Capital In The Twenty-First Century Research Articles

The Ethical Embeddedness of the Economic Inequality Debate

AbstractHow do scholars formulate arguments about economic inequality? What is the role of empirical analysis? In what ways, if any, is the debate informed by ethical considerations? In this paper, we address these questions by evaluating one of the main arguments in Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, along with its endorsements and rebuttals. Applying Stephen Toulmin’s model of arguments to Piketty unearths a complex argument structure that must be understood for an evaluation to be possible. Of particular importance are the warrants that Piketty used to justify his conclusions from the empirical material. Our analysis revealed that the most influential rebuttals were targeted not at Piketty’s empirical inferences but the way he used these inferences to justify his claims. We also found value judgments to be an essential part of the justification process, making Piketty’s claims ultimately embedded in ethical considerations. We conclude that value judgments are intrinsic to scholarly arguments not only in economic inequality debates but also more broadly.

The Mainstreaming of Global Inequality, 1980–2020

Abstract This article maps the conceptual history of global inequality from its marginal status in the 1980s, its minute mainstreaming within research and globalization discourse from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, until its popularization, politicization, and “economization” in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, recession, and the publication of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century in 2014. Asking when, why, and how global inequality became a key concept, it draws upon quantitative and qualitative analysis of global inequality in scientific articles, books, and public media. It traces transformations in the term's temporal and spatial meanings and situates these in the contexts of rising within-nation and declining between-nation inequality, inequality research, inequality in public media, and broader discursive fields.

Virtually united: The role of the internet in building social capital

This article examines the transformation of social capital in the context of the digital era, highlighting the significant role of the Internet in this process. Three main areas of impact are identified: the increase in online community participation, enabling people to overcome geographic and temporal barriers to engage in civic and cultural activities; the strengthening of personal social networks through digital platforms, crucial during periods of physical isolation; and the diversification of social capital, facilitating the inclusion of marginalized groups and access to a wider range of support networks. This study highlights how the Internet has served not only as a tool to maintain and expand interpersonal relationships, but also as a means to promote equity, social inclusion and collective mobilization. However, it emphasizes the need to address challenges such as the digital divide and online privacy concerns in order to maximize the positive potential of the Internet. It is concluded that the Internet represents an invaluable resource for building a more robust and diversified social capital in the 21st century.

(In)equality in the Past and in the Future. A View by the Authors of “the Most Influential Books on Economic History in the New Millennium”

The Paris School of Economics and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales organized a roundtable in May 2023 to discuss the books The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz and Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. According to the organizers of the discussion, these are two of the most influential books on economic history of the new millennium, offering complementary perspectives with a focus on national economic differentiation and social inequality. We present an analytical overview of the discussion by a participant of that meeting — Ivan Smekalin.

Addressing the rise of inequalities: How relevant is Rawls's critique of welfare state capitalism?

Addressing the rise of inequalities: How relevant is Rawls's critique of welfare state capitalism?

GENESIS OF SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO THE THEORY OF HUMAN CAPITAL OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES

Scientific research is aimed at combining theoretical aspects of the development of scientific knowledge and theoretical and practical application of these aspects in relation to human capital. The article analyzes the concepts of science, the development of science and knowledge, using chronological and historiographical methods, the concepts of genesis, scientific and pre-scientific knowledge of reality are defined. The signs of the scientific transformation of reality based on the public perception of new paradigms, their development, application in practice and further scientific processing to identify methodological connections, the formation of relevant theories, which are combined with already mastered practice, are identified. Currently, we see the traditional development of scientific knowledge of the problem of introducing persons with disabilities into the country’s economic potential. The article presents the concept of human capital and its features, reveals research scientists who derive human potential from the theoretical development of the concept of labor productivity in the 20th century to the theoretical and practical concept of human capital in the 21st century. They indicate that at the beginning of scientific research, the concept of labor productivity was applied, and with the development of technology and engineering, the higher development of civilizational processes, labor productivity is gradually mediated by the intellectual potential of the worker. Therefore, it is emphasized that increasing the scientific level and education of the employee at the present time gives the employer a higher rate of return on the spent funds, since the employee uses not only improved means of work, but also mental abilities and skills, practical skills and thus gives a higher level of income. In the economic system of the modern state, the consequence of the increase in the number of people with disabilities reaches a new level of research on the use of the potential of people with disabilities in the economic development of the country. Technological catastrophes, wars and the deterioration of the environment create higher threats and produce an increase in the number of people with disabilities both from birth and throughout their lives. Their economic potential should be used on a par with other professionally fit people, fulfilling the requirement to respect their rights and freedoms regarding employment and social and financial security. The article clearly emphasizes the role of the state in the formation of a normative and scientific basis for the professional adaptation of such persons, the creation of professions in all branches of the economy and programs that will interest both employers and scientists in the development of employment programs for persons with disabilities depending on their physical and mental state.

Financial Instability and Income Inequality: Why the Minsky–Piketty Connection Matters for Macroeconomics

ABSTRACT This article addresses the relationship between financial instability and wealth inequality in a twofold perspective. First, it is an attempt to explain why the two phenomena, despite being nowadays equally relevant as empirical concerns, do not attract equal attention from researchers and are usually studied separately or conceived as independent levers affecting cycles or growth. We suggest the adoption of implicit methodological paradigms, instead of ‘historical momentum’ as the likely reason. Secondly, we present a theoretical framework grounded on the work of Piero Ferri (Aggregate Demand, Inequality and Instability — New Directions in Modern Economics. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK, 2016) with a medium-run dynamic demand-led model set for a monetary economy of production, where corporate debt is introduced into the financial account of firms. Minsky and Piketty come instrumentally to support the two perspectives: on one side they become our opposite representatives of heterodox and orthodox method; on the other side, as the model specification makes the work of Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014, and Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Technical Appendix. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014) directly comparable with the financial instability hypothesis, our exercise sheds light on the dynamic role of retention rates and capital share during the cycle phases, qualifying the conditions under which financial instability may lead to inequality. Connecting the implications of the two argumentative lines, the call emerges for a significant rethinking in macroeconomics studies.

From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter

Reviewed by: From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social ed. by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter Eleanor Courtemanche (bio) From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter; pp. xiii + 287. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $119.99, $84.99 paper, $64.99 ebook. This fascinating and useful volume of essays marks a new stage in the study of political economy from the standpoint of Victorian studies. This subfield, with its origins in New Historicism and the "New Economic Criticism," has developed new branches in response [End Page 521] to recent work on environmental crisis, the history of slavery, and critiques of inequality that sharpened after the global financial crisis of 2008 (5). This subfield of Victorian studies has always had an edge of ideology critique, in its claim that axioms of economic law have been abstracted from their historical and social contexts and then used to dominate discourses of capitalist experience. Yet it was also defined at the outset by a rather abashed bracketing out of Marxism, as in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics (1999), which claimed that "most literary critics' knowledge of economics begins and ends with Karl Marx" (edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen [Routledge], 12). In response, scholars drilled down specifically on the British tradition of political economy, including the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus, as well as representatives of the neoclassical or marginalist turn such as William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall, and a vast, shadowy host of otherwise-forgotten economists. The goal was to carefully disentangle this theoretical tradition from its oversimplification as "capitalist ideology," and to read it for its own internal contradictions and use of literary terms, as well as its historical embeddedness in an age of turbulent industrialization and imperial expansion. That subfield was mapped out by Catherine Gallagher, Mary Poovey, and Regenia Gagnier between roughly 1985 and 2005 in work that articulated the crucial transition between "political economy," a term that admits that economics is a field structured by power, and "economic theory," which naturalizes its prescriptions with narrow mathematical certainty (10). As its title suggests, this volume follows in this tradition by defending the "social" against the presumably anti-social abstractions of economic theory. Its general thrust is to defend the empirical and inductive—observed social life and historical impasses—rather than to follow the path of formalist analysis laid out by Jean-Joseph Goux and Marc Shell, or of Marxist-semiotic analyses of money and credit as themselves fictional. The autonomy of fictional or aesthetic ways of knowing is not the main point here. But the banishment of Marx is over, and this volume is a welcome opening in Victorian studies to some non-British and even radical approaches to economic history. The volume's introduction frames its task in terms of this critical genealogy, stressing its allegiance to historical rigor and aversion to presentism. But it also defines its intervention as making the connections between contemporary capitalist crisis and the study of the nineteenth century more "directly" than earlier work—perhaps more in the line of Audrey Jaffe's The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock Market Graph (2010), which connected Victorian and contemporary obsessions with stock market graphs (7). I am not sure any of this work will ever give a University of Chicago economist even a momentary twinge of regret about their discipline's limitations. However, in an age when neoliberalism seems to be cracking under multiple pressures, the opportunities for critical engagement with economics extend beyond rereading the classics. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which used novels by Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac to illustrate a world of inherited financial inequality that might be returning, is referenced by several writers as a new interdisciplinary interlocutor. Though unified by their engagement with nineteenth-century political economy, the essays in this volume splinter out in many directions, each engaging with a new set of contemporary theorists and problems. [End Page 522] The essays...

The New History of Old Inequality

Abstract Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the publication in 2014 of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, income and wealth inequality have returned to public and scholarly interest. Most subsequent discussion has focused on the fall and rise of inequality in the twentieth century, but meanwhile another body of economic history literature has reconstructed long-run inequality dynamics in early modern Europe. This article surveys the new history of old inequality and discusses its three principal findings: first, that between about 1300 and about 1900 inequality increased continuously almost everywhere, meaning there is no clear link between economic growth and inequality. Secondly, the only phenomena that substantially reduced inequality were unprecedented catastrophes. Thirdly, although few things have decreased inequality, many strategies of elite wealth defence have increased it, motivating new comparative concepts like the ‘inequality possibility frontier’ and the ‘extraction ratio’. Inequality will continue to be a subject of urgent political and moral attention, and this field opens up a research agenda that could bridge the methodological divide between economic history as practised by economists and by historians.

"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" (Piketty, trans. Goldhammer)

"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" (Piketty, trans. Goldhammer)

Accumulating Capital: Capital and Ideology after Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster Capital in the Twenty-First Century was followed by the publication of Capital and Ideology in early 2020. This paper looks at the differences between the two books, and provides an analysis and a critique of the main advances in the new book. First, Piketty drops r>g as an explanation for rising inequality. Instead, inequality is generated and constrained by economic power supported by an ideology. Second, there is a focus on the political consequences of inequality, including the rise of right-wing populism and the election of people like Donald Trump. Third, there is a new policy proposal-changes in corporate governance that gives labor and government seats on the Board of Directors of public corporations.

Power Law Distributions In the Social Science Research Network

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century makes the assertion that r > g, or that the rate of capital increase will, generally speaking, outstrip the growth rate of the economy. In this paper I will show that the statistical distribution cited by Piketty as evidence for his claim can also be found in data sets regarding the productions of social scientists themselves, perhaps suggesting just why social scientists may have individual incentives to ignore Piketty’s arguments.

Introduction: Corbynism and its Aftermath

Introduction: Corbynism and its Aftermath

Institutions and Material Conditions: The Problem of History in Piketty’s Capital and Ideology

In his celebrated 2013 volume, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty set out a detailed empirical account of the accelerated growth in inequality within and between societies around the globe, noting that over the past two centuries increases in wealth have increasingly made their way into the pockets of fewer and fewer people. His latest book returns to the question of inequality, but the focus is on what he sees as its ideological origins rather than its empirical manifestatio...

Will production in the modern world and its regions return to a slow growth regime?

The main idea of this paper originated from the analysis of the fundamental research of the French economist Th. Piketty «Capital in the Twenty-First Century» (2013). Based on the study of historical data he argued that in the long-term global production growth has always been relatively slow and it will slow down even more in the future, at least with regard to its demographic component. The purpose of the presented research is to investigate empirically to what extent the dynamics of world production at the beginning of the 21st century corresponds to a slow growth regime (both in its demographic and economic component) and to find out whether there is production growth inequality between the regions of the world. The theoretical part of the research methodology is based on a unified growth theory. It explains why production growth has led to a significant increase in inequality between regions of the world over the past two centuries and contributed to further division of the global economic space into «worlds-economies» with different patterns of production growth. In the empirical part of the study, the authors use the methods of panel data analysis. During the period from 1992 to 2019, there was a slowdown of global production growth only in its demographic component, while the world average increase in the economic component of production growth (and, consequently, the total production growth) is constantly accelerating. However, its structure and pace vary significantly between regions of the world. The modern world can be conditionally divided into «worlds-economies» which have different, sometimes diametrically opposite, patterns of production growth.At the beginning of the 21st century, most regions of the modern world are still far from a slow growth regime in terms of production, especially with regard to its economic component, which cannot last long without a substantial dematerialization of the produced GDP.

Debating Capital and Ideology: An introduction to the special issue.

Debating Capital and Ideology: An introduction to the special issue.

Beyond property or beyond Piketty?

Capital and Ideology represents a significant further statement from Thomas Piketty. The arguments made by the "New Piketty" are largely compatible with those of his previous Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but reflect broadening of scope and deepening of causal analysis, most markedly through the adoption of a world historical perspective. The result is a fuller offering for understanding inequality's pattern in the world, why it exists and how we can best respond to it. The book presents a wide range of arguments, which do not on first glance appear unified. This review essay distills these into six propositions, describes and evaluates each in turn, and identifies some threads that link them. In the process, it provides a critical assessment of Capital and Ideology.

Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Does The Fall of Sparta Support Thomas Piketty’s r > g?

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century makes the assertion that r > g, or that the rate of capital increase will, generally speaking, outstrip the growth rate of the economy. In this paper I will show that the available statistics regarding ancient Sparta, though sparse, do support Piketty’s theory.

Daddy Issues

Daddy Issues Bethany Moreton (bio) Don't look it up, because you cannot unsee it: a blanched and scowling Trump strides through a lurid flood scene, a bawling white baby under each arm. Behind him, a shadowy band of skeletons and hooded reapers looms on a receding shoreline. Pastor Jeff Jansen, the founder of Global Fire Ministries International in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, posted the image to his Facebook and Instagram accounts on May 6, as the news of his firing for "unbiblical behavior" (he left his wife and children "to pursue his own desires") went viral. Jansen had been among the evangelical pastors and self-described prophets confidently predicting a Trump re-election in 2020. In April he had denounced the modern church as "so neutered and so turned effeminate, almost homosexual" that it was cruising for a bruising from the Heavenly Father. "Where are the men?" he demanded of an audience in Oregon. "Where's the maleness? Where is the: 'I will defend the children, I will protect the family?'" This demented crypto-Christian phallus-worship is to Reagan-era family values what the Charlottesville tiki-torch brigade was to the Docksiderwearing Orange County Young Americans for Freedom of the 1980s. QAnon-fueled fantasies of white child rescue and the once-and-future king have drained any nuance from the ideology of white possession and domestic dominion. The murderous hysteria over white patrimony—"blood and soil," anchor babies, the birther movement that launched Trump into political life—is inseparable from the private capture of both economic opportunity and political authority. In his surprise best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated that inherited wealth is almost as decisive a factor in current levels of inequality in the United States as it was in the Gilded Age. The gains in equality that marked the middle decades of the twentieth century have almost completely been undone by the policies pursued since the 1980s. These developments were born of a union of neoliberal economics and neoconservative traditionalism. [End Page 64] For all their incompleteness, the social investments of the New Deal and Great Society definitively broadened access to healthcare, education, stable housing, and secure retirement, thus dampening the advantages of inherited wealth. The wartime federal investment in production, followed by the postwar boom and alongside the decriminalization of collective bargaining, meant that more productivity gains were retained by those workers who made them. Young white men of modest backgrounds who lacked a significant patrimony in property could nevertheless expect to advance beyond their parents' standing. These public benefits, however, depended on a different form of private patrimony: the inheritable property of whiteness. In deference to the profoundly unrepresentative legislative power of the Dixiecrats, New Dealers ratified and extended the link between property in whiteness and other forms of property. They did so in a legal regime equipped to restrict that inheritance through miscegenation and immigration laws and the policing of sexuality. White men begat many a child across the color line both before and after slavery, but those children didn't automatically receive the status of "free" or "white"—categories with clear-cut economic meaning. When a segregationist debating James Baldwin on television objected to Black men marrying his daughters, Baldwin made the implicit meaning clear: "You don't want us marrying your wives' daughters," he corrected his opponent. "We've been marrying your daughters since the days of slavery." Through the 1930s, most miscegenation cases brought in court were intended to invalidate a longstanding interracial relationship in order to prevent property from passing to or through a non-white wife. When the overtly eugenicist immigration restrictions of 1880 and 1924 became an embarrassment on the international stage of the Cold War, U.S. law dropped the explicit language of racial preference; the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 declared race an inappropriate tool for policing the biological basis for national belonging. But it maintained its racial restrictions in part by shifting preferences to family unification: entry was denied to homosexuals and adulterers, twin threats to the purity of America's imagined bloodline and the legitimacy of the heirs to its patrimonial property. The debate when the laws were...