It is not in the excerpt of Crook’s review of Piketty that Tyler Cowen blogged. Instead, my favorite sentence is this:
It could also explain why the book has been greeted with such erotic intensity: It meets the need for a work of deep research and scholarly respectability which affirms that inequality, as Cassidy remarked, is “a defining issue of our era.”
I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but I will say it anyway:
Marx’s economics never stood on its merits. He got major things clearly wrong.
Keynes’ economics was never proven right or wrong, but by the same token no one has ever been able to pin down the answer to the question, “What did Keynes really mean?” Who else has spawned such a voluminous and inconclusive literature dedicated to seeking the “correct” interpretation? You don’t see economists floundering over the issue of “What did Coase really mean?” or “What did Samuelson really mean?” But with Keynes, that remains the overriding reason to read The General Theory–to try to figure out what the heck the guy really meant. I would say that after more than 75 years of attempts to clarify Keynes, one must either conclude that he was a clear thinker whose ideas are so brilliant that they have eluded the understanding of all subsequent economists–or that perhaps he was not such a clear thinker.
Galbraith’s The New Industrial State was the best-seller that was greeted with erotic intensity in the late 1960s, but on its merits it fell short as well. One of its central themes was that entrepreneurialism was dead, replaced by Soviet-style planning at American industrial giants. As Deirdre McCloskey tartly observed, “Eight years after the first publication of The New Industrial State, Bill Gates founded Microsoft.”
So before we pronounce Piketty’s book a masterpiece, I suggest waiting to see how the economic arguments shake out.
Who else has spawned such a voluminous and inconclusive literature dedicated to seeking the “correct” interpretation? You don’t see economists floundering over the issue of “What did Coase really mean?” or “What did Samuelson really mean?”
Austrians play this game endlessly too, and I lean towards the same reason for it as you give for Keynes: They just were not that clear thinking.
I agree with your larger point that the response to Piketty seems to be based on emotional fulfillment.
“Marx’s economics never stood on its merits. He got major things clearly wrong.”
I’d be curious to hear what would be a few of the major things you had in mind here. I put questions about the LTV to Tyler Cowen years ago, and never received a reply that indicated it was wrong, strictly. Only that it was unworkable.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/03/what-is-the-biggest-flaw-in-the-labor-theory-of-value.html
In full disclosure, I’m not a Marxist, but I’ve tried to argue with them in earnest, and I would be interested in, specifically, what you were thinking of when you mention the things he got wrong. (Unless you are ignoring the post-hoc workarounds his disciples have employed to keep him relevant)
While I would also like to hear Arnold’s answers, I think a safe place to start would be that what we would today call ‘organizational capital’ Marx called, I think it’s safe to say, ‘theft.’
Piketty = Fukuyama’s End of History: A dense and erudite book that was ultimately wrong, but had the benefit of riding the business cycle/zeitgeist.
Freud comes to mind. He’s been strongly embraced in theater and fiction, and in pop culture he is frequently depicted a pure genius of psychology. For actual students of psychology, though, he comes off as muddled and, well, wrong.
It’s easy to see the appeal of promoting Freud, if you are in a position where accurately understanding psychology is important to you. He served as a counsellor to many higher-class people, and he typically told them that the reason for their problems in life was due to bad parenting. He was also happy to smear poorer, lower-class people as having fundamental mental deficiencies and thus being essentially a second race. He wrapped it all up with a thick veneer of science. I mean, just look at those sciencey-looking glasses he wore!