(March 25, 2016) Three things are striking about the rise in economic inequality since the 1970s in the United States. (1) It doesn’t really matter which measure of income distribution we choose; they all show a rise in inequality. (2) There are many different competing possible explanations and interpretations. (3) We do not need to agree on the explanation to agree on what are sensible policies to lessen inequality.
Most of the reviews of Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century have already been written. But I thought it might be best to read it all the way through before offering my own thoughts on this book, which startlingly rose to the top of the best seller lists last April. It has taken me five months, but I finished it.
One of the things the book has in common with the Karl Marx’s Das Capital (1867) is that it serves as a rallying point for the many people who are passionately concerned about inequality, regardless whether they understand or agree with the specific arguments contained in the book in question. To be fair, much of what Marx wrote was bizarre and very little was based on careful economic statistics. Much of what Piketty says is based on careful economic statistics, and very little of it is bizarre.
My preceding blog post described how market-oriented mechanisms to address environmentally damaging emissions, particularly the cap-and-trade system for SO2 in the United States, have recently been overtaken by less efficient regulatory approaches such as renewables mandates. One reason is that Republicans — who originally were supporters of cap-and-trade — turned against it, even demonized it.
One can draw an interesting analogy between the evolution of Republican political attitudes toward market mechanisms in the area of federal environmental regulation and hostility to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The linchpin of the program is the attempt to make sure that all Americans have health insurance, via the individual mandate. But Obamacare is a market mechanism, in that health insurers and health care providers remain private and compete against each other.