Is the Piketty Enthusiasm Bubble Subsiding?

Jeff Madrick

The Piketty bubble may be coming to an end. Economists are starting to criticize the heart of his argument. That is not to diminish important aspects of his book. But the most profound of his claims simply may not hold.

Arriving with a fanfare worthy of Caesar, Thomas Piketty’s long book, Capital in the 21st Century was at first welcomed almost uncritically by enthusiastic centrists and progressives both. Why not? As one read the first sections of the book, who wouldn’t have? I am an admirer and remain one. Here was an economist widely respected in the mainstream telling us point blank that the rich earned far more than they deserved, that economic theory regarding labor markets failed, that the most respected economists had little sense of the real world, and that inheritance was a source of persistent inequality.

Most impressive was the quantity and depth of empirical backing. Piketty scolded economists for depending on models with little empirical basis. This needed to be said by someone so respected. Piketty’s remarkably influential work on income inequality with his colleague Emmanuel Saez is what really revolutionized thinking about economics—and paved the way for his enthusiastic acceptance. Using tax records, they showed the remarkable concentration of wealth in the top 1%—basically they counted how many really rich people there were. Their findings about the extreme distribution of income towards the risk were shocking and confirmed anecdotal evidence.

The empirical analysis in the new book went further. It showed that the equality that existed since World War II and began to reverse in the early 1980s had been an aberration. Capital usually grew faster than incomes throughout history. And it would likely continue to do so! Piketty found that this relation in which r, the rate of return on capital, exceeded g, the growth rate of the economy, seemed permanently etched into not merely history but the future.

And he told us that the best way to deal with such a law of inequality was to tax the rich through a global wealth tax.

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Antibiotics Are Becoming Ineffective All Over the World, Why?

Martin Khor

Triple Crisis contributor Martin Khor has written recently about the rising problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Here, he is interviewed by The Real News Network producer Lynn Fries about the issue. Khor pulls no punches about the magnitude of the danger, calling it “as serious to human life as the climate change crisis that we are all trying to address and fighting against.” He goes on to address the necessity of government action on antibiotic resistance, as well as the impediments to such action (including a different kind of resistance—from the pharmaceutical industry).

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The Tragedy of the Soma Mine-Workers

The Tragedy of the Soma Mine-Workers: A Crime of Peripheral Capitalism Unleashed.

Erinç Yeldan

One of the greatest work-crimes in mining industry occurred in Soma, a little mining village in Western Turkey. At noon-time on Tuesday, May 13, according to witnesses, an electrical fault triggered a transformer to explode causing a large fire in the mine, releasing carbon monoxide and gaseous fumes. (The official cause of the “accident” was still unknown, at this writing, after nearly 30 hours.) Around 800 miners were trapped 2 km underground and 4 km from the exit. At this point, the death toll has already reached 245, with reports of another 100 workers remaining in the mine, yet unreached.

Turkey has possibly the worst safety record in terms of mining accidents and explosions in Europe and the third worst in the world. Since the right-wing Justice and Development Party (AKP) assumed power in 2002, and up to 2011, a 40% increase in work-related accidents has been reported. The death toll from these accidents reached more than 11,000.

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Why is Calorie Intake Falling if Incomes are Rising in India?

Deepankar Basu and Amit Basole, Guest Bloggers

Deepankar Basu is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Amit Basole is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. This blog post summarizes the findings from their recent Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) working paper “Fueling Calorie Intake Decline: Household Level Evidence from Rural India.” The full paper is available here.

The Indian “Calorie Consumption Puzzle” has attracted a lot of attention recently. The puzzle is that average per capita calorie intake has been declining over the past few decades, even as real per capita expenditures and incomes have been rising. According to National Sample Survey (NSS) data, between 1983 and 2009-10, average inflation-adjusted monthly expenditure increased by 28% but calorie intake declined by 16% in rural India (Figure 1). Since, at any given point in time, calorie intake tends to increase with income, the Indian time trend is unexpected and puzzling.

Figure 1: Average real monthly per capita expenditure (MPCE) and calorie intake in rural India. Real MPCE is obtained by deflating nominal MPCE by the consumer price index for agricultural labourers (with 1986-87 as the base year). Source: Report 508 and 538 of the National Sample Survey Organization, India and authors’ calculation from unit-level data.

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Rhode Island's Crisis of Inequality, and a First Step to Tackle It

Douglas K. Smith, guest blogger

Introduction

I am Doug Smith, the Executive Director of Columbia Journalism School’s Sulzberger Leadership Program. I have authored a number of books on best practice for business, based on three decades of consulting experience.  I am also one of the co-founders of Econ4, a network of economists and other analysts seeking to shift the way economics is taught, understood, and practiced—away from the failed practices that produced the Great Financial Crisis and the extraordinary income and wealth inequalities that now imperil our democracy.

On May 6, I submitted written testimony to the Finance Committee of the Rhode Island Senate in support of a proposed law to help rein in rising economic inequality in the state. The law would give preference in the awarding of state-government contracts to businesses that limit the ratio of pay between their highest-paid executive and lowest full-time employee to no more than 32-to-1. The text below is based on my testimony.

For Triple Crisis readers unfamiliar with Rhode Island, it is the smallest by area of the fifty U.S. states. It is, however, also the second most densely populated, making Rhode Island’s economy essential not just to Rhode Islanders but also people across the Northeast region of the United States. Today, Rhode Island’s economy is in serious jeopardy—in large part because of the raging income and wealth inequality imperiling people across the globe—from Greece to Great Britain and, yes, from Romania to Rhode Island.

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Rhode Island’s Crisis of Inequality, and a First Step to Tackle It

Douglas K. Smith, guest blogger

Introduction

I am Doug Smith, the Executive Director of Columbia Journalism School’s Sulzberger Leadership Program. I have authored a number of books on best practice for business, based on three decades of consulting experience.  I am also one of the co-founders of Econ4, a network of economists and other analysts seeking to shift the way economics is taught, understood, and practiced—away from the failed practices that produced the Great Financial Crisis and the extraordinary income and wealth inequalities that now imperil our democracy.

On May 6, I submitted written testimony to the Finance Committee of the Rhode Island Senate in support of a proposed law to help rein in rising economic inequality in the state. The law would give preference in the awarding of state-government contracts to businesses that limit the ratio of pay between their highest-paid executive and lowest full-time employee to no more than 32-to-1. The text below is based on my testimony.

For Triple Crisis readers unfamiliar with Rhode Island, it is the smallest by area of the fifty U.S. states. It is, however, also the second most densely populated, making Rhode Island’s economy essential not just to Rhode Islanders but also people across the Northeast region of the United States. Today, Rhode Island’s economy is in serious jeopardy—in large part because of the raging income and wealth inequality imperiling people across the globe—from Greece to Great Britain and, yes, from Romania to Rhode Island.

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Monsanto Meets its Match in the Birthplace of Maize

Timothy A. Wise

On April 21, a Mexican judge dealt a blow to the efforts of agricultural behemoth Monsanto and other biotech companies to open the country to the commercial cultivation of genetically modified (GM) maize. The ruling upheld the injunction issued last October that put a halt to further testing or commercial planting of the crop, citing “the risk of imminent harm to the environment.”

In a fitting tribute to Mexican surrealism, Monsanto had accused the judge who upheld the injunction of failing to be “impartial.” I don’t know if the presiding judge smiled when he denied Monsanto’s complaint, but I did.

I had just arrived in Mexico to look at the GM controversy, and I could tell it was going to be quite a visit.

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Big Banks Caught Red Handed but Continue to Avoid Prosecution

Bill Black, Guest Blogger

Sharmini Peries of The Real News Network interviews Bill Black, associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. Black discusses twin news events showing how big banks have been “caught red-handed committing frauds” and yet no government action in the United States has been undertaken to prosecute “any of the Wall Street elites whose frauds actually drove the crisis.”

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TPP Would Deepen Income Divide

Roger Bybee, Guest Blogger

Those at the top have never done better,” President Obama ruefully acknowledged in his January 28 State of the Union speech. “But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened.”

Yet, moments later, Obama heartily endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which as drafted directly reflects the demands of “those at the top” and would, if passed, severely intensify the very inequality spotlighted by the president. The TPP would provide transnational corporations with easier access to cheap labor in Pacific Rim nations and new power to trump public-interest protections—on labor, food safety, drug prices, financial regulation, domestic procurement laws, and a host of others—established over the last century by democratic governments. The nations currently negotiating the TPP—which together comprise nearly 40%of the world economy—include the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Among them, Malaysia, Brunei, Mexico, Singapore, and Vietnam, are all notorious violators of labor rights The TPP’s labor provisions are far too weak to begin uplifting wages, conditions, and rights for workers in these nations.

As with NAFTA, the TPP will benefit U.S. companies relocating jobs to low-wage, high-repression nations, argues economist Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). This would also exert strong downward pressures on the pay of U.S. workers, “Most U.S. workers are likely to lose out from the TPP,” Weisbrot says. “This may come as no surprise after 20 years of NAFTA and an even-longer period of trade policy designed to put lower- and middle-class workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world.”

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Alarm Bells Over Antibiotic Resistance

Martin Khor

The World Health Organisation’s most comprehensive report to date sounds a warning that we are entering a world where antibiotics have little effect.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has sounded a warning that many types of disease-causing bacteria can no longer be treated with the usual antibiotics and the benefits of modern medicine are increasingly being eroded.

The comprehensive 232-page report on anti-microbial resistance with data from 114 countries shows how this threat is happening now in every region of the world and can affect anyone in any country.

Antibiotic resistance—when bacteria evolve so that antibiotics no longer work to treat infections—is described by the report as “a problem so serious that it threatens the achievements of modern medicine.”

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