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News | Dec. 10, 2021 Institute for National Strategic Studies National Defense University Responding to China: The Case For Global Justice and Democratic Socialism By Thomas Piketty INSS Speaker Series February 16, 2022 – Event Details The event will be held February 16, 2022, from 1200-1300, on the Strategic Multilayer Assessment platform and is open to the public. An access link will be posted the week of the event. Summary Western countries are still struggling to define their attitude towards the Beijing regime. In this talk on February 22, 2022, Thomas Piketty will argue that the right answer lies in...

The Department of Defense’s National Defense University (NDU), the premier education institution for military and defense civilian leaders, is planning to host a lecture on how Western countries should adopt socialism in response to the challenge from China. The lecture, which is scheduled to take place online February 16, is titled, “Responding to China: The Case For Global Justice and Democratic Socialism,” and will be given by French economist Thomas Piketty, who is the author of a 2021 book titled Time for Socialism. A summary of the event, posted on the university’s website, reads: Western countries are still struggling to...

This book is more than 1000 pp., here are my impressions: 1. About 600 pp. of this book is a carefully done history of the accumulation and sometimes dissipation of wealth and property. You can evaluate that material without reference to any particular set of political views. 2. At some point the book veers into partisan issues such as the wealth tax. Many of those parts remain interesting, but it also becomes clear that Piketty is “out to lunch,” to wit (p.591): To return to the Soviet attitude toward poverty, it is important to try to understand why the government...

Global inequality has stabilized at high levels in recent years, a report said Friday, despite gains among the poor in China and much milder disparities in incomes and wealth in Western Europe. The World Inequality Report 2018 is based on a massive, interactive collection of data compiled by an international team of researchers that includes renowned economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. It shows inequality has soared since 1980, although the global top “1 percent” saw their share of global income slip slightly after the 2008 financial crisis, to just above 20 percent. At the same time, the share of...

There is inequality and inequality. The first is the inequality people tolerate, such as one’s understanding compared to that of people deemed heroes, say Einstein, Michelangelo, or the recluse mathematician Grisha Perelman, in comparison to whom one has no difficulty acknowledging a large surplus. This applies to entrepreneurs, artists, soldiers, heroes, the singer Bob Dylan, Socrates, the current local celebrity chef, some Roman Emperor of good repute, say Marcus Aurelius; in short those for whom one can naturally be a “fan”. You may like to imitate them, you may aspire to be like them; but you don’t resent them. The...

One year after Thomas Piketty sold a record number of economic textbook paperweights which virtually nobody read past page 26, once again showing the power of constant media hype, the French economist and wealth redistributor is out and about, this time pouring more gasoline on the fire started by the IMF last week when it released the Greek debt sustainability analysis showing Greece needs a 30% haircut, only to be met with stern resistance by, who else, Germany who know very well that should Greece get a debt haircut it will unleash the European dominoes which not even all...

A book by a French economist who became a darling of 99 percenters and his lefty peers is riddled with errors, cherry-picked data and flawed premises, according to two new studies. Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the 21st Century,” which New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman called “the most important economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade,” calls for an 80 percent income tax to stop wealth inequality from increasing. The book earned its author an invitation to the White House to meet with Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. ... ... The recent...

IÂ’ve already shared a bunch of data and evidence on the importance of low tax rates.A review of the academic evidence by the Tax Foundation found overwhelming support for the notion that lower tax rates are good for growth.An economist from Cornell found lower tax rates boost GDP.Other economists found lower tax rates boost job creation, savings, and output.Even economists at the Paris-based OECD have determined that high tax rates undermine economic performance.And itÂ’s become apparent, with even the New York Times taking notice, that high tax rates drive away high-achieving people.WeÂ’re going to augment this list with some additional...

Why do statists make so many mistakes with data? Paul Krugman, for instance, has butchered numbers when writing about fiscal policy in nations such asFrance, Estonia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. But Krugman isn’t alone. We also have Thomas Piketty, who was lionized by the left after publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Ever since his book was published, various experts have called into question the veracity of Piketty’s numbers. Most recently, here’s some of what Alan Reynolds, my colleague at the Cato Institute, wrote about his data for the Wall Street Journal. Thomas Piketty…remains a hero on the...

Nick Hanauer, internet entrepreneur, has a message for his fellow "zillionaires", the revolution is coming. Mr. Hanauer, an early investor in internet retail giant Amazon..... Now, he writes in Politico magazine, he sees a different kind of future, and the outlook for people like him is not a bright one: "If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come...

Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” was published on March 10, 2014, the day after the first episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” aired on Fox and its sister networks. The fact that both men have captured the public imagination at the same time is at least partly due to that simple fact. There’s also the matter of professional ripeness, behind the appearance of fresh fame: Piketty had been around for some time, publishing papers and collaborating on constructing the Top Incomes database along with Emmanuel Saez, but he’d never published anything remotely as sweeping as...

There can be little doubt that Thomas Piketty's new book Capital in the 21st Century has struck a nerve globally. In fact, the Piketty phenomenon (the economic equivalent to Beatlemania) has in some ways become a bigger story than the ideas themselves. However, the book's popularity is not at all surprising when you consider that its central premise: how radical wealth redistribution will create a better society, has always had its enthusiastic champions (many of whom instigated revolts and revolutions). What is surprising, however, is that the absurd ideas contained in the book could captivate so many supposedly intelligent people....

We are seeing the most dangerous trend ever. There is an agenda behind the curtain and that is to sustain government at all costs and that includes everything you own. I have warned that either government will move toward a totalitarian state or to real democracy – real Athens style without the career politicians. The latter is possible with civil unrest as we saw in Ukraine. This agenda requires no secret group of sinister corporations, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, or Bildebergs. This is plain old Adam Smith where those in government will never admit they are wrong so the reason they are...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Will the Veterans Administration scandal wake up those people who have been blithely saying that what we need is a "single payer" system for medical care? Delays in getting to see a doctor have been a common denominator in government-run medical systems in England, Canada and Australia, among other places. Class warfare rhetoric would have us resenting "the top ten percent" in income. But that would be a farce, because most of us would be resenting ourselves, since more than half of all Americans — 54 percent — are in the top ten percent...

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is by far the most talked-about book of the year. Liberals who are predisposed to wanting higher taxes to redistribute wealth and expand the scope of government have praised the book to the heavens. On the other hand, conservative critics have often punctured the author’s theory about capital accumulation and the his quantitative case that inequality has been getting “worse.” For example, in the May 15 Wall Street Journal, Harvard professor Martin Feldstein argued that “Piketty’s Numbers Don’t Add Up.” Feldstein shows that Piketty has ignored the effects of tax law changes that...

From President Obama to Paul Krugman, Thomas Piketty to Elizabeth Warren, the Left has adopted “inequality” as the cause of the day. They paint a picture of a new Gilded Age in which a hereditary American gentry becomes ever richer, while the vast majority of Americans toil away in near-Dickensian poverty. It’s a compelling political narrative, one that can be used to advance any number of policy proposals, from higher taxes to increases in the minimum wage Unfortunately, bad facts make for bad policy. Let’s look at just some of the ways they get it wrong. Inequality has never been...

First, take today’s Unconventional Logic pop quiz: If you were kidnapped by terrorists, whom would you want to come to rescue you? Captain Sweden Captain Denmark Captain Belgium Captain France Captain America OK, now back to economics. With both Thomas Piketty and Pope Francis in the news calling for government-coerced redistribution to reduce inequality, it is useful to ask, “Why this, and why now?” Piketty’s argument for additional government redistribution programs, which he bases upon numbers that don’t take government redistribution programs into account, is certainly—to put it delicately—creative, but the question still remains why Piketty’s ideas (which have been...

The right is dropping the ball when it comes to Thomas Piketty’s much heralded and totally flawed book on inequality, “Capital in the 21st Century.” This long and lugubrious opus is really an open sore, replete with so much absurdity that shooting it down should be like shooting fish in a barrel. The left has embraced this rant against capitalism — and conservatives should be tying them to it, to expose where all the class-war rhetoric would really bring us.

FRENCH ECONOMIST and darling of the left Thomas Piketty is the latest in an endless array of economists who are clueless regarding profits and what brings about prosperity and a higher standard of living. In his call for ferocious wealth and income taxes on a global scale to combat what he believes is the growing inequality between the rich and everyone else, Piketty has become a media rock star. This merely underscores the fact that pundits and all too many journalists, politicos and economists know less about money and economics than their forebears did 100 years ago. No wonder the...

Thomas Piketty, the “rock star” economist, has been accused of beating his former girlfriend Aurelie Filippetti, France’s culture minister. The 42-year-old economist’s affair with Ms Filippetti, 40, ended after she lodged a complaint with Paris police about an attack in 2009. Mr Piketty, whose bestelling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has been praised by Unite union boss Len McCluskey and an advisers of Ed Miliband, was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence shortly after the report. He denied any wrongdoing but was placed under formal investigation on March 17 of that year.