Okay fine, not the best. (Click bait!) But for me, the most important — the five books that, more than any others, taught me how to think about the world. A friend in my “classics” book group asked me for nonfiction book recommendations. Here’s what I wrote: The NF books that wow me, get me […]

I’m stunned by how good the new Jacobin piece by Seth Ackerman is: “Piketty’s Fair-Weather Friends.” It gives what I find to be the best understanding so far of the whole Piketty “think space.” It’s so good that I can’t encapsulate it, so I’ll just share some of the passages I’m most taken with, with my […]

Noah Smith has documented the “anti-Piketty crusade” by Tyler Cowen, Chairman and General Director of the Koch-brothers-funded Mercatus Center. (The post seems to have gone missing from Noah’s site [pourquoi?]; here’s Google’s cached version.) The latest from Cowen is here, joining in the right-wing chorus desperately trying to debunk the long and widely documented increase in wealth inequality (documented […]

That headline makes quite a statement. But it’s true. The stock of so-called “financial capital,” or wealth — all the financial assets out there, which are ultimately claims on real capital — represents only the most tenuous long-term approximation of what our real capital is worth. Certainly true: the stock (total dollar value) of “financial capital” goes up […]

Arthur over at New Arthurian Economics has posted a much-appreciated though decidedly negative reply to my recent post on the nature of money and financial assets. He and I have had very similar thinking over the years (and he has provided me, at least, with some Aha! moments), so I’d much like to convince him to […]

As a naive young noodler on economic topics I always wondered: Why are players in the financial industry — which produces very few real, human, consumable goods and services that people value in their lives — so well-paid? I figured it out pretty quickly: it’s because they are able to control who gets that real […]

I’ve bruited the notion in the past that “money” should be technically defined, as a term of art, as “the exchange value embodied in financial assets.” In this definition, counterintuitively relative to the vernacular, dollar bills aren’t money. They’re embodiments of money, as are checking-account balances, stocks, bonds, etc. etc. Money and currency aren’t the […]

That’s the conclusion of Stuart W. Elliott in his recent paper, “Anticipating a Luddite Revival.” (Hat tip: RobotEconomics.) We’ve seen that scale of transformation before. But this one promises to be roughly four times as fast, dwarfing Luddite-era concerns: …the portion of the workforce employed in agriculture shifted from roughly 80% to just a few […]

Dean Baker gives me the courage, in his recent post on Pikkety, to reiterate a statement I’ve made some few times in the past: Economists have no coherent or consistent idea of what they’re talking about when they use the word “capital.” They lump together real capital — fixed, human, organizational, whatever — with “financial capital,” […]

I haven’t beaten the drum lately for Lane Kenworthy — perhaps the best researcher out there on the economic effects of income and wealth distribution. His years of careful, diligent (and voluminous) statistical and analytic work, tapping the best data sets available, and his cogent, coherent explanations of his findings, should get a lot more attention […]