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 […]
150 years ago this week an unusual discussion took place at the White House. On a mid-April morning Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler met with Abraham Lincoln to discuss what Butler later recounted as a proposal to resettle several thousand freed slaves on the Isthmus of Panama. It would prove to be their final encounter, as Lincoln
Lincoln and the case for Ben Butler’s Colonization Story Read More »
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
How to manufacture rising inequality, Piketty-style Read More »
My positions on global warming, in brief: Is it happening? Probably. At what rate is it happening? Very gradually, due in large part to the earth’s resilient absorption capacity. What about the climate change models? All the alarmist ones have failed to pan out, and quite a few of the alarmist ones are politicized beyond
A few thoughts on Global Warming and “climate justice” Read More »
Paul Krugman has been on a particularly nasty kick this week over inflation. At issue are a series of predictions of an impending acceleration of inflation made by a number of economists on “the right” (most notably Alan Meltzer) over the past six year, none of which have played out as of yet. It is entirely
In a previous post, I noted that one of the stranger characteristics of the larger body of inequality literature produced by Thomas Piketty and two of his frequent collaborators, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, seems to be a tendency of their arguments to invariably end up at the same place: a call for high progressive taxation. This was
Last Saturday marked the 150th anniversary of the day the 13th Amendment passed the House of Representatives, securing its submission to the states for ratification. This momentous event – marking the abolition of slavery in the United States – has received increased attention in light of the Civil War sesquicentennial, as well as its 2012 dramatization
Thaddeus Stevens, Colonization, and the 13th Amendment Read More »
Most of my work on Capital in the 21st Century, including the new paper in the Journal of Private Enterprise, has concentrated on data problems in Thomas Piketty’s consideration of the United States. This was an editorial decision made out of space limitations and the U.S. focus of much of the discussion around the book. Since Chris Giles’
My previous posts on the data problems in Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century have focused almost entirely on errors contained within his data charts and files. But what happens when one tries to reconstruct those files? To find out, I conducted a simple experiment using Piketty’s Figure 10.5 – the widely cited depiction of
A brief note, as my last post seems to have touched a very raw nerve with one of the crankier denizens of the economics blogosphere. I remarked very specifically at the outset of my last post that “[Daniel] Kuehn isn’t exactly the most lucid writer in the economics blogosphere, so it’s sometimes difficult to discern what he is