April 2015

Misrepresenting the Austrian “revival”

Janek Wasserman has an article up at HNN, purporting to correct what he portrays as a “dogmatic” appropriation of the historical Austrian school of economic thought by American libertarians, free-marketeers, and business interests since the mid 20th century. Steve Horwitz has written a thorough retort of Wasserman’s argument, taking him to task for neglecting to do even a

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How to manufacture rising inequality, Piketty-style

Since quite a few of Thomas Piketty’s followers are still convinced that he has empirically demonstrated a rise in wealth inequality in the past 30 years, I put together the following breakdown which illustrates how he constructed the famous “U-shape” in his Figure 10.5. As may be readily seen, neither the Kopczuk-Saez (2004) series nor of the

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