Must-read: Thomas Piketty: “Capital, Predistribution and Redistribution”

Must-Read: Thomas Piketty: Capital, Predistribution and Redistribution: “In my view, Capital in the 21st Century is primarily a book about the history of the distribution of income and wealth…

…We have been extending to a larger scale the pioneering historical data collection work of Simon Kuznets and Tony Atkinson (see Kuznets, 1953, and Atkinson and Harrison, 1978). My first objective in this book is to present this body of historical evidence in a consistent manner…. Another important objective is to draw lessons for the future and for the optimal regulation and taxation of capital and property relations…. We have too little historical data at our disposal to be able to draw definitive judgments… [but] at least we have substantially more evidence than we used to….

The size of the gap between r and g… can contribute to explaining why wealth inequality was so extreme and persistent in pretty much every society up until World War I…. [But] 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 inequality in the 21st century. Institutional changes and political shocks… played a major role in the past, and… will… in the future…. It is obvious that this rise in labor income inequality in recent decades has little to do with r-g….

A higher r-g gap will tend to greatly amplify the steady-state inequality of a wealth distribution that arises out of a given mixture of shocks…. Relatively small changes in r–g can generate large changes in steady-state wealth inequality…. Available micro-level evidence on wealth dynamics confirm that the high gap between r and g is one of the central reasons why wealth concentration was so high during the 18th-19th centuries and up until World War I….

The theory of capital taxation that I present in Capital in the 21st Century is largely based upon joint work with Emmanuel Saez…. We develop a model where inequality is fundamentally two-dimensional: individuals differ both in their labor earning potential and in their inherited wealth…. Optimal tax policy is also two-dimensional: it involves a progressive tax on labor income and a progressive tax on inherited wealth….

In my book, I propose a simple rule-of-thumb to think about optimal annual tax rates on wealth and property. Namely, one should adapt the tax rates to the observed speed at which the different wealth groups are rising over time…. If top wealth holders are rising at 6-7% per year in real terms (as compared to 1-2% per year for average wealth)… and if one aims to stabilize the level of wealth concentration, then one might need to apply top wealth tax rates as large as 5% per year…. Indeed that there is substantial uncertainty about how far income and wealth inequality might rise in the 21st century, and that we need more financial transparency and better information about income and wealth dynamics…. The progressive consumption tax… is in my view a highly imperfect substitute…. Meritocratic values imply that one might want to tax inherited wealth more than self-made wealth, which is impossible to do with a consumption tax alone. Next, and most importantly, the very notion of consumption is not very well defined for top wealth holders….

One of the important findings from my research is that capital-income ratios β=K/Y and capital shares α tend to move together in the long run…. In the standard one-good model of capital accumulation with perfect competition, the only way to explain why β and α move together is to assume that the capital-labor elasticity of substitution σ that is somewhat larger than one…. This is not my favored interpretation…. Maybe robots and high capital-labor substitution will be important in the future. But at this stage, the important capital-intensive sectors are more traditional sectors like real estate and energy. I believe that the right model to think about rising capital-income ratios and capital shares in recent decades is a multi-sector model of capital accumulation, with substantial movements in relative prices, and with important variations in bargaining power over time….

The last chapter of my book concludes: ‘Without real accounting and financial transparency and sharing of information, there can be no economic democracy. Conversely, without a real right to intervene in corporate decision-making (including seats for workers on the company’s board of directors), transparency is of little use. Information must support democratic institutions; it is not an end in itself. If democracy is someday to regain control of capitalism, it must start by recognizing that the concrete institutions in which democracy and capitalism are embodied need to be reinvented again and again’ (p. 570)…

Over at Project Syndicate: “Piketty vs. Piketty”

Over at Project Syndicate: Piketty vs. Piketty: BERKELEY – In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty highlights the striking contrasts in North America and Europe between the Gilded Age that preceded World War I and the decades following World War II. In the first period, economic growth was sluggish, wealth was predominantly inherited, the rich dominated politics, and economic (as well as race and gender) inequality was extreme… READ MOAR over at Project Syndicate

Must-read: Dean Baker: “The Upward Redistribution of Income: Are Rents the Story?”

Must-Read: Contra Dean Baker, I suspect that Thomas Piketty would say that the ability of the rich to manipulate property rights and market power in order to keep the rate of profit high even as the economy becomes more capital-intensive is a feature that is “intrinsic to capitalism.” Thus I think Piketty would say that Baker is wrong here at the end:

Dean Baker: The Upward Redistribution of Income: Are Rents the Story?: “The top one percent of households have seen their income share roughly double…

…from 10 percent in 1980 to 20 percent in the second decade of the 21st century. As a result of this upward redistribution, most workers have seen little improvement in living standards from the productivity gains over this period…. The bulk of this upward redistribution comes from the growth of rents in the economy in four major areas: patent and copyright protection, the financial sector, the pay of CEOs and other top executives, and protectionist measures that have boosted the pay of doctors and other highly educated professionals. The argument on rents is important because, if correct, it means that there is nothing intrinsic to capitalism that led to this rapid rise in inequality, as for example argued by Thomas Piketty.

http://cepr.net/publications/reports/working-paper-the-upward-redistribution-of-income-are-rents-the-story

http://cepr.net/documents/working-paper-upward-distribution-income-rents.pdf

The melting away of North Atlantic social democracy

Over at Talking Points Memo: The Melting Away of North Atlantic Social Democracy: Hotshot French economist Thomas Piketty, of the Paris School of Economics, looked at the major democracies with North Atlantic coastlines over the past couple of centuries. He saw five striking facts:

  • First, ownership of private wealth—with its power to command resources, dictate where and how people would work, and shape politics—was always highly concentrated.
  • Second, 150 years—six generations—ago, the ratio of a country’s total private wealth to its total annual income was about six.
  • Third, 50 years—two generations—ago, that capital-income ratio was about three.
  • Fourth, over the past two generations that capital-income ratio has been rising rapidly.
  • Fifth, the flow of income to the owner of the dollar capital did not rise when capital was relatively scarce, but plodded along at a typical net rate of profit of about 5% per year generation after generation.

He wondered what these facts predicted for the shape of the major North Atlantic economies in the 21st century. And so he wrote a big book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century **READ MOAR at Talking Points Memo


Version with annotations, references, and deleted scenes: https://fold.cm/read/delong/the-melting-away-of-north-atlantic-social-democracy-Fdf2BEBZ

Photo of Thomas Piketty in Sweden, June 30, 2014. (AP Photo/Janerik Henriksson)

Must-read: Henry Farrell: “Piketty, in Three Parts”

Must-Read: Second to Miriam Ronzoni in the Crooked Timber Piketty symposium is Henry Farrell–who provides the best precis of Piketty as both sociological phenomenon and political actor I have yet seen:

Henry Farrell: Piketty, in Three Parts: “Piketty[‘s]… contribution is better understood in sociological terms…

…Economic knowledge… is the product of social processes… in which socially-legitimated social structures produce socially-legitimated forms of knowledge that are validated in socially-legitimated ways…. In a technocratic age… high-quality statistical data are… legitimate in ways that other kinds of knowledge are not. Piketty and his colleagues[‘]… high-quality data sets… confound… previous… wisdom that we didn’t need to worry about inequality. This makes a vast and important social phenomenon… visible, salient and socially undeniable….

Although efforts to undermine the credibility of the project (such as the notorious Financial Times investigation) have failed, it will continue to get empirical pushback. However, this pushback is likely to further increase the salience of the problem of inequality, by making it a major object of scientific inquiry…. If you (whether for principled or unprincipled reasons) don’t want inequality to be a problem that people pay attention to, and want to try and solve, then the Piketty book is likely to seem like a disaster to you. You’ll devote a lot of time and energy to trying to tear it down. Sometimes this criticism will be useful…. Sometimes it will be a form of denialism. Equally, if you are someone who believes that inequality is a real problem, Piketty’s work not only helps to validate your beliefs, but it gives you a new set of tools….

Finally, it helps explain Piketty’s policy prescriptions, some of which are proposed not so much to solve the problem of inequality, as to help generate the kinds of politics that might solve the problem…. For example, his self-admittedly utopian proposal for a global tax on capital is in part motivated by the desire to reduce financial opacity, and to make it clearer just how well the truly rich are doing…. If we (as a democratic society, in the US, France, Ireland or some congeries of these national societies) truly understood how rich the rich were, we could do something about it…. Obviously, this bet is an uncertain one. Piketty has little to say about the politics through which knowledge generates political action…. What more we might need than knowledge is difficult to say…

Must-Read: Miriam Ronzoni: Where Are the Power Relations in Piketty’s Capital?

Must-Read: The extremely-sharp Miriam Ronzoni excellently puts her finger on a substantial hole in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Piketty starts, I think, from the observation that the French Second Empire and Third Republic–extraordinarily egalitarian in politics for white native-born males either as equal subjects of the Bonaparte dynasty or equal citizens of the Republic–were extraordinarily unfriendly to egalitarian economic measures. And, in addition, capital was able to adjust and rig the system of property rights in order to neutralize the forces of supply and demand that economists see as naturally making a high-capital economy a low-profit rate economy. Piketty strongly believes that a non-plutocratic society requires a low level of r-g, a low level of the difference between the profit rate r and the growth rate g. With r fixed save in times of societal catastrophe by the hegemonic power of capital even in political democracies, escape from plutocracy this hinges on boosting g, on a higher overall economic growth rate.

But, Ronzoni points out, this fatalistic analytical conclusion by Piketty has no impact on his suggested political strategy. A trust in Habermasian discourse and in the effectiveness of mobilization for social democracy appears out of thin air–both in the later pages of Piketty’s text, and in his post-publication career as a public intellectual. It’s not even “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. It’s simply a disconnect:

Miriam Ronzoni: Where Are the Power Relations in Piketty’s Capital?: “My concern about Piketty’s proposal is that there seems to be a friction…

…between the diagnosis offered in the rest of the book (which seems to draw a rather bleak picture of the power of capital in the early 21st century) and the suggested cure (which seems to rely on the optimistic hope that, once well-minded citizens will have recognized the problem, the only hurdle will be to find the right policy to fix it)…. Piketty seems to hold on to a social-democratic [political] optimism… whereas his findings seem to push him in a different direction…. [By] ‘social-democratic optimism’ I mean… optimism about the role of policies and institutions in taming capital… [plus] the persuasion that… politics is fundamentally about is making citizens understand… and then they will be persuaded to do the right thing…

Must-Read: Marshall Steinbaum: Thomas Piketty at the University of Chicago

Must-Read: It is genuinely surprising to me that Kevin Murphy thinks that Katz and Murphy (1992) is still close to the last word on inequality. And it is beyond genuinely surprising that Steve Durlauf thinks that Bill Gates’s wealth was acquired by merit and John D. Rockefeller’s by monopoly when they are both winners in gigantic winner-take-all natural-monopoly markets–a natural-monopoly created by economies of scale in refining and distribution in the case of oil, and by write-once run-everywhere protected by patent and copyright in the case of operating systems:

Marshall Steinbaum: Free-Market Dogmatism Still Going Strong at the University of Chicago: “A discussion between Piketty and… Kevin Murphy and Steven Durlauf…

…with Jim Heckman acting as moderator…. [Murphy] thinks that his 1992 paper with Lawrence Katz, which tried to explain the dynamics of the college wage premium in the 1970s and 1980s with reference to the supply and demand for skilled labor in the form of workers with a college degree, constitutes the final word… [even though] its model fails at explaining… labor market outcomes… since… [and relies on the residual of] skills-biased technical change: the Ghost in the Free Market Economics Machine….

Piketty started things off by claiming that… globalization and skill-biased technical change… don’t explain the phenomena… closed with what I consider a profound restatement of why Capital in the 21st Century is such an important book:

The gap between [the] official discourse and what’s actually going on is enormous. The tendency is for the winner to justify inequality with meritocracy. It’s important to put these claims up for public discussion.

Durlauf… said, quite reasonably, that the key mechanism of inequality is segregation, because it translates individual inequality into entrenched deprivation, and that its policy implications are therefore to foster integration in a variety of contexts….

Murphy’s presentation was where the wheels came off, intellectually speaking. He declared… by regurgitating his 1992 paper… [saying] “that theory has done an amazing job,” including a cryptic statement about how it explains the rise of tail inequality “if you extrapolate,” whatever that means…. Murphy stepped forward once again to declare that the economy’s “natural supply response of supplying capital” will help workers by reducing the capital share and increasing their productivity…. Durlauf asserted in his JPE review of C21 that no one thinks like Clark anymore, with his quasi-moralistic view of the efficient functioning of capital formation and the adjustment of its rate of return. Unfortunately, Durlauf’s empirical prediction was falsified by Murphy right there on that stage…. Murphy added that in the absence of better education, “The march of technology over time means there’s little for someone with no human capital to do.”… Then things got weird. Durlauf… [said] what mattered was [Americans’] perception of [inequality’s] source: whether justified by merit, as in the case of Bill Gates, or extracted through monopolization, as with John D. Rockefeller. At that, Piketty quipped that Bill Gates certainly agrees….

Murphy[‘s]… idea seems to be that the poor, benighted though they are, will adopt the morally correct position of looking out for their own interest by acquiring an education, so long as the incentive to do so is preserved by avoiding progressive taxation. Usually the fallacy in the moral philosophy of economics… is to argue that whatever reality exists is for the best…. In this case, though, the “ought” is a priori: people should be selfish. For that reason, they probably will be, so long as the status quo is maintained as an instructive lesson in the disaster befalling anyone not born rich…. Durlauf made a final, inscrutable point… saying that we should directly address the harms caused by inequality, by which he was referring to capture of the political system by the wealthy…

Exploding wealth inequality in the United States

There is no dispute that income inequality has been on the rise in the United States for the past four decades. The share of total income earned by the top 1 percent of families was less than 10 percent in the late 1970s but now exceeds 20 percent as of the end of 2012.  A large portion of this increase is due to an upsurge in the labor incomes earned by senior company executives and successful entrepreneurs. But is the rise in U.S. economic inequality purely a matter of rising labor compensation at the top, or did wealth inequality rise as well?

Before we answer that question (hint: the answer is a definitive yes, as we will demonstrate below) we need to define what we mean by wealth. Wealth is the stock of all the assets people own, including their homes, pension saving, and bank accounts, minus all debts. Wealth can be self-made out of work and saving, but it can also be inherited. Unfortunately, there is much less data available on wealth in the United States than there is on income. Income tax data exists since 1913—the first year the country collected federal income tax—but there is no comparable tax on wealth to provide information on the distribution of assets. Currently available measures of wealth inequality rely either on surveys (the Survey of Consumer Finances of the Federal Reserve Board), on estate tax return data, or on lists of wealthy individuals, such as the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans.

Download the pdf version of this brief for a complete list of sources

In our new working paper, “Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data,” we try to measure wealth in another way.  We use comprehensive data on capital income—such as dividends, interest, rents, and business profits—that is reported on individual income tax returns since 1913. We then capitalize this income so that it matches the amount of wealth recorded in the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds, the national balance sheets that measure aggregate wealth of U.S. families. In this way we obtain annual estimates of U.S. wealth inequality stretching back a century.

Wealth inequality, it turns out, has followed a spectacular U-shape evolution over the past 100 years. From the Great Depression in the 1930s through the late 1970s there was a substantial democratization of wealth. The trend then inverted, with the share of total household wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent increasing to 22 percent in 2012 from 7 percent in the late 1970s. (See Figure 1.) The top 0.1 percent includes 160,000 families with total net assets of more than $20 million in 2012.

Figure 1

102014-wealth-web-01

Figure 1 shows that wealth inequality has exploded in the United States over the past four decades. The share of wealth held by the top 0.1 percent of families is now almost as high as in the late 1920s, when “The Great Gatsby” defined an era that rested on the inherited fortunes of the robber barons of the Gilded Age.

In recent decades, only a tiny fraction of the population saw its wealth share grow. While the wealth share of the top 0.1 percent increased a lot in recent decades, that of the next 0.9 percent (families between the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent) did not. And the share of total wealth of the “merely rich”—families who fall in the top 10 percent but are not wealthy enough to be counted among the top 1 percent—actually decreased slightly over the past four decades. In other words, family fortunes of $20 million or more grew much faster than those of only a few millions.

The flip side of these trends at the top of the wealth ladder is the erosion of wealth among the middle class and the poor. There is a widespread public view across American society that a key structural change in the U.S. economy since the 1920s is the rise of middle-class wealth, in particular because of the development of pensions and the rise in home ownership rates. But our results show that while the share of wealth of the bottom 90 percent of families did gradually increase from 15 percent in the 1920s to a peak of 36 percent in the mid-1980, it then dramatically declined. By 2012, the bottom 90 percent collectively owns only 23 percent of total U.S. wealth, about as much as in 1940  (see Figure 2.)

Figure 2

102014-wealth-web-03

The growing indebtedness of most Americans is the main reason behind the erosion of the wealth share of the bottom 90 percent of families. Many middle class families own homes and have pensions, but too many of these families also have much higher mortgages to repay and much higher consumer credit and student loans to service than before. For a time, rising indebtedness was compensated by the increase in the market value of the assets of middle-class families. The average wealth of bottom 90 percent of families jumped during the stock-market bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s. But it then collapsed during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009.  (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3

102014-wealth-web-02

Since the housing and financial crises of the late 2000s there has been no recovery in the wealth of the middle class and the poor. The average wealth of the bottom 90 percent of families is equal to $80,000 in 2012—the same level as in 1986. In contrast, the average wealth for the top 1 percent more than tripled between 1980 and 2012. In 2012, the wealth of the top 1 percent increased almost back to its peak level of 2007. The Great Recession looks only like a small bump along an upward trajectory.

How can we explain the growing disparity in American wealth? The answer is that the combination of higher income inequality alongside a growing disparity in the ability to save for most Americans is fuelling the explosion in wealth inequality. For the bottom 90 percent of families, real wage gains (after factoring in inflation) were very limited over the past three decades, but for their counterparts in the top 1 percent real wages grew fast. In addition, the saving rate of middle class and lower class families collapsed over the same period while it remained substantial at the top. Today, the top 1 percent families save about 35 percent of their income, while bottom 90 percent families save about zero.

The implications of rising wealth inequality and possible remedies

If income inequality stays high and if the saving rate of the bottom 90 percent of families remains low then wealth disparity will keep increasing. Ten or twenty years from now, all the gains in wealth democratization achieved during the New Deal and the post-war decades could be lost. While the rich would be extremely rich, ordinary families would own next to nothing, with debts almost as high as their assets. Paris School of Economics professor Thomas Piketty warns that inherited wealth could become the defining line between the haves and the have-nots in the 21st century. This provocative prediction hit a nerve in the United States this year when Piketty’s book “Capital in the 21st Century” became a national best seller because it outlined a direct threat to the cherished American ideals of meritocracy and opportunity.

What should be done to avoid this dystopian future? We need policies that reduce the concentration of wealth, prevent the transformation of self-made wealth into inherited fortunes, and encourage savings among the middle class. First, current preferential tax rates on capital income compared to wage income are hard to defend in light of the rise of wealth inequality and the very high savings rate of the wealthy. Second, estate taxation is the most direct tool to prevent self-made fortunes from becoming inherited wealth—the least justifiable form of inequality in the American meritocratic ideal. Progressive estate and income taxation were the key tools that reduced the concentration of wealth after the Great Depression. The same proven tools are needed again today.

There are a number of specific policy reforms needed to rebuild middle class wealth.  A combination of prudent financial regulation to rein in predatory lending, incentives to help people save—nudges have been shown to be very effective in the case of 401(k) pensions—and more generally steps to boost the wages of the bottom 90 percent of workers are needed so that ordinary families can afford to save.

One final reform also needs to be on the policymaking agenda: the collection of better data on wealth in the United States. Despite our best efforts to build wealth inequality data, we want to stress that the United States is lagging behind in terms of the quality of its wealth and saving data. It would be relatively easy for the U.S. Treasury to collect more information—in particular balances on 401(k) and bank accounts—on top of what it already collects to administer the federal income tax. This information could help enforce the collection of current taxes more effectively and would be invaluable for obtaining more precise estimates of the joint distributions of income, wealth, saving, and consumption. Such information is needed to illuminate the public debate on economic inequality. It is also required to evaluate and implement alternative forms of taxation, such as progressive wealth or consumption taxes, in order to achieve broad-based and sustainable economic growth.

Emmanuel Saez is a professor of economics and director of the Center for Equitable Growth at the University of California-Berkeley. Gabriel Zucman is an assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

Who are today’s supermanagers and why are they so wealthy?

What explains the changes in top-earning occupations over the past four decades? Perhaps the most intriguing argument about the current state of income inequality in the English speaking economies that Thomas Piketty makes in his bestseller “Capital in the 21st Century” is this—“the vast majority (60 to 70 percent, depending on what definitions one chooses) of the top 0.1 percent of the income hierarchy in 2000-2010 consists of top managers.” He goes on to argue on page 302 of his book that the rise in labor income “primarily reflects the advent of ‘supermanagers,’ that is, top executives of large firms who have managed to obtain extremely high, historically unprecedented compensation packages for their labor.”

top-earners-infographic

This really begs the question as to how and why these supermanagers came into existence. Nobel Laureate Robert M. Solow points out in The New Republic that this is primarily an American outcome. And Henry Engler at Thomson Reuters Accelelus’ Compliance Complete recently published an excellent piece on Piketty’s supermanagers in the United States and the United Kingdom. Both writers agreed with Piketty that these supermanagers were being vastly overly compensated given their questionable contributions to productivity.

I hope to shed a little more light on this issue by examining the change in professions comprising the top 0.1 percent of tax filers between 1979 and 2005. The purpose: to examine whether the changing composition of this super elite reflects changes in our economy that may explain the link between rising economic inequality and anemic economic growth over this period.

To do so, I used data from the April 2012 white paper “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data,” by economists Jon Bakija of Williams College, Adam Cole of the Office of Tax Analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and Bradley Heim of Indiana University. They used tax data on the top 0.1% of filers to identify the top earning professions. The infographic below tells the tale, charting the change in occupations at the tippy top of the income ladder in 1979 and 2005.

The biggest change in the distribution of top earners is in the types of executives, managers, and supervisors at non-financial firms. In 1979, most of these people worked for large, publicly traded firms but by 2005 more were working in closely held firms. There is not enough information to provide a clearer picture as to who exactly these people are, but chances are they are employed by firms that are owned by private equity firms—the growth in the private equity industry over this period of time was substantial—and because financial professionals saw large gains, too. The share of people in the top 0.1 percent working in finance also increased substantially, to 18 percent in 2005 from 11 percent in 1979.

These findings are consistent with Piketty’s analysis in his new book. But there are alternative explanations. One is presented in George Mason economist Tyler Cowen’s latest book, “Average is Over.” He claims a skill biased-technological change is responsible for the shift in top occupations over roughly the same period. He argues that technology allows top performers to capture more of the market and thus earn substantially more than average performers. He and many other people hypothesize that this is a driver of increased economic inequality.

But if technology were a primary driver of inequality, then one would expect that skilled trades would have larger incomes and would have become a larger share in the top 0.1 percent. While there are slightly more technical types and entertainers among top earners (as can be seen in the data presented in our interactive) the biggest gains in both percentage terms and magnitude were among privately held business professionals.

Thus, the so called “average is over” argument—that that the top performers in each field will capture a bigger share of the pie—may be a driver of inequality, but it does not appear to explain the bulk of the changes in occupations at the top of the income ladder. Instead, the supermanagers appear to be capturing greater share of the wealth as is argued by Piketty and others. More detailed data would be required to assess who these people are and how workplace dynamics changed from 1979 to 2005 that would explain the change in income. The Washington Center for Equitable Growth will be examining this data in more detail in forthcoming publications.

Is Piketty’s treatment of housing an excuse to ignore him?

French economist Thomas Piketty’s treatment of housing as capital in his blockbuster “Capital in the 21st Century” is not an excuse to ignore his predictions about rising economic inequality. “Capital in the 21st Century” is clear from the beginning that housing—and real estate generally—ought to be included in the definition of “capital” for the book’s purpose, which is to examine the aggregate effect of accumulated wealth that produces an annual return through no effort on the part of its owner.

A whole set of Piketty “rebuttalsattacks that treatment of housing as capital. The critics focus on that aspect of his analysis because a large proportion of the increase in the capital-to-income ratio that he emphasizes is thanks to the accumulation of housing and real estate at market prices. In some countries, the rise in the value of housing accounts for all of the increase in the capital-to-income ratio since 1970. And even beyond housing, Piketty’s approach is not consistent with standard neo-classical economic theory in several important ways—and so the critics have looked to housing as a reason to cling to their theory in the face of his countervailing facts.

But if housing were not counted as part of capital in Piketty’s analysis then the wealth distribution patterns he explores would be even more skewed. He identifies one key historical phenomenon that is unique to the 20th century—the rise of what he calls a  “patrimonial middle class,” that is, non-trivial, inheritable wealth holdings by those between the 50th and 90th percentiles of the wealth distribution in advanced economies, rather than the top decile holding nearly all the wealth as was true in the 19th century and previously.

So, even though total capital accumulated (as a percentage of national income) has already reached the level where it was in the late 19th century, inequality has not yet attained its prior height, at least not in Europe, because that capital is partly held by the middle class. And their wealth is largely in housing.

This means that removing housing from consideration would by fiat skew the wealth distribution as much as Piketty predicts it will be skewed in the future if that patrimonial middle class dwindles, which is the dire outcome his whole book warns against. In other words, the arguments put forward as part of an attempt to discount Piketty’s prediction about the rise in capital’s share of income would, if accepted, put his prediction about the evolution of wealth inequality into effect mechanically. So how should economists interpret housing wealth?

Is housing capital?

Claim:  Housing is not “productive” capital, like machines or factories or even farmland.

Response: In fact, housing is productive in the sense that it produces a good—shelter, broadly conceived—that economic agents value. Someone who owns his or her home doesn’t have to pay rent, and the owner of an investment property will earn rent exactly as does the owner of some piece of “productive” capital equipment. Second, capital functions as a store of value, and not simply as an input to production—a function that Piketty’s historical data show has been vital over the long run.

To take the argument a bit further, the value in real estate is often a matter of proximity—of “location, location, location”—and proximity to productive economic activity or to agents whom it is valuable to know is a very real economic resource. That proximity is capitalized as real estate. An identicallysized and equipped dwelling in Manhattan, Kansas costs much less than one in the more famous Manhattan because of the productivity and amenity benefits that come from living and working near many other people in New York City.

Arguably, in a world of increasing population density, location has been getting more important, and incumbent owners of real estate have been the main beneficiaries. Klaus Desmet at the University of Charles III and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg at Princeton University have a 2014 paper called “Spatial Development” that emphasizes population densification as the cause of productivity gains, location rent dynamics, and inter-sectoral employment flows in the United States. Piketty doesn’t discuss spatial trends as such, but the dynamics of housing wealth are entirely consistent with the argument in “Capital in the 21st Century.”

Excluding housing and real estate from the capital stock is convenient if the goal is to dismiss Piketty’s data and predictions, but that interpretation is not warranted by economic theory or empirical analysis.

How should the value of housing be calculated?

 Claim: Piketty’s use the market price of housing distorts his analysis because housing should be priced according to its discounted rental stream, which is a measure of its “fundamental value.” The market price is subject to bubble dynamics, which according to the standard economic theory of bubbles would occur when the price deviates from some notion of its fundamental value, such as if a fruit tree were to cost more than the appropriately discounted sum of all the fruit it will ever produce.

Response: This critique fails for the same reason the argument that housing isn’t capital fails—because capital, broadly conceived to include wealth, is a store of value, and thus the stream of annual rent from its users isn’t the only relevant aspect of the return to its owner. The price of housing in central metropolitan areas has been on an upward march for the past several decades, in part because economic agents foresee dynamics of the kind described by economists Desmet and Rossi-Hansberg and in part because investing in real estate abroad is an effective way for the wealthy global elite to stash their cash overseas. At times, this has given rise to the property bubbles observed in Japan before 1990 and in the United States before 2006, but the resulting firesales do not erase the long-run trend. The fluctuation in housing market prices probably occurs in part because of misperceptions or misevaluations of the timing of long-run trends, but that does not imply the trend doesn’t exist.

Is housing really as substitutable with labor as Piketty assumes?

Claim:  Including housing in the stock of capital should reduce Piketty’s assumed value for the marginal rate of substitution between capital and labor, and hence his prediction of an increasing capital share of income. Piketty’s assumption that the marginal rate of substitution between capital and labor is greater than one is important since it implies that the aggregate rental rate of capital will not decline by as much as the stock of capital increases.  In other words, workers face no threat of losing their jobs just because more houses exist since there’s “no way to substitute a house for a worker.”

Response: Piketty’s main argument that the marginal rate of substitution is greater than one—that workers are indeed threatened by capital accumulation, including housing—is based on the dual U-shaped historical evolutions of the capital-to-income ratio and capital’s share of income in the very long run. That implies that when capital is accumulated, the resulting decline in the price of capital is not large enough to offset the increase in its quantity. Hence, the total share of income going to capital is higher when there’s more capital. If the marginal rate of substitution were less than one, the capital share would move inversely with the capital-to-income ratio, and if it were equal to one, as neo-classical theorists generally assume, the capital share would not change at all with the capital-to-income ratio.

All the evidence that the marginal rate of substitution between capital and labor is less than one cited by the critics is drawn from relatively short-run studies of the tradeoff between capital and labor at the firm- or industry-level, and there are very good reasons to believe that long-run elasticities are higher. Piketty’s long-run, aggregate evidence already includes the historical value of housing in capital, so this critique doesn’t bring anything more to the table—Piketty already has an excellent empirical case for assuming the marginal rate of substitution is high: the dual U shapes cited above.

Moreover, the aggregate marginal rate of substitution incorporates a much larger range of empirical economic phenomena than simply how easy it is to substitute between two factors in the production of a single good. So interpretations that adhere narrowly to that premise—such as econometric estimates at the firm or industry level—are bound to fail. The neo-classical argument holds that the price of capital is determined by its marginal productivity, and that marginal productivity declines mechanically as the quantity of capital increases. That is the so-called Ricardian scarcity principle, named for the 19th century thinker David Ricardo.

The rate at which it declines depends on how substitutable capital and labor are. The argument that they are not very substitutable implies that additional capital is relatively useless—and hence that its price will get much lower as its quantity increases. Notably, if what is relevant about housing and its value dynamics is that it acts as a store of value, then there’s no reason to believe that diminishing marginal productivity is operative. That concept relates to the additional output produced by increasing the use of one input in production while holding all others constant, but there’s no production going on if what’s being amassed is a store of value.

In this sense, housing wealth accumulation is like hording a precious metal: how useful the metal is in the production of other goods is irrelevant to the value of the horde. Finally, there are strong empirical reasons to believe that the price of housing, and of capital in general, is not only determined by marginal productivity as in the traditional, neo-classical macroeconomic model. That is the subject of my next response.

Are housing price increases due to supply restrictions?

 Claim: There’s been a great deal of research into the dynamics of the housing market since the housing bubble burst, starting in 2006, and especially the unsurprising conclusion that local housing supply elasticity is related to price dynamics, and further, that political pressure by homeowners and the mortgage lending industry, especially on the west coast of the United States, has constrained housing supply and led to the enormous price swings. Those supply restrictions have nothing to do with the rise in the capital-to-income ratio and the reasons for it proposed by Piketty.

Response: This explanation for housing price dynamics isn’t actually distinct from Piketty’s narrative. The Economist commentator Ryan Avent wrote about this eloquently: “Over the last few decades technological changes have greatly increased the return to locating in large cities filled with skilled people. Being in such places makes workers more productive and raises the income they are able to earn. But skilled cities have not allowed housing supply to expand to meet rising demand. Housing has therefore been rationed by price, pushing less productive workers toward cities where housing supply growth is higher and housing cost growth is lower.

As a result, fewer people live in the most productive places, and quite a lot of the gain from employment in productive places is captured by landowners earning rents thanks to artificial housing scarcity. This may mean lower overall productivity, more income inequality, and more income flowing to capital rather than labour.” In other words, what we have here is collective political action to make sure the price of housing remains high just as increases in the bargaining power of capital relative to labor have contributed to the decline of the labor share. There is no room in the neoclassical model for these effects—only for the Ricardian scarcity principle and diminishing marginal productivity—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

The answers are clear

Piketty’s framework, including his decision to count housing as capital, does not map directly onto the standard neoclassical economic growth model—but his approach is more consistent with empirical reality in several key ways. The critics who want to cling to their outdated theories have latched onto his interpretation of housing as a way to do so, but given their theory’s many empirical shortcomings, they are seriously misguided.