One of the foundations of liberal belief for many years now has been the idea that the distribution of wealth in our society is growing ever more unequal. We're told that "the rich are getting richer; the poor are getting poorer." This situation is supposed to be a crisis, destabilizing society. Of course, the proponents of the idea of growing inequality want it to destabilize society. They're the ones ever pushing for greater government power, since government is supposedly the only remedy, so growing inequality is a godsend for them. Now comes evidence that the growing inequality idea is yet another liberal hoax added to the already long list. "Capital In The 21st Century" by Thomas Piketty, Professor at the Paris School of Economics, is seen as the capstone of the anti-inequality movement. It has been enormously influential around the world. But the Financial Times, the great British newspaper, has subjected Piketty's data to a rigorous analysis, and found it wanting. In fact, the whole edifice may well be unsupported by fact. See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/upshot/did-piketty-get-his-math-wrong.html?_r=1 Let me anticipate the response of the more dedicated leftists here by saying that just because you've heard so many other leftists repeat the growing inequality thesis so many times, it needn't be true. Popular errors are still errors, even if you "know" they're true. Any genuinely progressive politics must be fact-based. I understand the left's reluctance to part with the inequality thesis, because it's a great vehicle to advance State Power, the ultimate goal of all left politics. Ever since the 1840s, at least, leftists have sought the heavy weight of the government thumb on the economic scale to redress supposedly terminal grievances. Yet here we all are almost two centuries later, and the lesson of those centuries has been that the most effective remedy for inequality is economic growth in a capitalist market. One need only compare standards of living around the world to see this. People have long wrestled with how to measure standard of living. The United Nations suggested what is perhaps the best way in its 2002 "Human Development Report." The Human Development Index (HDI) looks at life expectancy at birth, education as measured by a combination of school enrollment and adult literacy, and GDP per capita adjusted for price differences among countries (purchasing power parity in US Dollars). The ten highest ranked countries by HDI in 2013 were: Norway, Australia, United States, Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, and Japan. See http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr2013_en_summary.pdf Note that all of these are capitalist countries, including the Nordic ones. So what do readers think? Are you gnashing your teeth with rage as you dream of putting successful people in concentration camps "after the Revolution," or are you grinning with me, and saying "I told you so"?
The book is being debunked as full or errors, cherry picked data and transcriptions errors along with flawed conclusions. Piketty's Numbers Still Don't Add Up More errors exposed in a popular book on income inequality MORE FLAWS EXPOSED IN LEFTIST BEST-SELLER In a recent Journal op-ed, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein ticked off a series of errors in Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Now the UK's Financial Times also sees "data problems and errors" in the popular screed that has been lauded by economists including Paul Krugman. After reviewing Mr. Piketty's work, the Financial Times finds "unexplained entries in his spreadsheets, cherry picking data sources and transcription errors. Taken together, these problems seem to undermine his conclusion that wealth inequality is rising in the US and in Europe." Two weeks ago, Mr. Feldstein noted a series of fundamental errors, including those related to Mr. Piketty's practice of comparing the incomes of top earners with total national income. "National income excludes the value of government transfer payments including Social Security, health benefits and food stamps that are a large and growing part of the personal incomes of low- and middle-income households." Mr. Feldstein wrote that "Mr. Piketty's theoretical analysis starts with the correct fact that the rate of return on capital...exceeds the rate of growth of the economy. He then jumps to the false conclusion that this difference between the rate of return and the rate of growth leads through time to an ever-increasing inequality of wealth and of income unless the process is interrupted by depression, war or confiscatory taxation." "[Mr. Piketty's] conclusion about ever-increasing inequality could be correct if people lived forever. But they don't," observed the Harvard professor. "The result is that total wealth grows over time roughly in proportion to total income. Since 1960, the Federal Reserve flow-of-funds data report that real total household wealth in the U.S. has grown at 3.2% a year while the real total personal income calculated by the Department of Commerce grew at 3.3%." http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...281380712.html
"It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few... Stark inequality: Oxfam says 8 men as rich as half the world Jan 15,`17 -- The gap between the super-rich and the poorest half of the global population is starker than previously thought, with just eight men, from Bill Gates to Michael Bloomberg, owning as much wealth as 3.6 billion people, according to an analysis by Oxfam released Monday.
What do you expect a "conservative" analysis to conclude? It's nonsense to claim there is no growth in income and wealth inequality. http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/american-inequality-in-six-charts Feel free to explore: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=historical+graph+of+wealth+inequality&t=hs&search_plus_one=form&ia=web Or try this: http://nyti.ms/2iBiLKM
