From Chris Heywood:
"... review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (GW89) was very useful, and I would like to add that Piketty is saying something much more radical than perhaps comes over in the review.
"The new-liberal consensus would have us believe that market systems must in the long term lead to equilibrium and that most of the economic problems that arise can be solved by perfecting the operation of market and reducing the power of the state to intervene in market mechanisms.
"But Piketty, on the contrary, deploys extensive evidence to demonstrate that over a long timescale the market will by its very nature produce great inequality, when r, the rate of return on capital, is greater than g, the annual percentage rate of growth of the economy - that is, when r>g.
"Piketty shows that in the last 200 years of capitalism, with the notable exception of the period between the wars and from 1945 to 1980, r has been greater than g. The rate of economic growth has been close to one percent, and the rate of return on capital has been close to five per cent. The result has been the greatest levels of inequality ever experienced.
"This by no means exhausts the full extent of Piketty's contribution to our understanding of global capitalism ...
I haven't read this book but I am already convinced by the argument. I can just sense it, not here in the suburbs, but in London ...
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