PIKETTY RESPONDS TO GILES

Professor David Auerbach has kindly sent me a link to the response Thomas Piketty has written to the criticisms of Capital in the Twenty-First Century published in the Financial Times.  You can read the response here.  Needless to say, I am not competent to offer a professional judgment on the merits of the criticism and the response, but I have read what Piketty has to say and it sounds eminently sensible to me.  As I have already indicated, the crucial issue -- namely, the grotesque inequality of wealth and income in modern capitalist states -- is really not in dispute between the two authors.  Those of us on the left ought to keep that in mind, and not make the mistake of supposing that somehow capitalism is exonerated if it should turn out that Piketty has overestimated the rate of growth of the inequality.