A series of papers that provide more than a review a collective response to Piketty's book can be found here. It was part of a mini-symposium organized by Lance Taylor, co-sponsored by the New School and INET.Naked Keynesianism
Structuralist (Keynesian) Response to Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First CenturyMatias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, University of Utah
3 comments:
According to Taylor, "Thomas Piketty attributes increasing wealth inequality to the characteristics of a neoclassical aggregate production function, which is known not to
exist."
But I don't believe that is true. Piketty considers the neoclassical production function in Chapter 6, without either rejecting or endorsing it, in the context of consideration of his demonstrated empirical and historical observation that an increase in the capital-to-income ratio has often not been accompanied by a corresponding decline in the rate of return on capital. As a result, the total capital share is often not stable over time, but can increase continually over long historical periods.
So, then, one who chooses to defend the production function framework, given these historical facts, will have to conclude that the real world shows an elasticity of substitution greater than 1. That's what Piketty is up to in that chapter of the book. Piketty himself seems ambivalent about the production function framework. He's just drawing conclusions about what one who is committed to that framework should say, given the historical fact that the capital share often doesn't remain stable over time, but can steadily increase.
But Chapter 6 is not even in the part of the book that deals with inequality. You can't deduce that income and wealth are becoming more unequally distributed merely from the premise that the capital share is increasing. The discussion of inequality takes place in Chapters 7 through 12.
Many Marxists, New Keynesians, New Classicals and others tend to argue a lot about what must happen in the world by deducing these results a priori from premises to which they are strongly committed. Piketty is much more interested in what has happened and what is happening, and is much less committed to grand theoretical claims about the causes. He is often flexible and conjectural when considering the causes. This empirically-minded approach is so much at odds with the dogmatic mindset of most contemporary economists, that the latter often don't know what to think about it.
Hey this Schwartz Center place is funded by the same Schwartz Fdn that is tied into the NAF and all of the false "deficit" dogmas coming out of that place....
"The organization provides fellowships to "foster the next generation of thinkers and public intellectuals" through the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows program. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_America_Foundation
"SCEPA is the economic policy research arm of the department of economics at The New School for Social Research. Made possible through a generous gift from Irene and Bernard L. Schwartz, SCEPA is distinct from other economic think tanks..."
Yeah it is distinct in that it is probably a moron factory...
http://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/index.php/about-us
So looks like these Schwartz people are funding both sides... both the morons and non-morons so should we be surprised that we get nowhere?
Looks like at best the Schwartz people dont really want to get anywhere just go back and forth with no progress... and they have all the "money"... go figure... same with INET...
"empirical and historical"
right Dan there are many out there that dont respect the empirical data they come up with rationalist dogmas and human reasonings, etc... rsp,
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