<story><title>Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder?</title><url>http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-why-are-economists-giving-piketty-cold-shoulder</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>reckoner2</author><text>Some thoughts: While working in finance I was able to talk to many people who&amp;#x27;s work was related to economics. Employees at banks and brokerages, governments and regulator bodies. Most had heard of Piketty, and many agreed with his basic premises (r&amp;gt;g, and all it entails). His reach actually surprised me.&lt;p&gt;But I also had contact with academics, and like the article said, it&amp;#x27;s not so much that academics are refuting Piketty, but that they simply aren&amp;#x27;t studying the same problems that he is talking about. From what I&amp;#x27;ve been told, a lot of academic work in economics is focused on incredibly unique and specific problems. It isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;fashionable&amp;quot; to be studying something so broad and perhaps abstract as inequality.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder?</title><url>http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-why-are-economists-giving-piketty-cold-shoulder</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>enraged_camel</author><text>I read Piketty&amp;#x27;s book, and some of the critical response. In my semi-educated opinion (I only have a Bachelor&amp;#x27;s in Economics), the criticisms failed to poke a hole in his main argument: that capitalism as a system is unegalitarian because it allows wealth to grow faster than economic output, resulting in increasing amounts of income inequality over time.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;But perhaps the greatest rebuke of Piketty to be found among academic economics is not contained in any of these overt or veiled attacks on his scholarship and interpretation, but rather in the deafening silence that greets it, as well as inequality in general, in broad swathes of the field—even to this day.&lt;p&gt;The reason for this deafening silence is simple: the truth revealed by Piketty is inconvenient, and there are no easy solutions.</text></comment>