Review of Thomas Piketty's Capital: Capitalism vs Democracy
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm not finished with it yet, so I won't offer a final opinion, but to the page I'm on it's been an impressive work. He's very apt at weaving together a narrative spanning far, far, longer than nearly all economics research, which is backed up with real data they (him and collaborators) spent quite a long time digging up and parsing. The book uses this sweeping dataset to color the major research/writings of prominent economists from several eras. Up to this point I had not read anything that had stepped back to this extent in terms of considering a history of economic thought, but which also backed up the history with data.
Personally, I find the basic tenets of his thesis pretty convincing, although, again, I have not yet finished the book. I think this was published at a very opportune time as people begin to read more about the similarities between the wealth structure of the early 20th century and today. Considering the middle of the 20th century as something of an aberration is difficult to wrap my head around, because (like most of us I assume) I've had so little exposure to people and their experiences from before 1940.
EDIT: To be clear, the foundation of this book began with research in the 1990s, so it's not as if I was trying to imply it was a completely opportunistic publishing. Rather, I consider it to be somewhat fortuitous to be able to gain a historical appreciation of these trends as they reach new peaks.
Given it's a 696 page economics text just released in English, this doesn't much surprise me. I've only managed to 1) acquire a copy and 2) start looking at reviews and interviews with Piketty and others. Anyone who's actually read him in depth either 1) had an advance copy (and still not much time to digest the work), 2) has been following Piketty for some time (e.g., Krugman), or is fluent in French and read the original. Anyone else either hasn't, is lying, or hasn't fully processed the work.
The only conclusions I've drawn so far are that Piketty is respected by many, feared by many, and has clearly struck a nerve. I have a nagging suspicion he's missed a few points I consider to be key, though that is, absolutely, based on not having read the actual book. Briefly: I put a lot of stock in the thermoeconomics / biophysical economics, and complexity economics schools (see, e.g., Herman Daly or Charles A.F. Hall, or J. Doyne Farmer and much of the Santa Fe Institute / Institute for New Economic Thinking), which at least in his interviews Piketty doesn't address.
My sense is that he's hit a very strong nerve, and that yes, inequality is a significant problem. It's more symptom than a cause, though it also has both effects on the economy as a whole and can likely be addressed in at least part. The work will, I'm pretty certain, be considered important, but it's not the earth-moving revolution which economics clearly and so desperately needs.
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/23jqiy/j_doyne_...
dang recently posted a link to an excellent overview of the life of Karl Polanyi as well. It generated upvotes but no comments of note:
I completely agree on the discussion here and that Piketty has struck a nerve. I was just a bit annoyed that no one was even attempting to claim actual knowledge of the book at hand, but was ready to make statements on its content, without any kind of qualifier (really, all I wanted). I have a feeling this is going to be one of those books whose influence, at least in discussion, will be greater than expected given the people in those conversations who didn't read it. I have found it an easier read than I expected though. Right now I alternate between it or Infinite Jest each night, which is a really nice change of pace in either direction.
I got the ebook on my tablet to just speed through in bed, but I've realized this is going to be one I'll need a physical copy of eventually to annotate. Thanks for the link to your subreddit, I've subscribed.
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/23njva/piketty/
Well -- informed by Thomas Edsall's review in The New York Times, specifically:
According to Piketty, those halcyon six decades [from 1914 - 1974] were the result of two world wars and the Great Depression. The owners of capital – those at the top of the pyramid of wealth and income – absorbed a series of devastating blows. These included the loss of credibility and authority as markets crashed; physical destruction of capital throughout Europe in both World War I and World War II; the raising of tax rates, especially on high incomes, to finance the wars; high rates of inflation that eroded the assets of creditors; the nationalization of major industries in both England and France; and the appropriation of industries and property in post-colonial countries.
While all of that is true, it's a still very incomplete picture of what resulted in the six golden decades.
How does he contrast the current unemployment situation with the boom-bust cycles during the industrial age? It seems completely different to me. Currently, we've got people being priced out of the job market forever based on their skills and what robots and asian child labor can do. That seems way different from the problems faced by factory workers in the 1900s.
In today's context, replace the transition from farming to industry with the transition from industry to knowledge-work and services. Robots and child labor will put a lot of people out of work, indefinitely, depending on the line of work they're in. So they'll need to find new lines of work. But it'll be a long time before robots have rendered all human work obsolete, despite what Singularity proponents would have us believe.
There isn't too much fundamentally different between what happened back then and what's happening now; only the set dressing has changed. We're not yet in the era of fundamental shifts in the way labor works. We have not reached the end of history.
What's changed between then and now? Predominantly, freer trade and more fluid and fungible labor markets. These have had at least as big an effect on labor as technology has (though the two forces have often worked in tandem).
The book is generally pessimistic in its outlook. Some critics argue that even this book, despite the breadth of its historical analysis, doesn't rely on enough data to make predictions. In essence, the book discusses how the postwar decades were a local aberration in a global data set. But one could argue that even the book isn't global enough in its analysis. (Though I'd argue that a more sweeping, global view of history would tend to bear out the book's thesis more than confound it.)
I'm jumping on a detail here, but even if that time is near, it doesn't really matter, because the most likely scenario is intelligence explosion: the day the machines render all human work obsolete is the day they are at least as smart as us. Which means they can design AIs on their own. Smarter AIs. And those…
Well this eventually means a super-intelligence that could take over the world —and will do so, if it's initial programming includes any unbounded goal, implicit or explicit. (To give you an idea of the potential gap: the other great apes don't rule the world. We do. 'Cause we're smarter, and though of things like picking up some hot blazing stick and taming it for food and shelter —or bridges and nukes, which can't even be explained in terms a chimp can understand. To the AI, we won't even look like chimps. More like mice, or bugs.)
So at this point, we're not thinking about the economic consequences of human obsolescence. We're thinking of not being used for spare parts.
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In the meantime, all humans won't be obsolete, so your main point looks okay. I'll just add that however long it takes to reach intelligence explosion, it will probably be a period of perpetual transition: more and more automation, less and less human labour. Technological unemployment has already started, it will only amplify. Whether that's a tragedy or good news depends on how we handle it as a society. (Like, we could have ever more massive unemployment and inequality, or we could have basic income and 4-3-2-1 days work-week —or whatever I haven't thought of and actually works.)
This is what kills me about the fear of automation and progressive taxation. There is a real shot here at capitalizing on the opportunity--less work and more, better living for all by reducing working hours. It's not talked about AT ALL in the media, which leads me to believe voters aren't even thinking about it. Worse, I suspect most people haven't considered it as a possible solution.
See, reducing working hours would drive down unemployment, which means more bargaining power for the working class, leading to higher wages, and ultimately, inflation. Not hyper inflation, but enough to be an effective tax on wealth. With relatively few exceptions, those people want to keep they money, so they don't want inflation, nor anything that might lead to it.
Therefore, the media don't speak of it. Those who do simply lose advertising revenue, possibly driving them out of business. Which is why I'm surprised to see this article on the New-York Times. Is this book welcome in the current intelligentsia? Is it simply an article that slipped through the cracks? Or are media becoming less eager to serve power?
The only people losing out are those who store their wealth as cash, and really, who does that?
This is even more direct than this inflation stuff, I should have mentioned it right away.
As for how people store their money… I believe many rather important financial "products" are sensitive to inflation. I'm not a specialist, but here is an example: insurance. You give an insurance company something (money, bonds, debts…), and ask for money in return. Not now, but later. If that sum is not indexed to inflation somehow, it will be sensitive to it. One also need some cash to exchange all those bonds and stocks and what have you. By reducing the money supply, inflation may reduce the fluidity of the market, which may have effect on the market value of stocks.
While I enjoy thinking and reading about these things and trying to piece together data into global narratives, I'm also realistic, we can't ever 100% know what's coming. I will try to remain upbeat about the future, enjoy what I have, and strive to put myself into positions to create clearly positive value for the country/world around me, no matter what the overall picture looks like.
Writing this has made me a bit thoughtful, so I'll also take this an an opportunity to go off on a related personal tangent/ramble. Hopefully I don't bore you too much, feel free to ignore.
I have always, always, been frustrated with economics. A field that is so divisive, but represents itself as a "science", has always annoyed the hell out of me. However, my academic and professional track has brought me further into economics over time, rather than away. Right now I have a BS and MS in environmental science, and an MPA in energy policy. I'm nearly certain I want to pursue a PhD in the future, and it looks more and more like it will probably be in energy economics. One way I have calmed down my inner turmoil over this is to more frankly assess my economist and scientist sides.
Basically, the scientist is in love with raw, pure, data generation, while my inner economist is about using that data to generate a picture (or a graph, so many graphs). Another side to this is that my inner economist constantly wants to generate an interesting narrative and draw out the connections between trends, while my inner scientist tears down those hypotheses or works to find the data points which are not influenced by a "narrative".
I've been happy on a lab bench centrifuging, pipetting, and doing PCR in the process of splicing soybean embryos, but I also enjoy sifting through census data and plotting $/kWh trends. Ultimately, I still maintain a distrust of the broad field of economics, but I think the phenomenon we broadly place within it could do with a more thorough explication via more scientific methods.
This is the internet. You don't need to read something, or even know what it's actually about to have an opinion on it.
(No, I haven't read the book yet, either; I'm waiting for Amazon to ship my copy. They said it'll be here by the end of the week.)
Inequality is returning to pre world-wars level - ok, that's an easily verifiable fact.
However, how do we know it's a bad thing? There is no conclusive evidence that rising inequality will have bad consequences on say growth - it might. We just don't know for sure.
OTOH, we know quite well how we got into that "equality" period - destruction of huge amounts of capital and human lives in 2 world wars that turned European countries from world leaders into 2nd rate places - yet very equalitarian (Gini coefficients etc) compared to other places.
It doesn't strike me as a "good thing".
To quote from another Economist article around the same time (http://www.economist.com/node/21564556#sthash.AXidvmgE.dpbs):
"It is also true that some measure of inequality is good for an economy. It sharpens incentives to work hard and take risks; it rewards the talented innovators who drive economic progress. Free-traders have always accepted that the more global a market, the greater the rewards will be for the winners. But as our special report this week argues, inequality has reached a stage where it can be inefficient and bad for growth."
This is due to, but not limited to, cronyism and lack of equality of opportunity (e.g., college).
But also, I think the new Princeton/Northwestern study that says the US is an oligarchy provides enough reason to be worried about inequality. If we agree democracy is important -- which means we value the voices of all citizens -- then growing inequality in its current state is concerning because it means the average citizen has a "miniscule...impact on public policy."
If you are measuring public policy in a nationalistic sense, then yes, an individual does have a miniscule impact on public policy because the per-individual impact is decreasing as the population increases. Then perhaps a presciption would be to decentralize governments, so that an an individual has more net political agency.
The anti-capitalist prescription, however, does exactly the opposite by concentrating political power in larger organization with broader oversight over bigger populations of individuals. Which, of course, exacerbates inequality because the mean marginal impact of an individual necessarily decreases.
Over the course of history, capital accumulation has yielded growth in living standards that people in earlier centuries could not have imagined, let alone predicted -- and it wasn't just the owners of capital who benefited. Future capital accumulation may or may not increase the capital share of output; it may or may not widen inequality. If it does, that's a bad thing, and governments should act. But even if it does, it won't matter as much as whether and how quickly wages and living standards rise.
That is, or ought to be, the defining issue of our era, and it's one on which "Capital in the 21st Century" has almost nothing to say.
[1] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-20/the-most-im... (hat tip:Tyler Cowen)
>That is, or ought to be, the defining issue of our era, and it's one on which "Capital in the 21st Century" has almost nothing to say.
It seems odd for the Bloomberg review to state that the book says nothing about this issue. In fact, it appears to be the very premise of the book, or at least a primary implication.
This Bloomberg review appears to be attempting a de-linking of the two issues. That is, it implies that rising inequality is independent of the rise of wages and living standards. It glosses over the inequality issue by saying that it's essentially unimportant as long as wages rise.
In fact, the book itself is making the case that inequality and labor-based living standards are interdependent. It goes through history to show where forces conspired to create more equality--be it destructive to capital (e.g. wars) or beneficial to labor (e.g. unions). It's during those periods of greater equality that wages and living standards tended to rise (or at least track with the overall economy).
Here's a key assertion from the book that refutes the Bloomberg review in a nutshell:
>The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values.
That is, when returns on capital exceed the rate of economic growth, those who depend on growth (laborers) are left with stagnating or declining wages and living standards.
Your quote does not support your conclusion. It says that (given Piketty's assumptions) inequality is likely to escalate. This says absolutely nothing about whether the standard of living of the poorest will improve or decline.
And as far as I can tell, this whole discussion (not just the book, but the broader complaints of inequality) are founded on a mistaken idea that accelerating growth of the richest somehow means that the poorest will be worse off. All of history shows us that this is false. Even the poorest today enjoy a life that was unimaginable to kings of a couple centuries ago, and rivals in most ways the hyper-rich of just decades ago.
If the poorest really were "downtrodden" - that is, that the rich achieved success by actually pushing down the poorest, there's be something to get excited about. But the actual fact, that the poorest are getting rich more slowly than the richest, is morally a non-issue to me.
I believe you are making the same mistake as the Bloomberg reviewer in separating inequality from the fate of the poorest.
To see the connection, you have to look deeper. That is, you must consider the causes of inequality that Piketty offers. You might argue that inequality in itself doesn't produce a negative outcome for the poorest, but that the causes of our current inequality produce those negative outcomes as a side effect. I would say that's semantics, but in any case, what Piketty lays out does support the notion of a rising inequality along with a comcomitant stagnation/slippage for the poorest/others.
So, let's say it the other way, if you prefer: some of the primary reasons (increased productivity, automation, etc.) for the rate of wealth-accumulation for the rich that we're seeing also produces negative outcomes for the poorest (unemployment, downward wage pressure, etc.). This has led us to (or, rather, is by definition) the growing inequality that we're seeing.
Finally, these arguments of the ilk that "inequality must be OK because the standard of living for the poor has risen even in the face of historical inequality" fall flat. It really is a false equivalence.
Firstly, such arguments imply that degree is irrelevant and that no degree of inequality would produce (or represent) a negative outcome for the poor. In fact, there is some point at which capture by one party must come at the expense of others to the extent that the latter parties slip backwards. Secondly--and to the first point--Piketty outlines that the degree of inequality was historically kept in check by various forces in other examples where the outcomes for the poor weren't detrimental.
In those cases, the threshold for negative outcomes was simply not crossed. However, this is certainly not proof that they cannot be.
> There is no conclusive evidence that rising inequality will have bad consequences on say growth - it might.
It won't matter much for me, but I'd be sad to see America's broad culture of entrepreneurship die in future generations.
Is the latter a bad thing? It depends what kind of world you'd favour. Let me put it this way: if people whose great-grandparents were innovators but who are now simply in the business of owning stuff get greater rewards in life than people who take risks, innovate and work hard to build new things, is that a bad world?
So fundamentally this thesis is flawed because there is no well-defined concept of 'labor'. You could take the value theory of labor, which states that 'labor is any non-property that you're willing to pay for', but in that case capital cannot grow at a faster rate.
Really inequality is growing because we have legions of administrator working to redistribute wealth. These are usually well-intentioned ideas that are designed to elevate the less fortunate, but result in corruption and redirection of those funds to the already-rich (who are generally more adept at lobbying for those funds, perversely, especially under the regime of stronger campaign finance laws)
Consider the case of Bell, California, a city with a median income below ~40k, where the city administrators took it upon themselves to line their own pocketbooks (to the tunes of half a million dollars in annual salaries) with city funds. 5 out of 6 administrators were convicted of corruption. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/09/local/la-me-1210-ang...
Or, the case of the centinela valley school district, again, a low-income area, where SCHOOL officials lined themselves with money (600,000 salaries, interest-free loans on property, etc etc), and awarded very lucrative construction contracts to their cronies. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-centinela-probe-20140417,... Meanwhile the teachers are underpaid and the kids are not getting educated in failing-grade schools.
When the poor get screwed, it's often not the free market that's screwing them. It's the people with authority that are warping the bureaucracy and taking advantage of the fact that they are spending 50-60 hours a week on tenuous employment and have little time to concern themselves with arduous bureaucracy and regulatory minutiae, that we 'vote' people in to handle.
This pressure need not be caused by war. Any big, ambitious, inspirational project like fighting climate change or colonizing Mars will do just as well.
I'm curious, which of the following is the most compelling argument for "fighting climate change" with government authority?
a) The survival of the planet depends on it
b) Developing cleaner economies is necessary, even ignoring the science
c) It is a suitable project for the purpose of lowering economic inequality
d) All of the aboveOne thing that surprises me when I read reviews about Piketty (I haven't read the book) is that they state as if it's a surprising fact that the inequality is inherent in free market Piketty was smart enough to find out about it. Is this a news to even trained economists?
Binary: one side people arguing with simple models that one should look into rules and regulations that would promote growth, inherently leading to new elites. Cases mentioned include new wealth from tech, telcos & construction, where marginal cases where key (should software be copyrightable, licensed to be used but not copies when ‘proprietary’, patentable; should incumbent offer access to ‘essential assets’ to encourage investment in infrastructures). The support from old-money to the handful of cases of new-money was not mentioned; neither was the large role played of investment — simply (deregulated) algorithmic trading as another example of the lack of regulation replacing the old guard. Bluntly put: the assumption of perfect rationality meant that investment went to good ideas, therefore social access to wealth wasn’t supposed to be an issue. I am not making it up that any model without perfect rationality was until 2006 laughed out of most polite society: mentioning in passing a coherent model for financial bubbles with something as simple as private success information, two periods and two types of agents got two of my teachers in trouble repeatedly.
The other side, namely ‘heterodoxes’, was, and probably largely still is, a very varied group: from Transaction costs economists, the closest to mainstream, who argue things similar to what I mentioned, but with consistent models, nuances and many exceptions; to more exotic animals, including self-confessed Marxists and neo-Marxists. Piketty was part of the most vocal and least theoretical sub-group; mainly thanks to amusing cases of institutional ‘hacking‘ to access national databases for wealth and revenue, he was able to prove something that can come off as obvious to non-theoretical economist. However, redistribution hasn’t really been the focus on that discipline since the 70’s. “New economics” postulated Cliton-inspired steady strong growth, fueled by the digital revolution. One was only allowed one critic: Solow’s Missing computers (“You can see computers everywhere, except in production growth.”) I’ve personally tried to mention that computeres needed a different kind of company structure, with more ad-hoc internal communication tools: that got me “Yeah… Maybe”-s; but if I tried to argue that this meant a thousand employees (Google headcount at the time) could do the work of a million, potentially leaving a generation of obsolete workers, unable to find an explanation of what to do to find a job (with detailed official data in hand), I got into real trouble and I was scolded into remembering that “New economics” meant jobs for everyone. I never dared stay in public that internet-based job search meant faster finds, a lower structural unemployment and that the stable overall numbers actually meant a growing population of long-term unemployed, dropped out of sight by counting standards. Digital Lumpen-proletariat wasn’t a word, and describing Amazon warehouse working condition wasn’t acceptable.
Thanks to his incredible skill-set, Piketty was also able to stay active at the most prestigious institutions, rather than be labeled a marginal and ignored by national media. Until 2007, his position were fairly ignored by specialists. Since, critic has come, but still evolving slowly; the current leading edge to me was McAfee & Brynjolfsson last year, and more recenlty Piketty apologising for assuming that the 1% got rich, while it was the 1% of the 1%.
Since people in the media were doing exactly that all the time and I did had a very cool teacher I got away with it from time to time.
I find it to be the worst, most myopic and misleading argument kind. That's like telling a cow is a bad cow because it's not like the other cows.
[0]: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-...
It's a long review, but even just the first paragraphs are worth a skim - for me as a lay person they were very enlightening as to why this work makes a difference.
You can forbid people from axe murdering their neighbors. What is special about "being capitalistic" that makes it unforbiddable?
Murdering someone is an act; "being a capitalist" isn't. Forbidding "being a capitalist" is like fighting thoughtcrime. You can forbid certain actions that seem "capitalist", but that's not a free society anymore.
My definition of "free" is simple: able to do anything you wish, as long as you're not hurting anyone (in general, I mean hurt physically). I'll agree that the definition of "hurting" gets complicated in practice: in a competition, the losers could claim the winners are hurting them by winning (in fact, in the economic competition we all live in, that's exactly what is happening).
Why not? If we can agree (and I doubt we can) that certain "capitalistic actions" do in fact hurt people, does that not make it possible to forbid capitalistic actions without losing abstract aspirations of freedom?
> My definition of "free" is simple: able to do anything you wish, as long as you're not hurting anyone (in general, I mean hurt physically).
To me, this reads, "able to do anything you wish, as long as you can get away with keeping others from proving you directly hurt anyone". We're actually pretty okay with people hurting each other in this society, because freedom is more important to us than human beings.
Let's do a fairly standard capitalistic action: constructing a building. This is a generally uninteresting conversion of capital, through some risk, into developing property to produce more capital. Can we ever forbid this? Does that restrict freedom? Does it hurt anyone? How can you really tell? The Law of Wheaton works fine for internet conversation, but it's woefully inadequate when discussing political philosophy.
You never really answered what "non-capitalist" means to you. That was kind of a more important question.
TLDR: The Most Important Book Ever Is All Wrong
The Mouse and the Market "If you are for technological progress, and its wide availability, then you should be an enthusiastic supporter of capital accumulation and its rational investment." http://mises.org/daily/1786/
Taxing income is horrendous enough, but necessary. Taxing accumulated capital is just plain destructive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy#Guilt_by_as...
In the capitalist west in the 20th century, it seems to me we've experienced what Marx envisioned, the struggle (sometimes violent) between the upper and lower classes, again and again. It is possible to be right in your assessment and wrong in your prescription.
Strangely enough, I think we're more socialist than we think we are. A huge part of the massive US Govt is pure income redistribution, and even so we're still farther to the right than any European country that comes to mind.
Perhaps Marx was right in his assessment, but maybe there is no prescription. That is never brought up. Perhaps you're condemned to have a standard of living better than most royals enjoyed a century ago (CAT scans, Internet, Jet Travel - capital, capital, capital) and the price is ennui and jealousy of someone with 2000x more paper wealth. Maybe there is no alternative, or all the alternatives are just a lot worse.
In the meantime, I will continue to think that any tax on accumulated capital is evil and label it as Marx 2.0.
1.) Invest in a natural monopoly. That's fine, but most of these are highly regulated (e.g., utilities) and limit your returns.
2.) Invest in real estate. This is rent seeking at its finest. Henry George [1] addressed this issue, but his ideas have not been widely implemented (unlike Marx).
3.) Invest in government debt. I'm always surprised that people like Krugman and Piketty never bring this up, but the fastest way to reverse inequality would be to default on the national debt. The debt is just a transfer payment from tax payers to wealthy debt holders. It is almost like Feudalism.
4.) Buy and hold a nonperishable commodity.
Even your example, the housing market crash, is not an example of hording. In fact, it is the opposite. It is the squandering of capital. Piketty might even argue it was a good thing (like WWII) since it reduced inequality. Or at least it did until the government intervened.
1) High income and high wealth are not the same thing. People keep mixing the two together (switching between "tax high incomes" and "tax the wealthy" like they're the same thing).
2) Many rich people don't have huge piles of money lying around, but instead own valuable companies or other assets. For example, Mark Zuckerberg owns a large part of Facebook, but that's not directly convertible into its equivalent in dollars. In fact, after the IPO, he had to pay an enormous amount of taxes on that, which was money he didn't have at the time [1].
1 - http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2013/12/20/mark-zucke...
He got that tax bill by exercising his options--he bought shares at $.06 that were worth significantly more, thus giving him a great deal of taxable income. It was in the form of shares, but it was still income. To say he didn't have the money at the time is a bit dishonest--those shares were (and are) highly liquid.
Are they? If he tries to sell all of them, will he get exactly what they're valued at? Selling a quantity like that will probably pull the price down significantly.
This is all guesswork though. Anyone here more knowledgeable that can jump in?
On the day of Facebook's initial public offering, Zuckerberg exercised a stock option and purchased 60 million Facebook shares at a "strike price" of 6 cents each. Even if those shares are never sold, the IRS treats them as ordinary income at the time the options are exercised. The rationale is that such options are a form of compensation, just like regular wages.
1 - http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/technology/zuckerberg-tax-bi...
So, in theory, even higher rates of inflation would be even better for income redistribution! How did that work in Zimbabwe or Yugoslavia? Sweden, with its low headline inflation over the past 4 decades, must be a cesspool where the rich are eating the children of the poor as a delicacy!