Terin D. (2021) After the Rising Tide: Reception of Piketty’s Concepts in Contemporary US Studies of Capital and Inequality. Mir Rossii, vol. 30, no 3, pp. 188–201 (in Russian). DOI: 10.17323 ...

Òåêñò ñòàòüè íà ñàéòå æóðíàëà URL: https://mirros.hse.ru/article/view/12645 (äàòà îáðàùåíèÿ 27.10.2021)

Abstract

In this article, I review several papers and topics featured in “After Piketty”, the voluminous collective work of the American scholars engaging with Thomas Piketty’s bestseller “Capital in the 21st Century”. The first chapters of the book focus on Piketty’s conceptualization of capital and his central argument that the concentration of wealth will continue to rise. Solow and Krugman agree with Piketty’s arguments, but Raval questions the estimates of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. Two sections of the book contain alternative explanations for the rising inequality: human capital, technological development, and demographic changes. Nielsen argues that Piketty’s concept of capital neglects human capital, and this strongly affects all of his conclusions and forecasts. Tyson and Spence draw attention to Piketty’s concept of rent and investigate the influence of technology on the concentration of wealth. De Nardi, Fella, and Yang consider the institution of bequest and the wealth transmission from one generation to another. Their model shows that a lower population growth rate plays a more significant role in the concentration of wealth. Naidu uses the metaphor of two “Pikettys” (the “domesticated” and the “wild”) to describe Piketty’s approaches to capital: an institution-and-politics free model of capital, and capital as an institution, “a set of property rights entitling bearers to politically protected rights of control, exclusion, transfer, and derived cash flow”. Why are existing democratic processes not sufficient to avoid the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few? This question is posed by the legal philosopher Grewal, who claims that the task of his chapter is to consider capitalism as a legal regime. In Grewal’s description, all existing economic life is generated as an “emanation of commercial sociability”, a product of modern legal state institutions which reproduce property rights as a comprehensive protection of the interests of owners of capital assets. Steinbaum presents a thorough historical analysis of the four leading countries of capitalism of how the dominant inequality legitimizing ideology gave way to social-democratic ideology. Derenoncourt looks at institutional differences and inequality from a global perspective. She introduces Acemoglu and Robinson’s typology of institutions, which divide institutional systems into inclusive and non-inclusive, and extractive, but she does not conclude that the observed concentration of wealth can be interpreted in such a way that capital in this typology should be classified as a non-inclusive institution. Jacobs argues that Piketty remains within the framework of traditional political economy, in which the political takes a subordinate position relative to the economic, and the role of institutions is not considered systematically. According to Jacobs, the turn to comparative institutionalism and the emergence of a rich literature on “the varieties of capitalism” (and, in particular, on the role of informal institutions) since the early 2000s seem to have been ignored by Piketty. Piketty does not make a systematic analysis of the relationship between civil society and the state, which could provide an answer to the question of how wealth inequality turns into power inequality.