Must-Read: Arthur Goldhammer: The Piketty Phenomenon

Must-Read: Arthur Goldhammer: The Piketty Phenomenon: “I will discuss anticipations of the book’s reception… show that even the most optimistic forecasts failed to predict the extent of the Piketty phenomenon… http://amzn.to/2pynukp

…consider… the political and social context created by the Great Recession…. I will survey the major early critiques of the work, insofar as they may have influenced its reception…. I will consider academic responses… from outside… economics…. I will assess the political response… and briefly discuss Piketty’s conception of the relation between democracy and capitalism….

Piketty… strengthen[s] the notion that patterns of class domination tend to persist over lengthy periods—a notion that had fallen into neglect with the ascendancy of neoliberal ideology…. Robert Lucas, whom Paul Krugman calls “the most influential macroeconomist of his generation,” declared in 2004, for instance, that “of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.” By making it once again respectable to raise distributional questions… Piketty earned the gratitude of historians aware… that economists like Lucas were entirely too sanguine in their belief that the normal operation of the market sufficed to ensure that wealth and its concomitant power did not settle all too comfortably into the hands of a restricted and (to a degree) self-reproducing class of capitalists. “Poisonous” ideas may after all turn out to be true…

Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, eds.: After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality http://amzn.to/2pynukp