Wealth at the top of the income distribution is skyrocketing, leading to growing inequality. This trend is especially pronounced in the United States. But much of the leading research on the topic isn’t coming from American economists.
A French economist, Thomas Piketty, wrote the blockbuster 2013 book Capital in the 21st Century about the growth of extreme wealth inequality; Piketty and (French) Berkeley colleague Emmanuel Saez co-authored a heavily quoted paper, “Income Inequality in the United States 1913-1998”; Saez has written exhaustively about the evolution of incomes of the top 1 percent, along with another (French) Berkeley colleague, Gabriel Zucman, who himself writes about how the top 1 percent hide their wealth offshore.
Those three are heavy hitters in the research on wealth inequality; other top scholars are also from Europe. There’s the British economist Anthony Atkinson at the London School of Economics, who has co-authored papers with Piketty and Saez; Nicholas Bloom, a British economist who writes about inequality at Stanford; Thomas Phillipon, a French economist at New York University who studies the financial industry and outsized compensation; Branko Milanovic, a Serbian economist at […]
Because there is no money in it!
That is why economists will not study inequality. The field of my training is whorrifying … now a mere rationale for bankers. Bankers spreading risk to others.
If one would do a study of endowed chairs and look at the pecking orders. There is a trend.
However this whorrification is not limited to the ‘discipline of economics’. Look a the so-called discipline of forestry producing holocaust breeding plantations of evenly aged baby trees whose roots are never allowed to go deep enough in the soil to retain water through the summer.
Does lack of shade, lack of the water holding sponge of forest soil and mono crop, even age baby tree plantation have anything to do with global warming? Hey….. but it is so efficient to cut and mill baby trees…. say these same economists. Thinking that money, far from being a convenience, is a diety.
If only our so called economists looked at the creation of money. Krugman does not get it, Stiglitz does.
We could transit to carbon free energy system in a couple of years if bankers were willing to write down sunk costs…. and admit mistakes. But rather than putting all the free money into that transformation they are spewing it into building real estate towers into the sky…. to spread the risk.
Learning in a changing environment requires admission of mistakes. Our institutions fail in the department of admitting failure. Our economists, seeing environment as externality, and money as supreme, have confused the finger with the moon.
Very well said “yourconstitution”. All the people I have known have worked at large corporations as accountants whose only motive was profit at any cost and the consequences be damned. They did not care about any external effects such as depletion of resources or bird and bee die-offs or water scarcity or anything other than more profit for the corporation and it’s “overlords” as well as filling their own pockets.