12."Rooseveltian reforms are off-the-table"
13.Piketty is writing "propaganda" not solutions (Yanis). Problem is we "can't measure capital" as long as we live in a multi-commodity world. Doomed to mis-appreciation like love or beauty. Piketty chooses to measure wealth instead, not measuring capital at all. Everything is the same -- Grandmother's silverware to robotic assembly line, to stocks and bonds. Would force grandmother to sell silverware to pay the wealth tax.
14.No distinction for productive vs. non-productive assets. Would tax machinery as well as Land, stocks and bonds.
15.(Yanis) Piketty not interested in solving inequality, but in becoming the guru of inequality and connecting to the social sentiment that there is something wrong with inequality. This makes Piketty a great enemy in the end of pragmatic egalitarianism (perhaps this is why his book was so heavily promoted? -- SB)
16.Piketty has formed economic committee to address how to change inequality.
17.(Yanis) Piketty has formed another group in France to do something about collapsing Eurozone. Have published a manifesto. However, (Andy) his book does not support direct gov't intervention. But (Yanis) he is allowing this because he knows democracy is imperiled.
18.Reminds Yanis of debate between John Rawls and Libertarian Robert Nozick. "Piketty is a second rate version of John Rawls (book "Theory of Justice", pub. 1971). Rawls mechanism for passing judgment on the justice of society was to imagine random scattering of rich and poor etc. Rawls was a re-distributionist as well, like Piketty (SB -- Robert Reich too). Nozick destroyed Rawls in his 1974 "Anarchy, State, And Utopia" by saying: "Well, OK, we have distributed wealth as Rawls says, but what happens if someone develops wonderful skills at Basketball? And everyone wants to pay large amts of money to this star player. But allowing people to pay excessive amounts to player would allow skewing of wealth. So, allow it and destroy distribution or disallow it and prevent talent?" But market is not fair (Yanis -- and me). Piketty too will be destroyed by Libertarian argument, even more so. Piketty has nothing to say about the process, only the outcome, and it is too late then.
My thoughts after watching the video:
Piketty may be sincere, despite what Varoufakis says, but his analysis is shallow and data-dependent on the easiest data to obtain. That is, he relies on data to drive his theoretical construct, which is at times incoherent anyway, rather than building a construct supported by data. This produces a result that shows what happened from a historical-economic perspective, but not why. He conflates anything that is remotely wealth as "capital" as both a way to explain inequality and also to enhance his book's impact (it would be far less powerful if his book was entitled "Capital in the 21 Century" but had an asterisk saying "*Includes: Land, Slaves, and makes no distinction between earned wealth and rent wealth due to monopoly." Such an asterisk would give away the game right there.)
Piketty's data-driven model is so weak it invites anti-progressive libertarian attack, even by nominally progressive people, since it doesn't allow for wealth based on production, or even for disallowing taxing Grandmother's silverware set. The more recent ad-hoc Piketty economic committees are fine as a concept, but may not support Piketty's limited viewpoint, so in the end are not going to be effective due to lack of clear theory.
But, the Georgist model was not given enough thought by Varoufakis either, and he too glibly conflates wealth and land value (which is never mentioned at all in the interview). Disaggregating land value and then suggesting taxing that would open the door to a new form of equality -- based on process, not result -- that in the end would produce something more fair than we have now. There would still be relatively poor, but not nearly the extremes as we have now. These extremes cannot exist without some form of unearned income from monopoly. The innovative market simply will not allow for it if it is allowed to function as it should. Piketty ignores this, or, at best, just assumes it is an unavoidable part of capitalism, except for great wars when everything is disrupted. Gaffney makes the point in his critique that Piketty is ignoring "non-shooting wars" in his period of relative equality -- 1914-1980. Policy plays no part in Piketty's world, or at best is a very weak and temporary brake on the rampant accumulation of capital at the top (again, conflated in his analysis) over national growth.
Notes on Piketty's book: Capital in the Twenty-First Century
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