| After Piketty The Agenda for Economics and Inequality | |
| Editors: | Heather Boushey J. Bradford DeLong Marshall Steinbaum |
| Language: | French |
| Subjects: | Capitalism, economic history, economic inequality |
| Publisher: | Harvard University Press |
| Pub Date: | 8 May 2017 |
| Media Type: | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages: | 688 pp. |
| Isbn: | 978-0-674-50477-6 |
| Isbn Note: | (alk. paper) |
After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality is a 2017 collection of essays edited by the economists Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum. The essays center on how to integrate inequality into economic thinking. Common themes are Thomas Piketty’s influence on academia and policy, the need for better wealth data, inequality in the United States, and the reasons for the process of wealth accumulation and rising inequality discussed by Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013). In the final entry, Piketty himself responds to the essays.
The book's essays are divided into five sections: "Reception", "Conceptions of Capital", "Dimensions of Inequality", "The Political Economy of Capital and Capitalism", and "Piketty Responds".
Asad Abbasi of London School of Economics described After Piketty as a work of serious scholarship, saying, "Readers without a background in economics will find some chapters daunting, terminology-wise." Abbasi claimed,"Piketty hopes that his work provokes discussion on wealth and inequality. After Piketty not only generates such debate, but also deepens it by highlighting the gaps missed by Piketty."[1]
Melissa S. Kearney of Foreign Affairs said the essays "put Piketty’s arguments into a broad historical and intellectual context and highlight some noteworthy omissions that call into question his book’s most dire predictions." She lauded the collection as "an intellectual excursion of a kind rarely offered by modern economics." However, she said that the contributors overly assume wealthy elites will maintain high positions regardless of left-wing policies and that contributors "do not explore those potential policies at great length, nor do they consider the precise mechanisms that would shape pushback from the elites." Kearney described the Brexit vote and Trump's election as evidence against the view that elites can overcome support for more wealth redistribution.[2]
Paschal Donohoe of The Irish Times stated that "despite its size, this collection misses so much." Donohoe said that the collection's editors fail to be impartial by describing critics' arguments as substance-free, and that there has been potent criticism of Piketty concerning "whether laws can exist in economics, whether the digital economy disrupts the accumulation and transfer of wealth, and even whether Piketty confuses wealth with capital." Donohoe also argued, "I do not believe that inequality is inevitable. Progressive taxation and social interventions make a difference. But such perspectives do not receive adequate prominence."[3]