T. Piketty - "Capital in the 21st century"

[Budja]

Ocekivano.

Excel error.

 

FT ide na sam izvor, tamo gde se svi slazu da je najveci doprinos.

Kreiranje nove Rogof-Rajnhart afere, cini se sa nesto slabijim argumentima, no vreme ce pokazati.

 

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/e1f343ca-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feabdc0.html#axzz32Tbqv13O

 

 

Piketty findings undercut by errors

By Chris Giles in London

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e1f343ca-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz32akOFd7A
 

The data underpinning Professor Piketty’s 577-page tome, which has dominated best-seller lists in recent weeks, contain a series of errors that skew his findings. The FT found mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets, similar to those which last year undermined the work on public debt and growth of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

The central theme of Prof Piketty’s work is that wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the first world war. The investigation undercuts this claim, indicating there is little evidence in Prof Piketty’s original sources to bear out the thesis that an increasing share of total wealth is held by the richest few.

[Prospero]

I Piketijev odgovor:
 

Piketty response to FT data concerns

May 23 19:00 | 15 comments | Share


Dear Chris,

I am happy to see that FT journalists are using the excel files that I have put on line! I would very much appreciate if you could publish this response along with your piece.
Let me first say that the reason why I put all excel files on line, including all the detailed excel formulas about data constructions and adjustments, is precisely because I want to promote an open and transparent debate about these important and sensitive measurement issues (if there was anything to hide, any “fat finger problem”, why would I put everything on line?).

Let me also say that I certainly agree that available data sources on wealth are much less systematic than for income. In fact, one of the main reasons why I am in favor of wealth taxation and automatic exchange of bank information is that this would be a way to develop more financial transparency and more reliable sources of information on wealth dynamics (even if the tax was charged at very low rates, which you might agree with).
For the time being, we have to do with what we have, that is, a very diverse and heterogeneous set of data sources on wealth: historical inheritance declarations and estate tax statistics, scarce property and wealth tax data, and household surveys with self-reported data on wealth (with typically a lot of under-reporting at the top). As I make clear in the book, in the on-line appendix, and in the many technical papers I have published on this topic, one needs to make a number of adjustments to the raw data sources so as to make them more homogenous over time and across countries. I have tried in the context of this book to make the most justified choices and arbitrages about data sources and adjustments. I have no doubt that my historical data series can be improved and will be improved in the future (this is why I put everything on line). In fact, the “World Top Incomes Database” (WTID) is set to become a “World Wealth and Income Database” in the coming years, and we will put on-line updated estimates covering more countries. But I would be very surprised if any of the substantive conclusion about the long run evolution of wealth distributions was much affected by these improvements.

For instance, my US series have already been extended and improved by an important new research paper by Emmanuel Saez (Berkeley) and Gabriel Zucman (LSE). This work was done after my book was written, so unfortunately I could not use it for my book. Saez and Zucman use much more systematic data than I used in my book, especially for the recent period. Also their series are constructed using a completely different data source and methodology (namely, the capitalisation method using capital income flows and income statements by asset class). The main results are available here: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014Slides.pdf.

As you can see by yourself, their results confirm and reinforce my own findings: the rise in top wealth shares in the US in recent decades has been even larger than what I show in my book.

In the attached graph, I compare their series with the approximate series that I provide in the book. As you can see by yourself, the general historical profiles are very similar. This is exactly what I expect as we collect more data in other countries as well: we will certainly improve upon my series and adjustments (some of which can certainly be discussed), but I don’t think this will have much of an impact on the general findings.
(see also this paper pp. 91-92 of pdf: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PikettyZucman2014HID.pdf)

Finally, let me say that my estimates on wealth concentration do not fully take into account offshore wealth, and are likely to err on the low side. I am certainly not trying to make the picture look darker than it it. As I make clear in chapter 12 of my book (see in particular table 12.1-12.2), top wealth holders have apparently been rising a lot faster average wealth in recent decades, at least according to the wealth rankings published in magazines such as Forbes. This is true not only in the US, but also in Britain and at the global level (see attached table). This is not well taken into account by wealth surveys and official statistics, including the recent statistics that were published for Britain. Of course, as I make clear in my book, wealth rankings published by magazines are far from being a perfectly reliable data source. But for the time being, this is what we have, and what we have suggests that the concentration of wealth at the top is rising pretty much everywhere. Of course, if the FT produces statistics and wealth rankings showing the opposite, I would be very interested to see these statistics, and I would be happy to change my conclusion! Please keep me posted.

Best, Thomas
_______________
Thomas Piketty
Ecole d’Economie de Paris/Paris School of Economics
Page personnelle : http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/

[Kampokei]

To jeste poslednji pasus, ali nije relevantan.  Neki od bodlovanih delova upravo govore o onome sto ste ti i Zaz pi pisali, to jest da li je posleratni period izuzetan ili ne. Sala-Martin ukazuje na cherrypicking u interpretaciji koju nudi Piketi.

 

Sala-Martin, profesor ekonomije na Columbia U, development je njegova nisa, jeste libekovac.

http://econ.columbia.edu/xavier-sala-i-martin

 

Pretpostavio sam da bi se Sala-i-Martin mogao javiti pre ili kasnije. Prvo, jer je sav cocky i nalozen (mislim, covek je svojevremeno, negde 2006, na svom sajtu izokola agitovao za Nobela za sebe). Drugo, jer Piketty vec negde na pocetku knjige (mnogo dalje nisam jos ni odmakao) pravi kriticku referencu na ideje Sala-i-Martina i Roberta Barroa o cross-country konvergenciji GDPa (kad kaze da to uopste ne mora da implicira bilo kakvu konvergenciju prihoda, sa cim se slazem).

[Budja]

I Piketijev odgovor:

 

 

Daj, okaci i detaljniju FT analizu, ja nemam pristup.

 

Gledam ovaj Piketijev attached graph, poredjenje razlicitih podataka.

Malo mu ga daje Piketi po intepretaciji. Meni to vise izgleda kao vrlo blag rastuci trend nego dramaticni rast.

 

Samo ona bela kockica daje jasan rast, ali ko ce ga znati da li je to pravi trend?

[Prospero]

May 23, 2014 7:00 pm

Piketty findings undercut by errors

By Chris Giles in London

 

 

 

Thomas Piketty’s book, ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, has been the publishing sensation of the year. Its thesis of rising inequality tapped into the zeitgeist and electrified the post-financial crisis public policy debate.

 

But, according to a Financial Times investigation, the rock-star French economist appears to have got his sums wrong.

 

The data underpinning Professor Piketty’s 577-page tome, which has dominated best-seller lists in recent weeks, contain a series of errors that skew his findings. The FT found mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets, similar to those which last year undermined the work on public debt and growth of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

 

The central theme of Prof Piketty’s work is that wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the first world war. The investigation undercuts this claim, indicating there is little evidence in Prof Piketty’s original sources to bear out the thesis that an increasing share of total wealth is held by the richest few.

 

Prof Piketty, 43, provides detailed sourcing for his estimates of wealth inequality in Europe and the US over the past 200 years. In his spreadsheets, however, there are transcription errors from the original sources and incorrect formulas. It also appears that some of the data are cherry-picked or constructed without an original source.

 

For example, once the FT cleaned up and simplified the data, the European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970. An independent specialist in measuring inequality shared the FT’s concerns.

 

Contacted by the FT, Prof Piketty said he had used “a very diverse and heterogeneous set of data sources ... [on which] one needs to make a number of adjustments to the raw data sources.

 

“I have no doubt that my historical data series can be improved and will be improved in the future ... but I would be very surprised if any of the substantive conclusion about the long-run evolution of wealth distributions was much affected by these improvements,” he said.

 

His contention to have found a “central contradiction of capitalism” has in recent months made him a hero of the left. Although his conclusions have stirred controversy, there has, until now, been near unanimous praise for the quality of his statistical work.

 

On a tour of the US last month, Prof Piketty met Jacob Lew, US Treasury secretary, gave a presentation to the White House Council of Economic Advisers and lectured at the International Monetary Fund and the UN.

 

Nobel prize-winning economists have heaped praised on Mr Piketty’s work. Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton University, said it was safe to say the book “will be the most important economics book of the year – and maybe of the decade”.

 

Professor Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University said Prof Piketty’s “fundamental contribution” was the provision of data on the distribution of wealth. It was the subject of laudatory reviews in the Financial Times and other publications.

 

In Britain, Ed Miliband, Labour leader, told the Evening Standard: “I’m in the early stages of the book. In a way, he is symptomatic of what people are actually feeling”.

 

In his response to the FT, Prof Piketty said that more recent data not in his work showed “the rise in top wealth shares in the US in recent decades has been even larger than what I show in my book”.

 

 

 

May 23, 2014 7:00 pm

 

Thomas Piketty’s exhaustive inequality data turn out to be flawed

By Chris Giles and Ferdinando Giugliano

 

 

 

Thomas Piketty is in no doubt that data underpin the conclusions of his best selling economics book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”.

 

He writes, in the introduction: “Compared with previous works, one reason why this book stands out is that I have made an effort to collect as complete and consistent a set of historical sources as possible in order to study the dynamics of income and wealth distribution over the long run”.

 

While the conclusions of his work, including his call for an international wealth tax, have stirred controversy among academics, commentators and policy makers, even his critics have generally praised the ambition and quality of the data presented in the text.

 

Reviewing the book this month, Lord Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, said, “the principal weakness of the book is that the carefully assembled data do not live up to Piketty’s rhetoric about the nature of capitalism”.

 

The sense of diligence in Professor Piketty’s compilation of trends in wealth is bolstered by an online technical annex and spreadsheets containing the data, with sources.

 

An investigation by the Financial Times, however, has revealed many unexplained data entries and errors in the figures underlying some of the book’s key charts.

 

These are sufficiently serious to undermine Prof Piketty’s claim that the share of wealth owned by the richest in society has been rising and “the reason why wealth today is not as unequally distributed as in the past is simply that not enough time has passed since 1945”.

 

After referring back to the original data sources, the investigation found numerous mistakes in Prof Piketty’s work: simple fat-finger errors of transcription; suboptimal averaging techniques; multiple unexplained adjustments to the numbers; data entries with no sourcing, unexplained use of different time periods and inconsistent uses of source data.

 

Together, the flawed data produce long historical trends on wealth inequality that appear more comprehensive than the source data allows, providing spurious support to Prof Piketty’s conclusion that the “central contradiction of capitalism” is the inexorable concentration of wealth among the richest individuals.

Once the data are cleaned and simplified the European results do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970.

 

The US source data are also too inconsistent to draw a single long series. But when the individual sources are graphed, none of them supports the view that the wealth share of the top 1 per cent has increased in the past few decades. There is some evidence of a rise in the top 10 per cent wealth share since 1970.

 

 

The FT uncovered several types of defect.

 

One apparent example of straightforward transcription error in Prof Piketty’s spreadsheet is the Swedish entry for 1920. The economist appears to have incorrectly copied the data from the 1908 line in the original source.

A second class of problems relates to unexplained alterations of the original source data. Prof Piketty adjusts his own French data on wealth inequality at death to obtain inequality among the living. However, he used a larger adjustment scale for 1910 than for all the other years, without explaining why.

 

In the UK data, instead of using his source for the wealth of the top 10 per cent population during the 19th century, Prof Piketty inexplicably adds 26 percentage points to the wealth share of the top 1 per cent for 1870 and 28 percentage points for 1810.

 

A third problem is that when averaging different countries to estimate wealth in Europe, Prof Piketty gives the same weight to Sweden as to France and the UK – even though it only has one-seventh of the population.

There are also inconsistencies with the years chosen for comparison. For Sweden, the academic uses data from 2004 to represent those from 2000, even though the source data itself includes an estimate for 2000.

 

Prof Piketty’s documents explaining his sources and methods, suggest that he uses similar data from death duty records around the world. In fact, he interchanges between such source material and surveys of the living, which often give very different answers. Switching between the two sorts of data series, particularly for the US is important to his results.

 

Some of the biggest defects relate to the UK data, where his original sources consistently show very large declines of near 10 percentage points in wealth held by the rich in the highly inflationary 1970s.

Conversely, Prof Piketty shows the super rich held a greater share of wealth by 1980 and the top 10 per cent saw their share fall only 1.5 percentage points.

 

The official data series that Prof Piketty says he used for the UK after 1980 shows little increase in inequality over the next 30 years, while his figures show a steep rise.

 

 

[kim_philby]

ovo je kao globalno zagrevanje :D

 

pa dobro tako i treba piketiju kada spasava kapitalizam

[Budja]

NYT, neocekivano, balansiran.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/upshot/did-piketty-get-his-math-wrong.html?rref=upshot

 

 

Did Thomas Piketty Get His Math Wrong?

 

MAY 23, 2014

 

One of the most common approaches for people writing about Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book “Capital in the 21st Century,” about global inequality, has been to critique his theories and predictions while effusively praising his data collection. Mr. Piketty, after all, did yeoman’s work compiling data from tax and other records to try to determine a history of wealth inequality around the world.

But now The Financial Times is throwing doubt on the data at the core of Mr. Piketty’s work, in a blockbuster report that will open a new debate on how reliable the book’s excavation of historical patterns of income and wealth truly are. At issue: Is the most influential economics book of the year built on bad math?

 

“The central theme of Prof Piketty’s work is that wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the first world war,” writes Chris Giles, the economics editor of The Financial Times. “The investigation undercuts this claim, indicating there is little evidence in Prof Piketty’s original sources to bear out the thesis that an increasing share of total wealth is held by the richest few.”

 

Here is a detailed walk-through of the problems Mr. Giles alleges, and Mr. Piketty’s detailed response. We have contacted Mr. Piketty, a French economist, and his publisher, Harvard University Press, for further comment. We will update this item with any response.

The Financial Times draws comparisons with the spreadsheet and other errors discovered last year that undermined work by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff on the relationship between government debt and growth. But what problems did The Financial Times discover and how much do they potentially undermine Mr. Piketty’s book?

Some of the issues identified by Mr. Giles appear to be clear-cut errors, and others are more in the realm of judgment calls in analyzing data that may not be fully explained by Mr. Piketty but are not necessarily wrong. Here are some of the specific potential problems that The Financial Times identifies and how they may come to bear on how we think about wealth, inequality and Mr. Piketty’s exploration of it.

Simple data errors. In the Reinhart-Rogoff case, a simple math error in an Excel spreadsheet had a relatively small impact on their final result, but it generated an outsize share of the attention to a broader critique of their data.

Mr. Giles identifies a couple of places where Mr. Piketty’s spreadsheets include what appear to be incorrect numbers, pulling a number for share of wealth held by the top 1 percent in Sweden from 1908 instead of the 1920 level that was intended. These errors may be embarrassing — and easy to understand — but can also be inevitable when pulling thousands of data points together as part of a large study. It is not clear that they have a major impact on Mr. Piketty’s conclusion, though it would be unsurprising, based on the Reinhart-Rogoff experience, if they get significant attention.

Arbitrary or unexplained changes. Mr. Giles examined many of the formulas in Mr. Piketty’s spreadsheets and found unexplained modifications to some of the data points, for example adding two percentage points to the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent in the United States in 1970, and calculating the share of British wealth held by the top 10 percent in 1870 by adding seemingly arbitrary numbers to the share held by the top 1 percent.

Questionable methods to arrive at conclusions. Mr. Giles notes that Mr. Piketty arrives at estimates of European wealth inequality by averaging results for three countries where he has data, Britain, France, and Sweden, arguing that this is a poor way to weight because of Sweden’s much smaller population.

More significantly, Mr. Giles argues that Mr. Piketty constructed data where there is no cited source. For example, in data for the top 10 percent wealth share in the United States before 1950, “none of the sources Prof. Piketty uses contain these numbers, hence he assumes the top 10 percent wealth share is his estimate for the top 1 percent share plus 36 percentage points,” he wrote. “However, there is no explanation for this number, nor why it should stay constant over time.”

Mr. Giles also argues that Mr. Piketty combines different data sources arbitrarily, using surveys of households in the United States versus estate tax data for Britain, for example.

 

But does it matter? Mr. Giles attempts to reconstruct estimates of wealth inequality, correcting for what he describes as Mr. Piketty’s errors. He finds significantly less evidence of a rising disparity.

Speaking of Britain, for example, Mr. Giles writes, “There seems to be little consistent evidence of any upward trend in wealth inequality of the top 1 percent.” He further writes that if one incorporates the different British data into numbers for Europe as a whole, and weights by population instead of weighting Britain, France and Sweden equally, “there is no sign that wealth inequality in Europe is rising again.”

That is a damning conclusion, and if it holds up to scrutiny, would significantly undermine the case Mr. Piketty mounts. But Mr. Giles himself writes that “while this post is clear about what is wrong with Piketty’s charts, it is much less certain about the truth.”

Mr. Piketty, in his response to The Financial Times, notes that he voluntarily posted his data files online for the world to see and question. And he added that subsequent work using other methodologies and more systematic data had also found a significant rise in wealth inequality in recent decades.

Moreover, writes Mr. Piketty, “as I make clear in the book, in the online appendix, and in the many technical papers I have written on this topic, one needs to make a number of adjustments to the raw data sources so as to make them more homogeneous over time and across countries.” He adds, “I have tried in the context of this book to make the most justified choices and arbitrages about data sources and adjustments. I have no doubt that my historical data series can be improved and will be improved in the future (this is why I put everything online).”

He does not specifically address the accusations of data-entry errors or give detailed responses to some of Mr. Giles’s criticisms about questionable assumptions that underlie Mr. Piketty’s broader work. He answers with an almost jovial tone: “Of course, if the FT produces statistics and wealth rankings showing the opposite [of his results], I would be very interested to see these statistics, and I would be happy to change my conclusion! Please keep me posted.”

It is always a difficult challenge trying to examine economic history given spotty data from the past and variations in how different countries collect and define data. The new Financial Times report will surely be examined by specialists and start an important debate over what we really know about wealth inequality — and whether the best-selling economics book of the year gets its figures right.

 

I Wolferson (Michigan)

 

 

Of course, one can’t help but be reminded of the kerfuffle about an earlier research paper written by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. I fear the similarities are deeper than most realize, with partisans already engaged in gaining political mileage out of sloganeering about fairly inconsequential spreadsheet errors, rather than digging more deeply into what the data actually say. The difference is that this time the political football is an empirical result that is an article of faith among liberals, rather than conservatives. Beyond that, though, it’s different mudslingers, but similar mud.

 

Kim je u pravu, ko globalno zagrevanje.

 

A i mogucnost da konzerve udare po Piketiju na nacin na koji su Rajnhart i Rogof bili razapeti, sa pravom.

 

Naravoucenije: Don t trust research assistants.

 

 

I poruka dva, ako ova debata o podacima zazivi, to je najbolji nacin da se izbegne debata. Ja ne verujem tvojim brojevima, ti ne verujes mojim, ergo, nista ne ugrozava nas ideoloski stav.

[Prospero]

FT video, okačen na YT:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Qjf36n5A8

[Kampokei]

Uh, ton je dosta ostriji nego sto mi se cinilo citajuc danas o ovome.

[Budja]

 Meni se cini da je rec pre o tome da je FT izabrao strategiju - imamo podatke manje-vise slicne kao Piketi, ali cemo potpuno  drugacije da ih interpretiramo.

 

Ako Piketi tvrdi raste wealth nejednakost, sada kada vidim grafove, to je onako malo jaka tvrdnja za vrlo blag trend koji se uocava u poslednjim decenijama. Apsolutno nista dramaticno.

[hazard]

http://trzisnoresenje.blogspot.ch/2014/05/piketty.html

 

 

Piketty

posted by Slaviša Tasić at Saturday, May 24, 2014

 

Nikako da ovde pomenemo Thomasa Pikettyja i njegovu knjigu Kapital u 21. veku koja je posle prevođenja na engleski u poslednjih par meseci privukla mnogo pažnje i bila u centru debate o ključnim ekonomskim i ideološkim pitanjima. Ja knjigu nisam čitao i čak mi za sada i nije na listi prioriteta iz ratloga koji se svi mogu podvesti pod oportuniteti troškak. Ali sam čitao njegove radove o istim stvarima i mada knjiga ima obuhvatnije podatke i dalekosežnije zaključke, znam o čemu se tu radi. Takođe, u poslednjih par meseci pročitao sam veliki broj prikaza. Ne sećam se da je neka knjiga izazvala toliki broj kvalitetnih - pozitivnih i negativnih - prikaza, a znam da je još nekoliko na putu. Usudiću se zato da dam par komentara na osnovu onoga što znam.

Prvo, dopada mi se pristup. U doba Freakonomics akademije, Piketty je odabrao relevantnu temu, o njoj ima velike ideje i njih je iskazao velikom knjigom -- u stilu Marksa, Mizesa ili Kejnsa. Jeste i prethodno objavio radove, ali lepo je videti da se knjige sa ambicijom revolucionarnih još uvek pišu. Piketty je bez sumnje i vredno radio, prikupio veliki broj podataka iz istorijskih arhiva i to je hvale vredno samo po sebi.

 

Glavni zaključak Pikettyja je da stopa prinosa na kapital istorijski viša od rasta dohodka (r>g). Zbog toga, bogatstvo vlasnika kapitala uvećeva se po višoj stopi (6%) od rasta dohotka ljudi koji rade za platu (3%), što znači da se razlike u bogatstvu mogu samo povećavati. I u prošlosti je to bio slučaj, ali su katastrofe i ratovi u prvom delu 20. veka uništili dosta kapitala pa je trend bio prekinut i izokrenut. Ali danas je toga sve manje i zato su se u poslednjih nekoliko decenija razlike u bogatsvu povećavale. I to će nastaviti da se dešava -- što je po Pikettyju fundamentalna greška kapitalizma.

Vidite kako ovo miriše na klasične radova Malthusa i posebno Marxa. U pitanju su neminovne istorijske zakonitosti. Evo šta su neki konkretniji problemi sa Pikettijem -- svi već primećeni od strane drugih koji su napisale prikaze.

 

David Brooks iz NY Timesa je cinično ali mislim ispravno primetio šta je glavni problem sa aktualizacijom problema imovinskih nejednakosti. Najnezadovoljniji nejednakostima u kapitalizmu danas nisu siromašni, već intelektualci više srednje klase. Kapitalizam je samo u poslednjih par decenija podigao iz siromaštva i spasao gladi na stotine miliona ljudi širom sveta, u Kini i Indiji najočiglednije. Ali mnogi boljestojeći slojevi u bogatim zemljama propuštaju to da vide ili ih to manje interesuje. Čini se da je ljudima kao Piketty važnije da spreče milionske bonuse CEO-ova, čak i ako je cena tog pristupa usporavanje globalnog rasta i podizanje dohotka za stotine miliona stvarno siromašnih. Ovo je deo opšteg trenda. Isti David Brooks je pre par godina imao dobar članak o ljudima kojima je popunjena Obamina administracija. To su srednje bogati ljudi, često milioneri -- ljubomorni na milijardere. Ironično, relativno bogati su ti koji su danas nezadovoljni, jer im smetaju oni još bogatiji.  Setite se i da okupatori Wall Streeta od pre par godina nisu bili siromašni i obespravljeni, već ljudi sa Mac kompjuterima i-padovima, kojima su smetali još bogatiji bankari.

 

Tyler Cowen je primetio jedan sasvim konkretan propust. Piketty uzima da je stopa prinosa na kapital viša od rasta dohotka, ali zaboravlja da ta stopa prinosa podrazumeva neki rizik. Ako danas hoćete sigurno da investirate u prvoklasne državne obveznice, dobićete stopu prinosa nižu od stope inflacije -- drugim rečima, dobićete negativan prinos. Takva je stopa prinosa na kapital uglavnom očišćena od rizika. A na berzi i u svim drugim ulaganjima kapitala rizik je veći. Neko je na berzi rizičnijim ulaganjima zaradio više, ali je neko zato i izgubio sve.

A čak i taj prosečan prinos na kapital od 6% je istorijski; govoriti o zakonitosti na osnovu toga je samo ekstrapolacija. A ekstrapolacije su opasne. Ja recimo uopšte nisam siguran da će i u budućnosti ulaganje u akcije isplatiti više od ulaganja u obveznice ili da će stopa rasta kapitala biti veća od stope ekonomskog rasta.

 

Dalje, neko je primetio da bi na osnovu iste zakonitosti koju dokumentije Piketty morao da se zalaže za privatizaciju penzionih fondova.  Ako je posedovanje kapitala put ka bogatstvu, zašto ne omogućiti radnicima da ulažu u formaciju sopstvenog kapitala putem penzione štednje? Umesto toga, država im danas putem doprinosa oduzima dohodak koji bi tako mogli uložiti i onemogućava ih da profitiraju od onih 6% . Problem je što se Piketty u isto vreme izjasnio protiv privatnih penzionih fondova. Neko bi mogao posumnjati da je u pitanju ideologija.

I konačno, iz Financial Timesa, inače levo naherenog, sada tvrde da su Pikettyjevi podaci puni grešaka koje drastično revidiraju zaključke. Koliko vidim, FT implicira da su bar neke od ovih grešaka namerne jer vode u zaključke koje je Piketty želeo da dobije, posebno da su imovinske razlike sve veće i veće. Piketty je nešto odgovorio, ali rasprava o tome u suštini tek počinje i videćemo šte će izaći iz toga narednih dana.

Da ponovim, prikazi ove knjige su nenadmašni -- od Branka Milanovića (pozitivan) i Jamiea Galbraighta (negativan) na levici, preko Roberta Solowa,  Larryja Summersa (mešoviti), do Tylera Cowena (uglavnom negativan i možda najbolji prikaz), a ima i mnogih drugih. Da ih sada ne tražim ponovo, koga interesuju može ih lako naći online.

 

bold 1 - nisam nikada razmisljao o tome na taj nacin, i ako sam sam cesto koristio kao argument za "odbranu" kapitalizma to vadjenje ljudi iz siromastva u Kini itd. No sada kad razmislim - jeste, glavne kritike kapitalizma, i gro podrske tim kritikama, ne dolaze od najsiromasnijih iz treceg sveta vec uglavnom od srednje klase na zapadu. Pa se postavlja pitanje, da li su boljke savremenog kapitalizma u smislu nejednakosti zbilja svetski problem, ili to samo kuka zapadna srednja klasa cije je imovinsko stanje nesto opalo u prethodnih par decenija?

 

 

bold 2 - ovo se nadovezuje na ono sto sam ranije pitao ovde o mobilnosti - dakle neko moze da nasledi 100 miliona dolara i investira pogresnu stvar i pukne i izgubi sve (ili ostane recimo sa milion ili 10 miliona dolara), dok istovremeno neko moze da ulozi daleko skromniju ustedjevinu (ili nasledtsvo od babe) od 100 hiljada dolara i da od toga napravi milion ili 10 miliona i izjednacio se sa ovim prvim ili ga je presisao. "Nejednakost" na papiru ostaje skoro ista ali su dvojica zamenila pozicije. A prosecni prinos na kapital je opet isti, on ne vidi te individualne price.

 

 

bold 3 - lepo primeceno. Covek je ocigledno "levo nasadjen" sto je skroz legitimno, nego meni je malo veci problem sto on izgleda (rekao bi po prikazima i diskusiji o knjizi, nisam citao) ispise stotine i stotine strana da bi jedan uzasno kompleksan sistem (ekonomija kroz vekove) sveo na jednu nejednakost - r > g - i to jos proglasio za neku nepromenjivu zakonitost. Meni to sve izgleda kao jako naivan zakljucak, no nije da nisam navikao na to da ekonomisti donose jako naivne zakljuce.

[MancMellow]

 

 

Najnezadovoljniji nejednakostima u kapitalizmu danas nisu siromašni, već intelektualci više srednje klase. Kapitalizam je samo u poslednjih par decenija podigao iz siromaštva i spasao gladi na stotine miliona ljudi širom sveta, u Kini

 

multidisciplinarnost je uginula. sad svi nazad na svoje radne zadatke

[kim_philby]

hazarde da sam imalo nalik niskostima na koje ste ti i slicni tebi spremni na ovom forumu ja bih ovo okacio na bisere u sekciji 'knjiga o milutinu - privreda'.

 

 

Sent from Bender's iPad using Tapatalk

[Takeshi]

That Big Financial Times Story on Errors in Piketty's Data is Overrated

 

Piketty fits data to this theory, but does not depend on it. Piketty’s theory—right or wrong—is largely unaffected by these results.

[Takeshi]

btw, super je ovo kako kapitalizam pomaze radnicima i seljacima u komunistickoj kini. oduzmes im sva prava, pa postanu konkurentniji na svetskom trzistu i privlacniji investitorima.