Reviewing Lawrence H. Summers: Review of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” I: Piketty’s Accomplishment

Mark Thoma sends us to Larry Summers at Michael Tomasky’s Democracy Journal:

Lawrence H. Summers: The Inequality Puzzle: “Piketty’s treatment of inequality is perfectly matched to its moment….

His work richly deserves all the attention…. Painstaking empirical research… transformed political discourse… a Nobel Prize-worthy contribution… elegant framework for making sense of a complex reality… theorizing is bold and simple and hugely important if correct…. Piketty makes a major contribution by putting forth a theory of natural economic evolution under capitalism….

Books that represent the last word on a topic are important. Books that represent one of the first words are even more important. By focusing attention on what has happened to a fortunate few among us, and by opening up for debate issues around the long-run functioning of our market system, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a profoundly important contribution.

Yes, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez are now a lock on a Nobel Prize someday for their extraordinarily impressive empirical work on inequality…