Stiglitz, Piketty and the Burden of Capital
When we hear the word “capital” we immediately associate it with Marx. Writing on this subject calls for a challenging confrontation that, however, did not deter the young economist Thomas Piketty when he undertook the mammoth task of writing his book entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century (the italian edition will be published by Bompiani) which, after the success of the original French edition, took the American bookstores by storm with an English translation published by Harvard University Press (2014), becoming top of the bestseller list with over 200,000 copies sold.
A huge
success for a book on the subject of economics, which has the merit of being
written in easily understandable language, although based on voluminous
research data on the conditions of ninety countries around the world. Although
the Financial Times (May 23) contested
its empirical data, it is clear that economic inequality is on the increase.
Piketty is
not a Marxist (despite the title) and is keen to point out that fundamentally
he is a liberal. “I am a defender of the free market and private property – he
states – but there are limits to what markets can do”.
Received
with positive comments from critics and experts, Piketty’s book emphasises the
growing concerns of the conservative side regarding an economic practice that
has serious consequences on the lives of millions of people and is likely to
cause irreversible damage to society.
His basic
theory, which is very similar in many respects to that of the Nobel
Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (The
Price of Inequality, 2013), is that inequality is growing exponentially and
this uncontrollable growth will kill capitalism. Such inequality has become
politically and economically unsustainable, unless drastic measures are taken
to redistribute wealth through hefty taxation.
It is indeed curious that two scholars who so
far apart in terms of education, age and culture – Stiglitz, American, born in
1943, adviser to the World Bank, and Piketty, French, born in 1971 – should
come to the same conclusions, where it seems that inequality is to be fought
against, not so much for the apparent injustice of human conditions, but for
the damage it can cause to the economic system.2014 © Carlo Bordoni
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