Indeed, Piketty’s book provides a valuable explanatory context for America’s economic woes. Wages constitute the lowest share of U.S. GDP, and profits the highest, since the end of World War II. And with heightened accumulations of wealth come heightened accumulations of political power — a shift toward plutocracy to which Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision, permitting the wealthy to contribute to as many electoral campaigns as they wish, adds a helpful push.
…Piketty gives us the most important work of economics since John Maynard Keynes’s “General Theory.”
1, It is interesting that Meyerson deems himself qualified to make this last statement.?
2. Suppose that the book becomes nothing but popular folk economics for “Workers are getting screwed. Tax the rich.” Will Picketty consider that a success or a failure?
3. “Wages and salaries” is mostly a return on capital, albeit human capital. Labor in its purest form (unskilled) earns a much lower share of GDP than Meyerson, Pickety, or anyone else has calculated.
4. How does the growth in equality of payments to individuals compare to the growth in inequality in payments for land? Has the ratio of rent for a square foot of office space in Manhattan to that for of a square foot of lowest-value land in the rural United States gone up as much as the ratio of CEO pay to the wages of unskilled workers? In both cases, where are looking at the ratio of improved to unimproved factors of production. Should we be appalled by the growth in land inequality?
lol “human capital” lol
Explain your LOL? Would you prefer education, skill…?
The problem with Meyerson is that his column is all non sequiturs. Induvidual points are reasonable but there is no argument provided to link them together.
It is always: 1. State a stylized fact. 2. (Blank) 3. Conclude workers are exploited and the rich must pay more in taxes.
More specifically, we don’t always know what are cause and effect. Meyerson says wealth concentration leads to political power concentration. Maybe it is political power that leads to wealth?
Finally: as David Friedman might say, everyone’s an armchair economist.
With “analysts” like Meyerson, no matter how much political, judicial and bureaucratic power the Left has, and no matter how much the Left itself colludes with industries in which great masses of wealth are concentrated, the problem is always that the Left does not have enough power. It seems that the objection is really to the existence of any effective opposition to the Left at all.