the nineteenth century is implausible. Moreover, his focus on inequality misses that something great is also going on—that more and more people can live off society’s accumulated wealth and so don’t have to work. The real danger is not inequality per se but bad policy that suppresses growth and thus the accumulation of wealth, delaying this utopia for the masses longer than necessary. So while progressive taxes may serve as a short-term palliative, we should focus on giving the most capable part of the population better incentives to innovate, while allowing everyone else to benefit from their brilliance as rentiers.

"America Will Never Look Like a Jane Austen Novel." Right, it looks like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

No surprises here. What you'd expect from the "unlimited growth solves all problems" Chicago School. They are thinking in terms of a Horatio Alger novel. This is caricature, not analysis. Like most of the commentariat, they also misrepresent what Piketty actually wrote.

But the authors do put forward some good analysis and propose reasonable solutions, so it is not all bad.

The New Republic
Thomas Piketty Is Wrong: America Will Never Look Like a Jane Austen Novel
Eric A. Posner and Glen Weyl

(h/t Greg Mankiew)

Eric Posner is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and Glen Weyl is an economist at the University of Chicago, currently on leave with Microsoft.