Thomas Piketty & Our World of Today

There is a fantastic "review" of economist Thomas Piketty's amazing work Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  I say "review" because it is not so much a review of the book -- or only of the book -- itself, but rather a review of the state of discourse about its core focus and conclusions.  The book itself, while amazing, is a bit of a slog, but well worth it.  So, too, is this writing at TPM.  Its most important and, I believe its most correct, point is quoted below.

The question of whether our road leads to Piketty (2014)—a new Belle Époque plutocracy—or Keynes (1936)—a euthanization of the rentier in which the wealth of the rich is outlandish but their incomes are not due to low rates of profit—hinges on our politics. And our politics is something we can control.
We as a civilization could decide that we are not willing to let money talk so loudly in politics. We could keep our politics from being one of establishing monopoly after monopoly and rent-extraction chokepoint after rent-extraction chokepoint. If we manage that, then the forecasts of Keynes (1936) and Rognlie (2015 will come true, and a rise in wealth accumulation will carry with it a fall in the rate of profit, and a highly-productive not-too-unequal society.
But right now money talks very loudly indeed. And I leave the Piketty debate more depressed about our ability to keep it from talking so loudly. What makes me more depressed? The Piketty debate itself does: The eagerness of so-many economists to aggressively make so many shoddy arguments that Piketty does not know what he is talking about.

22 December 2015