But his results are just so convenient and sound so cool. How can we discard them for something as silly as being totally wrong?
If I'm wrong, mind citing the correct sources?
I'm also agreeing with Taleb that the specific facts don't support Piketty, yet no one even discusses them. They just appeal to the zeitgeist. Somehow Piketty can survive Taleb and Rognlie knocking down what he asserts to be his core claims, as well as Milanovic showing that his work is hopelessly myopic (Piketty mentions Balzac and Jane Austen more than China and India). Specific facts don't matter, only the mood does.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-P...
[2]: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014Fig...
That word is the problem. It means something different for every person. To you it means one thing, to him it means another. When people criticize capitalism their arguments are always convincing because you project your own negative connotations into the word.
People say this, yet when I have traveled in some of the poorest countries in the world (Zambia and Nepal for example) they seem a lot more capitalistic than Europe / the US. It seems to bring some people wealth at the expense of others.
Right. Which is why when I kill someone, I go to jail, and when George Bush attacks a country, the crickets chirp.
> tearing it down because it is the Establishment and tearing down the Establishment is cool is counterproductive.
More importantly, it's a straw man.
edit: if anyone is seriously debating that's a straw man, use your words.
Unprecedented equality means that in a capitalistic (Western) society almost everybody eats a hot meal everyday day, has free time to enjoy, has an assortment of clothes, furniture and things, has a place to live with running water and electricity and appliances that run with said electricity.
All things that only the richest people could dream of enjoying just a couple of centuries ago.
That's an achievement of a hockey-stick rise in exploitation of fossil fuels and energy use per capita, not some esoterically defined system called capitalism.
Just about the only core tenet of capitalism are strong protections of property rights. All of the negatives typically associated with capitalism are due to failures in regulation (over or under) and the irrationality of human beings and their policies.
That simple claim would also not imply the conclusions you claim, namely that some global disincentive for saving is needed.
What specific claims must one refute to prove Piketty wrong? Or can one refute every claim, yet Piketty will still be part of the zeitgeist?
I will provide others when I'm not on mobile. You can also Google "Piketty rognlie" and it'll be near the top.
FYI, I believe this is the paper you were referring to: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.1791.pdf
The gist of the paper as far as I can tell is that when sampling fat-tailed distributions, it's easy to 'miss' outliers on the tail that would significantly change the average observed. So in Piketty's historical analysis, the rise in inequality might simply be due to better samples as data becomes easier to get. If you actually read the book, though, it's not clear that data became uniformly better over time---there's some indication that recent data actually became worse. It's also clear from the book that Piketty's conclusion wasn't based solely on aggregations of equality data, but also historical returns on capital that would not be subject to Taleb's bias. In short, at best, Taleb offers an alternative explanation for the historical inequality data. More of a caveat than a refutation.