Are Economists Ready for Income Redistribution?

First off, we'll have to determine Piketty's royalties, then...*
Oh wait.
From the Fiscal Times:

When the Great Recession hit and it became clear that monetary policy alone would not be enough to prevent a severe, prolonged downturn, fiscal policy measures – a combination of tax cuts and new spending – were used to try to limit the damage to the economy. Unfortunately, macroeconomic research on fiscal policy was all but absent from the macroeconomics literature and, for the most part, policymakers were operating in the dark, basing decisions on what they believed to be true rather than on solid theoretical and empirical evidence. 

Fiscal policy will be needed again in the future, either in a severe downturn or perhaps to address the problem of growing inequality, and macroeconomists must do a better job of providing the advice that policymakers need to make informed fiscal policy decisions. 

Why was there so little attention to fiscal policy issues in the macroeconomics literature prior to the Great Recession? Why didn’t we have any idea, for example, of what government and tax multipliers are at the zero lower bound? Are they near zero as some people claimed, or, as others believed, much, much larger? Are expenditure multipliers bigger than tax multipliers?

Source: The New York Times

There are two reasons for the lack of attention to fiscal policy. First, many prominent macroeconomists – in large part those in control of which questions are considered interesting enough to warrant publication in the best journals – believed that the problem of large financial meltdowns of the type that led to the Great Depression had been solved.

There was no need to study fiscal policy, monetary policy alone would be enough to counter the mild fluctuations associated with the new era known as the Great Moderation (which many macroeconomists believed had been brought about by improvements in monetary policy, i.e. by their own research on these issues). Second, it would be a waste of time to study fiscal policy in any case since ideological differences in Congress prevented fiscal policy measures from being implemented....MORE

*Being a best-selling author isn't all that it used to be.

If Piketty earned 15% of the $35 cover price on the 200,000 copies sold, that works out to a bit over a million bucks.

Even at a 90% tax rate I don't think he's paying enough.
Oh wait...