There has been significant criticism of some of his data, his measures of inequality and his statistical definitions especially in the work done for the 21st C Capital book. They don't necessarily invalidate his general conclusions but they reinforce the impression of political bias in his work.
Not to mention the whole Chicago school of economic thought. Laffer has been considered something of a "Laffing stock" (with my apologies for the play on words) for his simplistic curve and considerably discounted.
At the end of the day you look at them all and form your own idea of how the economy works. What is certain is that has worked very much against the interests of the people . It is time that the dominance of politics over economics be re-established to bring the wealth back to the people who really produce it rather than to those that "own" it.
Indeed all economists (and other social theorists) choose data and measures that back their desired conclusions. But in the case of supply-side approaches, we have 50 years of accumulated information about outcomes about tax policies, regulatory changes, income distributions and their knock-on effects, etc. It is inevitable that there are different uses of these measures and different conclusions drawn from them. But some track closer to the masses of data than others.
For a simple presentation of the Piketty approach, Saez and Zucman published a slideshow that summarizes their book "The Triumph of Injustice":
I agree with Stuart that Krugman's analyses and suggestions for improvement are in many respects closer to well-confirmed data. If you want to go further into the weeds on this, here is a CUNY panel discussion which includes all of them:
But as welcome as these contentions and the new UK study are, none of them doubt that trickle-down was a successful spin of a set of policies disastrous for the bulk of the people.
It doesn't work in part because the politicians leave the largesse recipients with freedom of choice about what they do with their ill-gained and fortuitous wealth increase and leave them far too many tax-credit havens which are totally unproductive.
Picketty is a genius. Truly brilliant work.
There has been significant criticism of some of his data, his measures of inequality and his statistical definitions especially in the work done for the 21st C Capital book. They don't necessarily invalidate his general conclusions but they reinforce the impression of political bias in his work.
Every economist has political bias. Do you think Arthur Laffer wasn't biased toward conservative capitalism?
Not to mention the whole Chicago school of economic thought. Laffer has been considered something of a "Laffing stock" (with my apologies for the play on words) for his simplistic curve and considerably discounted.
At the end of the day you look at them all and form your own idea of how the economy works. What is certain is that has worked very much against the interests of the people . It is time that the dominance of politics over economics be re-established to bring the wealth back to the people who really produce it rather than to those that "own" it.
Indeed all economists (and other social theorists) choose data and measures that back their desired conclusions. But in the case of supply-side approaches, we have 50 years of accumulated information about outcomes about tax policies, regulatory changes, income distributions and their knock-on effects, etc. It is inevitable that there are different uses of these measures and different conclusions drawn from them. But some track closer to the masses of data than others.
For a simple presentation of the Piketty approach, Saez and Zucman published a slideshow that summarizes their book "The Triumph of Injustice":
https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SZ2019Slides.pdf
I agree with Stuart that Krugman's analyses and suggestions for improvement are in many respects closer to well-confirmed data. If you want to go further into the weeds on this, here is a CUNY panel discussion which includes all of them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIv0xTPWZOo
But as welcome as these contentions and the new UK study are, none of them doubt that trickle-down was a successful spin of a set of policies disastrous for the bulk of the people.
Thank you for these videos.
It doesn't work in part because the politicians leave the largesse recipients with freedom of choice about what they do with their ill-gained and fortuitous wealth increase and leave them far too many tax-credit havens which are totally unproductive.