RE MY POSTS RE INFLATION DEFLATION BOTH RED HERRINGS SEE PIKETTY CONVERGENCE

Convergence, a topic he avoids like the plague. Not destabilizing to Piketty.

Here he let this slip out: p 649, fn 22:  'furthermore inflation depends...especially international wage and price competition, which is currently damping down inflationary tendencies while driving asset prices higher.'

re Convergence: 'Never in the history of human conflict has so much been given away to so many by so few for so little so quickly.' This blog.

For him, convergence is a mechanical, and frankly, natural economic process resulting from largely mechanical globalization; whereas divergence, although mechanical, is exacerbated by political aberrations and needs economic and political treatment. 

Convergence, apparently, needs no treatment, and is, moreover, not mechanically susceptible to it.

What was either mechanical or natural about the recovery of Europe and Japan? What mechanical about the Marshall Plan? Why then wasn't the Morgenthau Plan as mechanical or natural as the Marshall Plan? The French wanted the Morgenthau Plan after all.....  

What was mechanical about the IMF, World Bank, Bretton woods, etc.?

What has been mechanical about the rise of China?

 In fairness to Piketty, he does at many places point out that there is nothing natural or spontaneous about certain economic phenomena re how shocks have been handled, etc., and that politics and other social sciences play a greater role than encompassed by mere economics. I was glad to see that he advocates a return to political economy.

Steingart said it best, in certain passages in The War For Wealth: nothing.

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