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It's Time to Discard Piketty's Inequality Statistics
- coldtea 2y ago>After accounting for transfers and taxes (something that Piketty and Saez fail to do), Auten and Splinter find virtually no changes since 1960. That's enough to discard them based on incompatibility with basic observed reality.
- slwvx 2y agoGini coefficient data from Our World in Data [1] agrees with Piketty: Inequality has been increasing since the 1980s (likely from Reagan's tax cuts on the rich). I think that Piketty's data is right, but even if he's not, I certainly buy his argument that when r>g, inequality increases [2]. We have better protection against viruses and other diseases, we have better tech; why are we are willing to tolerate the higher or even the same level of inequality? We could lower inequality and make everyone richer [3]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce... [3] https://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue95/Roth95.pdf https://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue95/Roth95.pdf