The Spectator: Deirdre McCloskey vs Thomas Piketty - a clash of the inequality titans
Well, I think I might have met his match. She's called Deirdre McCloskey. ...
... McCloskey on the other hand, who is meant to be the conservative one, has the zeal of a revolutionary. She describes herself as an ex-Marxist, Christian libertarian. She is the most notable transgender economist in the world (I can’t recommend strongly enough Crossing, A Memoir, her moving account of her journey from Donald to Deirdre.) She is an entertainer and storyteller; one of the few serious economists who is as likely to quote the poetry of Robert Burns in support of an argument as she is to quote wheat prices in the 15th century.
But forget the characters. It is the intellectual contrast which gets to the heart of the debate between those who worry about in-equality and those who don’t. ...
... McCloskey, by contrast, has long argued that economists are far too preoccupied by capital and saving. She doesn’t even like the word capitalism, on the grounds that capital is not what got us where we are today. ‘If Scotland is trying to become Holland, then capital accumulation is how to do it. That will double your income, maybe triple it.’ But for her, that sort of accumulation is a scratch-card-sized prize — and the lottery jackpot beckons. She enthuses about the Great Enrichment of the 19th century. ‘What happened, understand, is not 100 per cent growth, but anywhere from 2,900 per cent growth to 9,900 per cent growth. A factor of either 30 or 100.’
That jump in incomes came about not through thrift, she says, but through a shift to liberal bourgeois values that put an emphasis on the business of innovation. In place of capitalism, she talks of ‘market-tested innovation and supply’ as the active ingredient of our economic system. It is incidentally a system ‘drenched’ in values and ethics overlooked by economists. ...
... The answer to that question determines what should be done about inequality. Piketty wants a progressive tax on wealth to prevent high returns entrenching the power of the richest. McCloskey, needless to say, is not keen on redistribution. Taking from today’s rich may give you a one-off uplift in the incomes of the poor of, say 30 per cent, she says; but that is nothing to the uplift from innovation and growth, which can double incomes every generation.
So much for the central disagreement between them. Here’s my problem. Many people with strong views on inequality consciously or unconsciously think of this as a binary choice: profits go to either a deserving or undeserving rich, depending on your view. It’s all about capital, or all about wealth creation. But I struggle to see it that clearly. I’d like to know how much of the return on capital that so concerns Piketty is actually income earned from entrepreneurial wealth creation. I’d also like to know how important that income is to innovation.
Piketty is well aware of this vulnerability in his argument. ...
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She is admirably pure in her view, but is it as black and white as she portrays it?
Bill Gates or Liliane Bettencourt? They co-exist, of course, and have both had a pretty good time of it in recent decades. The question is which one better characterises the very rich. And also which risk you would rather take: taxing the Bills at the risk of deterring them from creating Microsofts? Or not taxing the Lilianes, at the risk of letting them become ever wealthier and more powerful while sitting at home doing nothing?
I know that the 99 per cent of the population have no difficulty coming to a view. I’m in the sad 1 per cent, who can see both sides.
Very interesting article! I lean more in McCloskey's direction. I think the impact of innovation is invisible to so many and it is radically underappreciated by others who acknowledge it. But I also share the ambivalence so well expressed by the author in this article. Here is a clip of McCloskey:
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