Comment by unknown_apostle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unknown_apostle | Hacker News Reader

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unknown_apostle

Piketty's book contains a correlation-implies-causation statistics-driven narrative to pitch yet another tax increase.

Economics In One Lesson is an exercise in logic, showing that many popular economic policies are flawed or will necessarily have non-obvious side effects.

EIOL is also deliberately written to be an easy read.

It's hard to compare the two.

(In the unlikely case anyone cares, my personal take on Piketty: wealth inequality doesn't matter unless you think jealousy is a matter of public policy. Wealth inequality is an inevitable consequence of progress. What matters is whether the wealthy can loose their wealth due to their own mistakes, and whether wealth inequality implies legal inequality. Private profits and public risks, bailouts, legislation a la tete du client, bribes, lobbying, monopolies, special tax agreements, propping up markets, complicated laws, ... that's how the 99% get screwed. Taxes allow the government to function. They cannot "counterbalance" the legal privileges of the 1%.)

I think wealth inequality matters, but not only from a moral standpoint:

From wikipedia on Trickle-down economics:

> A 2015 report by the International Monetary Fund argues that there is no trickle-down effect as the rich get richer:

>> [I]f the income share of the top 20 percent (the rich) increases, then GDP growth actually declines over the medium term, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down. In contrast, an increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with higher GDP growth.[19]

The other way of looking at it is that Piketty is a popularisation of serious piece academic research, however flawed some of its data processing and conclusions may be, whereas Economics in One Lesson is a pamphlet beating straw men to death with "analysis" that's beneath simplistic in many parts and flatly wrong in some of the others (e.g "for every public job created...a private job has been destroyed somewhere else")

The one thing they have in common is both being pretty polemical in tone.

"What is seen and what is not seen”; tracing the consequences of a policy to all groups affected. These are basic economic truths and skills that are extremely important to impart on kids and young adults. Skills that many adults miss.

Just like “I Pencil” delivers the crucial, uplifting insight that complex economic cooperation spontaneously emerges everywhere. This order will exist prior to and regardless of any political system.

Keeping these broad insights front and center at all times, does not imply that you have to reject every proposed intervention a priori. But if you know that every intervention will have side effects and can backfire because of the sheer complexity of the order, even when meaning well, you will naturally be much more careful and skeptical.

Which in my opinion is really a very, very, very good thing. Especially in this day and age, where the spontaneous order is more complex than ever and where government is once again very big, technocratic and e.g. willing to "clamp" macro economic variables.

I also quite simply disagree that EIOL is “beneath simplistic”. If the kids are interested in economics, they should obviously read much more than just these texts.

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