Thomas Piketty is a French economist whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century has swept American discourse. Four experts – Brad DeLong, Tyler Cowen, Stephanie Kelton and Emanuel Derman – take on why that is
There’s been a bizarre phenomenon this year: a young, little-known French economist has written a 700-page tome about economic inequality – dense with data, historical examples from France, and a few literary references to Jane Austen.
That’s not the strange part. This is: it’s a bestseller.
Somehow, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty has become a conversation piece among well-read people. Its graphic red-and-ivory cover is inescapable. Early in its launch, it hit No 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list and the paper version – a doorstop in punishing, heavy hardcover – sold out in major bookstores.
Piketty’s main argument is this: that invested capital – in the stock market, in real estate – will grow faster than income.
The implications of that are deep: to have invested capital, you must have money already. If you rely on income, as most people do, you will likely never catch up to the wealth of people who are already rich. The 1% and the 99% enshrined by Occupy are not an anomaly of our time, Piketty’s research suggests. It’s a structural feature of capitalism. Piketty’s work – which has been in progress for over a decade – is a natural pairing with the Occupy movement, which also questions the premises of capitalism.
You can see the appeal of such an argument, which has driven the book to become a cultural touchpoint. Seattle quoted Piketty in its minimum-wage law. The book has had so many reviews and articles that it’s possible for someone to feel as if they have read it even without cracking the cover.
Which raises the question: why this book? The themes that Piketty brings up have been enshrined in discussion about progressive economists for decades. No fewer than three Nobel Prize winners – Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Robert Solow – have all devoted much of their careers to studying inequality. On Friday, 19 September, I moderated a panel at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth that included Solow as well as economists Brad DeLong, Tyler Cowen and Russ Roberts. For 90 minutes, they hammered out the implications of Piketty’s work -- and the discussion ended with much more to say.
I decided to ask star economists and finance experts who have devoted their careers to issues of inequality and the American economy: why is Thomas Piketty a bestseller? Is he required reading? Their thoughtful responses are below, and they include some surprises – including one who has decided not to read Piketty at all.
Oh, and it’s pronounced like this: Tome-AH PEEK-a-tee. Now, over to the experts.
...Emanuel Derman
Emanuel Derman is a professor at Columbia University, where he directs the program in financial engineering. His latest book is Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disasters, On Wall Street and in Life – one of Business Week’s top ten books of 2011.
Economists are the new nuclear physicists, turned to by governments for advice as though they are heirs to the power of the scientists who created Hiroshima. Macroeconomists now advise central banks on monetary policy, and behavioral economists tell political parties and governments how to nudge citizens to do what politicians and economists deem to be right.
I make my living teaching finance, the branch of economics concerned with putting a value on assets such as stocks, bonds, mortgages and options.
Though I should, I can’t bring myself to read Thomas Piketty.
I wish I could. I have nothing against him or his work, which seems well-intentioned and directed at improving human welfare. I am just spiritually weary of the ubiquitous cockiness of economists, though Piketty sounds as though he’s less guilty of this than most of the pundits in the daily papers.
The best model in my field, finance, is the Black-Scholes model of options pricing, which, according to Steve Ross, an MIT economist himself, “ ... is the most successful theory not only in finance, but in all of economics.” I’ve spent most of my professional life working on options theory, and I understand it well. More importantly, I understand its limitations in describing the behavior of complex human beings and markets via simple assumptions and mathematics. But limited though it is, finance is much more reliable than economics.
Economics is the study of how to utilize limited resources to achieve good ends. And good, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, defined by humans. But economists don’t agree with each other about ends or means. They can’t agree on the efficacy of money printing or austerity. They keep changing their minds every few years about conventional wisdom while at every instant appearing to be certain that they are right. My gripe with economists is not that their models don’t work well – they don’t, look at the role of central banks in the financial crisis – but that they seem so reluctant to acknowledge the riskiness of their advice. And yet, beware their fearsome unelected power. Anyone visiting from Mars last year and asking to be taken to our leader would undoubtedly expect to meet Bernanke.
As a result their public arguments have an incestuous yet masturbatory quality that is exhausting to follow. The only field more self-confidently but just as regularly wrong as economics is nutrition, whose recommendations to shun butter/margarine or red meat/carbohydrates regularly reverse themselves.
Natural scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists) have had frightful power, and not always used it well. But at least they can more or less agree about truth and efficacy. Economists cannot, except by using statistical regressions which are often flawed and prove little.Well then...
So I cannot currently bring myself to read over 600 pages by an economist. One day I do hope to read Piketty’s book....MORE
HT: The Big Picture
