Su suggerimento e a cura di @paolo_paolo_ppa.

Il blog collettivo Crooked Timber – al quale collaborano per lo più esponenti del mondo accademico anglosassone – ha dedicato molto spazio nell’ultimo anno a Il capitale nel XXI secolo di Piketty.
Gli articoli sul tema si sono intensificati nell’ultimo mese, con la pubblicazione degli interventi di un simposio che dovrebbe culminare con la risposta dello stesso Piketty, a inizio gennaio.
Nell’attesa si possono leggere gli interventi pubblicati nel blog, che sono di seguito elencati:

• Piketty and the Australian exception di John Quiggin, sull’eccezione australiana, che sembrerebbe suggerire che
  

  there is plenty of scope for progressive changes to tax policy that would partly or wholly offset the trends towards greater inequality documented by Piketty.

• Education and Equality in the 21st Century di Danielle Allen.
  

  In what follows, I will summarize Piketty’s educational policy prescriptions, comment on the theoretical framework underlying them, and then point to what I take to be an even more important source of education’s egalitarian effects.

• The politics behind Piketty di Elizabeth Anderson.
  

  Piketty misses an opportunity to connect his analysis to a critique of the ideology and associated politics that have driven increasing inequality since the early 1970s. While he rightly claims that the distribution of income and wealth is a deeply political matter, and connects increasing economic inequality to the increasing political clout of the top 1%, he does not identify political decisions, other than cuts in marginal tax rates on top incomes, that lie behind inequality trends. Filling in the ideological and political stories gives us some clues as to policy instruments, other than the tax code, needed to reverse the ominous trends he documents.

• Which inequalities matter and Which taxes are appropriate? di Kenneth Arrow.
  

  Professor Piketty and his colleagues at the Top Income Distribution Study have put us all in great debt for the great increase in our knowledge of historical development of inequalities in income and in wealth in a number of leading countries.[…] There is one more leading inequality which does not receive much attention in Piketty’s work: consumption.

• Piketty, Rousseau, and the desire for inequality di Chris Bertram.
  

  What Piketty does not do is to tell us why inequality is bad or why people care about inequality, although we can glean some knowledge of his personal beliefs here and there. In what follows I draw on some aspects of Rousseauvian moral psychology to suggest that the reasons people care about inequality matter enormously and that because some people value inequality for its own sake, it will be harder (even harder than Piketty thinks) to steer our societies away from the whirlpool of inequality.

• A critique of Piketty on the normative force of wealth inequality di Ann Cudd.
  

  Although Piketty raises important concerns about the possibility of growing wealth inequality, he fails to normatively ground or argue for his presupposition that this inequality is unjust. Since relative poverty can coincide with high levels of objective or subjective well-being, this presupposition is brought into question.

• Piketty, in Three Parts di Henry Farrell.
  

  It’s the unfortunate fate of greatly influential books to be greatly misunderstood. […] These processes of reinterpretation and misinterpretation have been unusually marked for Capital in the Twenty-First Century because it is such a big and ambitious book. There are three major parts to it – a big theory, a set of major empirical claims and a (preliminary) set of policy proposals. Most earlier critics have focused on one or another of these three while occluding the others in a kind of chiaroscuro. I want to do something a little different – to separate out the first part from the others so as better to understand one aspect of its contribution, and to argue that the second and third are connected in different ways than most readers understand.

• Resurgence of Capital or Rise of the Working Rich? On Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century di Olivier Godechot. L’articolo propone un sunto dell’analisi di Piketty e – nella parte finale – cerca di argomentare a favore dell’ipotesi che
  

  the complexity of recent changes in inequality is due to the necessity to think them as both the product of the return of capital and the rise of the Working Rich.

• A new agenda for the social sciences di Margaret Levi.
  

  Others, particularly some of those contributing to the Crooked Timber collection, already offer telling critiques of the weaknesses in Piketty’s political analysis. I do not want to rehearse well-tread ground but focus instead on issues where I think Piketty requires the help of other kinds of social scientists to enhance his important agenda. In particular, I will discuss two work-related issues: technology and the changing nature of jobs. Then I shall turn to more standard political questions: the roles of the state, organized interests, and beliefs.

• It’s bargaining power all the way down di JW Mason. Suggerisce che dopo la lettura del libro
  

  you might also find yourself with the uneasy feeling that the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.[…] In contrast to the comprehensive account of the evolution of wealth shares in a dozen countries, the evidence linking this evolution to the supposed underlying dynamics is sparse and speculative.
  The fundamental source of this disconnect is the two different senses in which Piketty uses the term “capital.” In the historical material, it is the observable aggregate of property claims, measured in money. But in the theoretical passages, it is a hypothetical aggregate of physical means of production. As a result, the theory and the history don’t really connect.

• Piketty, Meade and Predistribution di Martin O’Neill. Presenta una lettura parallela di Piketty e Meade (Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property, testo del 1964) per concludere che
  

  Mechanisms of redistribution will not be sufficient, but will have to be supplemented by more radical forms of predistributive institutional innovation.

  Dove predistribution consiste in

  To focus on market reforms that encourage a more equal distribution of economic power and rewards even before government collects taxes or pays out benefits.

• Where are the power relations in Piketty’s Capital? di Miriam Ronzoni.
  

  I would like to raise two related questions to Thomas Piketty. The first concerns his repeatedly declared conviction that economic theory cannot explain trends in inequality by itself […] The second concerns Part Four of Capital, where Piketty sketches a proposal for how to regulate capital in the 21st century. In a nutshell, my concern about Piketty’s proposal is that there seems to be a friction between the diagnosis offered in the rest of the book (which seems to draw a rather bleak picture of the power of capital in the early 21st century) and the suggested cure (which seems to rely on the optimistic hope that, once well-minded citizens will have recognized the problem, the only hurdle will be to find the right policy to fix it).

 

Immagine by Sue Gardner CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons