Should-Read: Peter Coy: Piketty’s Capital Was So Popular There’s a Sequel

Should-Read: Good for you, Peter, in reading “the introduction, the retrospective by translator Arthur Goldhammer, and bits and pieces of some of the following essays.”

I would recommend that you, next, read Piketty’s response. After that, browse first through “A Political Economy Take on W/Y” [Suresh Naidu], “Increasing Capital Income Share and Its Effect on Personal Income Inequality” [Branko Milanovic], “The Research Agenda after Capital in the Twenty-First Century” [Emmanuel Saez], and “The Legal Constitution of Capitalism” [David Singh Grewal]—those are, I think, the chapters that you are likely to find most accessible.

As I wrote in my Amazon review: As one of the co-editors of this book, I know it very well. I am greatly pleased with how this project came out—we have very serious people, as Bob Solow would put it, writing very serious takes on what Thomas Piketty has accomplished, where he has gone wrong, and what gaps remain to be investigated by others. Social scientists thinking of citing on, working along lines related to, or drawing on Piketty should certainly read this book. People who have read Capital in the Twenty-First Century who are curious about how serious people are reacting to and assessing the book should read it as well.

Peter Coy: Piketty’s Capital Was So Popular There’s a Sequel: “Another hefty volume that looks at the connection between capitalism and inequality… https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-08/piketty-s-capital-was-so-popular-there-s-a-sequel

…If you’re reading this article, it may be because you’re one of the 2 million people who bought a copy of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty. The long, dense academic treatise was the biggest publishing surprise of the year when it came out in English in 2014…. Now comes After Piketty, a book that, at 678 pages, is almost as long and almost as weighty. Released May 8 in the U.S., it’s a sympathetic appraisal of what Piketty got right and what he got wrong. I have read the introduction, the retrospective by translator Arthur Goldhammer, and bits and pieces of some of the following essays….

One recurrent gripe about Capital in the Twenty-First Century… is that it was too deterministic, failing to acknowledge that society could choose…. Another is that the rate of profit has held roughly constant over a long period in a way that Piketty doesn’t account for. “This seems to be a substantial hole in the book,” the editors write…. Boushey says in an interview that… the impetus for the new volume is that Piketty’s ideas haven’t been taken up, or even wrestled with, to the degree that the editors felt they deserved…. The reception that Piketty has received from fellow economists, says Boushey, relates to “a deeper question about the purpose of economics as a social science”…