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The piece seems to attack Piketty for not explaining why capital accumulation rates don't diminish, but then ignores the arguments presented; namely that capita

The piece seems to attack Piketty for not explaining why capital accumulation rates don't diminish, but then ignores the arguments presented; namely that capital accumulation allows privileged access to the political system.

alexqgb 13y ago
A failure to accept the mere possibility of institutional corruption in free market enterprises was the defining failure of the Greenspan era. Regulators working through the '90s and the '00s could not have turned a blinder eye to the deleterious effects of their own capture on account of having no more blind eyes to turn. This was due, in large part, to the efforts of academic economists who laid the intellectual groundwork for deregulation of the financial industry. Many members of the economic profession have yet to emerge from the fog of idiocy, corruption, and denial that let to / resulted from the faith misplaced in their malarky - much of which boiled down to the "wisdom" of Ayn Rand, thinly veiled. The sum of Randian-in-Chief Greenspan's concessions to reality can be found here. Needless to say, it's a pretty brief read. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.h... For a more extended piece of outrage - which really centers on the corruption of university economics departments - see "Inside Job", which won a (richly deserved) Oscar and which can be downloaded here: http://vimeo.com/57527797 http://vimeo.com/57527797 You can also watch the final 20 minutes (which is the most searing part, as well the section that focuses on the domain of academic economists) here: http://vimeo.com/20170617 http://vimeo.com/20170617 And you can read a bit more about the film here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film) I have nothing to do with the making or selling of this film, by the way. I just think it's one of the sharpest accounts to emerge from the Fiasco of '08.

alexqgb 13y ago

A failure to accept the mere possibility of institutional corruption in free market enterprises was the defining failure of the Greenspan era. Regulators working through the '90s and the '00s could not have turned a blinder eye to the deleterious effects of their own capture on account of having no more blind eyes to turn. This was due, in large part, to the efforts of academic economists who laid the intellectual groundwork for deregulation of the financial industry. Many members of the economic profession have yet to emerge from the fog of idiocy, corruption, and denial that let to / resulted from the faith misplaced in their malarky - much of which boiled down to the "wisdom" of Ayn Rand, thinly veiled. The sum of Randian-in-Chief Greenspan's concessions to reality can be found here. Needless to say, it's a pretty brief read. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.h... For a more extended piece of outrage - which really centers on the corruption of university economics departments - see "Inside Job", which won a (richly deserved) Oscar and which can be downloaded here: http://vimeo.com/57527797 http://vimeo.com/57527797 You can also watch the final 20 minutes (which is the most searing part, as well the section that focuses on the domain of academic economists) here: http://vimeo.com/20170617 http://vimeo.com/20170617 And you can read a bit more about the film here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film) I have nothing to do with the making or selling of this film, by the way. I just think it's one of the sharpest accounts to emerge from the Fiasco of '08.