Category Archives: Thomas Picketty

John H. Cochrane’s Article in The Wall Street Journal, Thursday 8/25/2022

The Wall Street Journal of Thursday, 8/25/2022 featured John H. Cochrane’s commentary entitled  “Nobody Knows How Interest Rates Affect Inflation.”  We would say, “In order to understand how interest payments from Smith to Jones should circulate in order to achieve price stability, continuity, equilibrium and realization of the economy’s potential, one must have a unified theory explaining the whole, organic, dynamic, pretio-quantital,economic process.  Then, within that theory one can know How Interest Rates Might Affect Inflation.”  (Click here, and here)  We would also assert that manipulation by the Fed of the rental price of money – the interest cost – can be counterproductive. (Continue reading)

 

Elizabeth Warren’s Advice to Jerome Powell; Sentiment Without Intelligence

The Wall Street Journal of 7/25/2022 featured an article by Senator Elizabeth Warren:  “Jerome Powell’s Fed Pursues a Painful and Ineffective Inflation Cure.” Because she lacks an objectivenormative, abstract, explanatory theory and, thus, fails to understand the functional interdependencies constituting the organic economic process, particular arguments in her article are a) sometimes contaminated by psychopolitical wishful opinions, b) often ignorantly one-sided because she is unaware that some policies have double edges, c) sometimes contradictory of her other arguments, and d) in at least one case, supercilious.

E. Warren suffers from the same plight as Thomas Piketty. To satisfy her responsibility to the public, she needs to achieve a scientific understanding of the organic economic process; she needs to get a “grip.”

We are at the heart of Piketty’s plight: he has no clue of the needed grip on the grounds of the inequality in history.  So, what else can he offer but a centralist solution, taxation, to history’s drunken careening. (McShane, Philip, Picketty’s Plight, 53)

In equity (the basic expansion following the surplus expansion) should be directed to raising the standard of living of the whole society.  It does not.  And the reason why it does not is not the reason on which simple-minded moralists insist.  They blame greed.  But the prime cause is ignorance.  The dynamics of surplus and basic expansion, surplus and basic incomes are not understood, not formulated, not taught….. [CWL 15, 82]

(Continue reading)

More re Piketty’s Plight and Centralist Modern Monetary Theory

In his blog entitled “Piketty in Brief,” dated Sunday, July 24, 2022, N. Gregory Mankiw asks what might be Thomas Piketty’s present thinking about inequality. Has it changed?  If so, how and why?  Also see on this website “Piketty’s Plight.”  in which we quote Philip McShane’s claim that, unless one has a normative explanatory theory yielding precepts as to how enlightened participants in the economic process should adapt and conduct themselves, one can only helplessly and hopelessly suggest harmful bureaucratic centralist solutions – such as disequilibrating taxation and intrinsicallyinflationary deficit spending. Continue reading

Piketty’s Plight

We are at the heart of Picketty’s plight: he has no clue of the needed grip on the grounds of the inequality in history.  So, what else can he offer but a centralist solution, taxation, to history’s drunken careening? (McShane, Philip, Piketty’s Plight, 53)

Simple-minded moralists and sentimentalists without intelligence do not provide the required normative theory which explains the process and supplies precepts for adaptation. “…man as external agent has not the systematic guidance he needs to operate successfully the machine he controls.” [CWL 21, 109]  

Academics have not discovered, understood, formulated and taught the dynamics of surplus and basic expansion.

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