mercoledì 4 giugno 2014

Capital in the XXI.th Century

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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