Professor
Great stuff. Thanks for this post.
Economics.I agree with almost all of it.
One wonders if the macro course went back and hit Ricardo and Smith. I am sure it did. The font et origine of the free market concept.
This was one of the passages I noticed because I took up Piketty's work after reading your posts...
"It began with a simple insight, one I think that was also at the foundation of the first Capital, by Karl Marx: capital tends to accumulate faster than the rate of economic growth. That's another way of saying that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Piketty paraphrase
This is really, in recent decades, a point about the top .1%. What about the other 99.9?
As I noted on my posts, there are other implications...The capital that accumulates most is increasingly dispersed to only the very highest elites everywhere, not to the middle 90 or so %. The wealthier societies will see, and are beginning to see, an enormous drain of prosperity, over time, from the convergence of average or median incomes.
Capital accumulates faster than economic growth, true enough.
For the middle 90% in the West this spells not merely stagnation but steep decline, going forward, as higher average incomes inexorably converge toward lower ones. The lower global incomes, believe me, are incredibly low, and are shared by billions of people, far outnumbering Western poor.
I have posted some notes on this topic on my site.
All the best
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