Piketty’s method of doing economics involves frequent grand proclamations about "social justice" and economic "evolutions," but he offers no analyses of the dynamics of individual decision-making, often referred to as "microeconomics," that should be central to the issues he raises…
Revealingly, Piketty writes of income and wealth as being claimed or "distributed," never as being earned or produced. The resulting statistics are too aggregated—too big-picture—to reveal what is happening to individuals on the ground…
He imagines that such aggregates interact in robotic fashion through a logic of their own, unmoved by individual human initiative, creativity, or choice…
If we follow the advice of Adam Smith and examine people’s ability to consume, we discover that nearly everyone in market economies is growing richer…
THE U.S. IS THE bête noir of Piketty and other progressives obsessed with monetary inequality.
But middle-class Americans take for granted their air-conditioned homes, cars, and workplaces—along with their smartphones, safe air travel, and pills for ailments ranging from hypertension to erectile dysfunction…
At the end of World War II, when monetary income and wealth inequalities were narrower than they’ve been at any time in the past century, these goods and services were either available to no one or affordable only by the very rich.
So regardless of how many more dollars today’s plutocrats have accumulated and stashed into their portfolios, the elite’s accumulation of riches has not prevented the living standards of ordinary people from rising spectacularly…
Piketty’s disregard for basic economic reasoning blinds him to the all-important market forces at work on the ground—market forces that, if left unencumbered by government, produce growing prosperity for all. Yet, he would happily encumber these forces with confiscatory taxes.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Jun 01, 2014 @ 22:56:15
If you go to Barron’s website where the article is, you see the comments section is filled with people calling Boudreaux’s article nonsense, garbage, and so forth. But IMO he is dead-on. Piketty is the one with at best a pseudoscientific understanding of economics. He does not understand the difference between relative wealth inequality and absolute wealth inequality. Realistically, the wealth gap is at the lowest level it has ever been. Wealth inequality is not increasing except perhaps in a relative manner.
And if Piketty actually claims that income is “claimed” by the wealthy, then he most definitely is engaging in pseudoscience. Income is just what one earns in exchange for what they produce, nothing more. There isn’t some supply of income that everyone at the end of the year claims some of for themselves, and the wealthy are claiming a larger and larger share for themselves, leaving less available to everyone else. That isn’t how it works. It would be like claiming that the poor are unfairly being made to carry around a large share of “society’s weight.” Yes, you can add up all the weight of everyone in society and get a “national weight” statistic, and then look at the “distribution” of that statistic throughout the country, but to claim this or that portion of the population is not carrying their “fair share” of the weight would obviously be ludicrous and based on a complete lack of understanding of what weight is in society and how people gain it.
Income and wealth are similar. They do not exist in fixed pies, they are not “distributed,” people do not “claim” them, and income and wealth quintiles do not represent fixed classes of people.
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Jun 04, 2014 @ 13:42:45
thanks Kyle, A lot of people believe inequality with a passion so much so they don’t want to hear evidence to the contrary.
I call these people the Twitter Left because of the irony that the tweeting all these insults to Don and his article about the Pikitty on an amazing technology called a mobile phone about the horrors of capitalism about everyone’s poor when just about everyone has a mobile phone.
A mobile phone would have cost several million dollars 20 years ago just for the processing power alone.
You might want to have a look at the bottom half of https://utopiayouarestandinginit.com/2014/03/12/why-call-my-blog-utopia-you-are-standing-in-it/ that explains the ironies of the Twitter left and how they’ll never be happy.
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