It’s taken me a month to read it but Deirdre McCloskey’s essay on Piketty’s Capital is just as persuasive as you’d expect. Print it and read it with your family over Christmas!
The review doesn’t break any new ground but it is eloquent and engaging. Her central themes are: Read more
Hello New Zealand readers. Just giving you a heads up that tomorrow (Thursday, 23 October) there is a panel discussion on the Piketty book (Capital in the Twenty-First Century) and its relevance to New Zealand.
As I contributed to the related book of book reviews, and as this particular event is in Wellington (where I live), I’m on the panel. Here are the details which I stole from an email:
The event is at the Royal Society (11 Turnbull Street, Thordon) and begins at 5.30pm.Bernard Hickey is chairing the panel, with the other panellists being Geoff Bertram, Brian Easton, Prue Hyman, Max Rashbrooke and Cathy Wylie.The aim of the event is simply to have some broad and engaging discussion on the relevance of Piketty for New Zealand, with reference to the book being launched on the night.
And if it swings your boat, you can even join the Facebook event.
If you want to prepare beforehand, here is my long-form review (filled with typos – like honestly filled, it is a first draft that never went any further), here are some common misconceptions, and here is a list of other reviews.
Everywhere we turn nowadays people are talking about Ginis. And sadly, they are not misspelling Genie, they are talking about Gini coefficients.
The reason for this interest in Gini coefficient stems from the fact they are used to measure “inequality” in an income distribution – with books such as the Spirit Level made hay discussing the relationship between Gini coefficients and other social outcomes.
Now I’ve spent a bunch of time talking about the claims (eg for the Spirit Level directly I wrote this and this), but I’ve never written anything directly about the Gini coefficient. There is a good reason for this, while I understand it is a measure of dispersion in a distribution I still had to (and still need to) learn things about the measure and other measures.
However, let me discuss what the Gini coefficient is – or at least one of a multitude of different ways we can view a Gini coefficient.
Over at Dim Post I see Danyl is discussing the latest (2014) Household Income Report and Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century. Excellent – there are lots of important and interesting issues to discussing look at these sources.
However, in this instance the data he is using and his interpretation is sadly a bit off. I thought I’d discuss why this is here. Read more
James sent me the following, I have nothing to add:
Piketty's Capital: An Economist's Inequality Ideas Are All the Rage http://t.co/ncC6z97KDl via @BW @asymmetricinfo pic.twitter.com/QFOnqUlsiS
— Brad Tucker (@BradCTucker) May 29, 2014
I’d also point out that Piketty has discussed claims of data mistakes here:
Piketty reply decimates the FT. Summary: http://t.co/TEhJhc7YLh Piketty's blow-by-blow: http://t.co/GF7LIl0oMe Debate's over folks.
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) May 29, 2014
The key predictions did not rely on these perceived data errors in the first place – it is the framework for thinking about inequality that was of use, and which helped to create debate. A debate that seems to have moved past his explanations, and looks like it will lead to a lot more research – which is choicetastic!
FFS, this is probably the worst example of a physicist treating economists like idiots, and saying something both meaningless and already known, that I’ve seen for a while (via Marginal Revolution). Read more