At The TLS: Deidre Mccloskey takes the measure of Thomas Piketty, and finds him wanting: Surprise?
Old Socialist caught in the brambles...
As one of the many beneficiaries of Mccloskey revelatory ‘The Rhetoric of Economics’ , Second Edition by Deirdre N. McCloskey: Rhetoric of the Human Sciences. Especially Chapter 3 ‘Figures of Economic Speech’!
Here is Mccloskey’ review of two books by Piketty
Headline: An equal music
Sub-headline: Thomas Piketty’s vision of an ideal society
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/time-for-socialism-brief-history-of-inequality-thomas-piketty-book-review-deidre-nansen-mccloskey/
This is, or has become one, of the propaganda arms of the hyper-conservative, or more pointedly reactionary, Times Newspaper. The first paragraph of the Mccloskey barely muted screed is predictable:
Thomas Piketty, the fifty-year old rock star of the international left, gathers in Time for Socialism his monthly columns in Le Monde; and in A Brief History of Equality (Une brève histoire de l’égalité, 2021), he considers the ups and downs of wealth inequality in a few countries over the past 200 years. Piketty’s global bestseller Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013; Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014) was justly admired for its ambition, though many economists were less impressed by its contents. Piketty has also this century produced Capital et idéologie (2019; Capital and Ideology, 2020), which argued that liberalism, defined in the correct and French sense of a system of society with no coercing masters, in effect supports inequality, and Les hauts revenus en France au XXème siècle (2001; Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century, 2018), which took aim at the very rich, in particular Liliane Bettencourt, heiress to the L’Oréal cosmetics fortune. In this pair of newly translated volumes, Piketty continues to make the case that any inequality is fearful and that the state is the right instrument to neutralize this fear.
The final sentence of this paragraph has struck Mcclosky’s Hayek nerve! As a Socialist why wouldn’t he advocate the state as the ‘right instrument to neutralize fear’?’
The Economist, in 2014 published these two essays on Piketty’s ‘Capitalism’:
Headline: Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”, summarised in four paragraphs
A very brief summary of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"
By R.A.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/05/04/thomas-pikettys-capital-summarised-in-four-paragraphs
And this :
Headline: A modern Marx
Sub-headline: Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book is a great piece of scholarship, but a poor guide to policy
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2014/05/03/a-modern-marx
I still have my print copy of R.A.’s chapter by chapter review of Piketty’s ‘Capital’ under the rubrics ‘Free Exchange, Economics, Book clubs’: the first titled ‘Reading “Capital” : Introduction’:
https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/02/27/reading-capital-introduction
As I am no longer a subscriber of The Economist, this link is behind a pay wall. R.A.’s essays are invaluable! The Economist once practiced, something like high political/intellectual standards, of a very specific kind!
The Reader must explore the December 2006 review, by Alan Ryan, of Mcclosky’s ‘The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce’ The first two paragraphs of his ‘review’ are tart, to understate the case:
The idea of providing an exuberant defense of bourgeois virtues seems on the face of it absurd. In common parlance, “bourgeois” is synonymous with “humdrum” and “conventional.” The ideal bourgeois citizen is cautious and anxious; given to deferred gratification, to considering the rainy days ahead, and to paying the price in present pleasures foregone. The bourgeois emulates the ant, not the grasshopper, working hard during the good times to survive the bad times that must lie ahead. When critics talk of “bourgeois virtues,” it is often with a sneer. Prudence is a virtue, but “bourgeois prudence” is a synonym for timidity and meanness; and “bourgeois courage” sounds very like a contradiction in terms. Exuberance seems foreign to the bourgeois soul; but a book that opens with the ringing declaration “I bring good news about our bourgeois lives” promises to be long on exuberance and short on anxiety. And so it proves.
Whether The Bourgeois Virtues provides a defense of distinctively bourgeois virtues is debatable. The author herself frequently seems unsure whether she is defending a set of ethics that are identifiable with a particular stratum of society, and sometimes professes herself unconcerned if it turns out that the virtues she espouses are not in fact distinctively bourgeois. It may not matter very much—there is plainly no reason why members of the bourgeoisie cannot display the “aristocratic” virtues of generosity, courage, and a disdain for narrow self-interest or the “working-class” virtues of comradeship and solidarity—but there is a never quite resolved tension between the search for a distinctively bourgeois set of virtues and the much more plausible case that the bourgeoisie display as much (classless) virtue as anyone.
…
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/12/21/is-capitalism-good-for-you/
Some selective commentary:
The most salient feature of Piketty’s obsession with the redivision of the social pie is that he never mentions the enormous increase in the per person size of the pie since 1800 or 1900 or 1960.
We live in a World Economy despoiled by a failed, more than forty year economic experiment with Neo-Liberalism, that collapsed in 2008 : note that Prosperity has failed to return, except for greedy Bankers and Un-Enlightened Capitalists. The immiseration of both the Working and Middle Classes are a fact that Mcclosky’s ‘size of the pie’ chatter does not mitigate. The Crisis that has only been exacerbated the wrenched economic picture for ‘the enormous increase in the per person size of the pie’ that has lost what ever patency it might have had!
The political watershed of that failed experiment, is what The Financial Times, in a telling moment of honesty, dubbed ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ , it soon disappeared as cutting too close!
This is the main story of the past two centuries, not Piketty’s ups and downs in the envy-inducing shares of the pie going to Bettencourt and Bezos.
This reads like the chatter of the late Tony Blankley, by way of Oakeshott, that diagnoses ‘jealousy’ as somehow the motive force of Socialism?
That Mcclosky possesses rhetorical gifts, for marshaling apt historical analogies, thinkers, writers, actors, ideas to festoon her pronouncement- its an impressive collection: ‘permission, since 1789’, Frédéric Bastiat, Jeff Bezos, Ireland, Finland, Botswana, Adam Smith.
Then there is this free-floating, what to name it? ‘Not being an economist, though professing economics and offering to arrange the pieces of the economy, is not the worst of sins.’
Or this on bidding: that puts politics behind the economy! This is simply an assertion, a throw away line …
Piketty wants a “participatory socialism”. But participation is more quickly achieved through bidding in the economy than through voting in politics.
For all the careful framing, that Mcclosky presents, with a certain practiced aplomb, the quote from Herbert Spencer, that obliquely offers Piketty, in the role of ‘political schemer’ . That is presented to The Reader as ‘Thomas Piketty’s hope.’
Which will be the most healthful community – that in which agents who perform their functions badly immediately suffer by the withdrawal of public patronage; or that in which such agents can be made to suffer only through an apparatus of meetings, petitions, polling-booths, parliamentary divisions, cabinet-councils, and red-tape documents? Is it not an absurdly utopian hope that men will behave better when correction is far removed and uncertain than when it is near at hand and inevitable? Yet this is the hope which most political schemers unconsciously cherish.
Just searching the index, of Mark Francis’ book ‘Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life’ pages 43,249,277,309, 315. that offers just mentions of Socialism.
Yet The Reader has two more sources to view/read:
12 Brilliant Quotes by Herbert Spencer on the Fallacies of Statism
On his birthday, consider this condensed version of Spencer's essay, "Over-legislation."
On his birthday, consider this condensed version of Spencer's essay, "Over-legislation."
And this review of Mark Francis’ book at NDPR. This partial quote offers some insight on Spencer’s historical reputation, for want of a better descriptor:
…
Francis demonstrates how Spencer actively contributed to public misunderstanding of his views in two major ways. First, Spencer's thought was constantly changing, in some cases quite radically, over the course of his long life; he died aged 83. As one speaks of Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and of Philosophical Investigations, meaning almost two different thinkers, it seems plausible to speak of the early Spencer (idealistic progressive, cheerleader for Western civilization, advocate of women's rights) and the later Spencer (ambivalent about technological progress and women's suffrage, fretfully optimistic). Unfortunately, the monumentally prolific Spencer rarely signalled these (sometimes substantial) changes of emphasis or view from one work to the next. Not only did he retain from work to work the continuity of his general evolutionary framework -- the idea that living things constantly adapt to environmental circumstances by adjusting their internal 'relations' to external ones -- large chunks of earlier works were recycled. Sometimes changes in position, in subsequent editions or new works, amounted to the omission of a critical phrase in a restatement of principle. Thus, only a literary sleuth with access to diverse sources of information (like Francis) could have hoped to follow Spencer's intellectual development. Even his admirers and adversaries found it difficult to keep track of Spencer's contradictory views.
…
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/herbert-spencer-and-the-invention-of-modern-life/
Old Socialist