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Comment by roeme | Hacker News Reader

If this piqued your interest; or left you wondering, I'd recommend reading Piketty's "Capital in the twenty-first Century".

As Graham's piece concludes; if we don't do something, we'll get into trouble.

- « Terrific work causes us to think of additional questions. »

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The Economist has a four paragraph summary of the book.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/ec...

Low growth causes more income to come from capital, which causes more inequality due to inheritance and the rich getting richer. The solution is a global progressive tax on capital.

There's a 20 minute summary by Piketty here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKsHhXwqDqM and even the short overview by Cory Doctorow is quite good: https://boingboing.net/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in...

After reading the first paragraphs in pg's essay I immediately went CMD + F Piketty and was somehow disappointed that he didn't choose to cite him since that's the crux of C21C. But, glad to see that others on HN resonated with the same ideas.

Generally Piketty is dealing with inequality produced by differences in income from capital, not labour. His reason for focusing on capital income is explained in depth, especially in chapter 7. In short, the distribution of capital ownership is always more concentrated than the distribution of income from labor, so we should be worrying about wealth inequality and inheritance. This is why Piketty proposes a wealth tax, not an income tax of the kind that pg says will 'be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity.'

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