Taken From Thomas Piketty's "Capital and Ideology" > Local Impact of Economic Policies Here In Arizona and Maricopa County

In the current clash of ideologies, while it's probably no coincidence that Americans see Piketty as more left-wing than he sees himself, the respected and now world famous French economist released a new book yesterday that is one of the most important in the 21st Century. It's longer than Tolstoy's "War & Peace", takes off from Karl Marx's "Das Kapital" . . .  and like some others has been attached to socialism

Well and good, so yes let's get more social and drop the negative -ism.

. . . and here's one more book readers of this blog might want to take more than a quick look at >

It is right on-topic:
how rising inequality distorts the global economy and threatens international peace

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Before we get to Arizona, here are some more top stories in the last 24 hours:
 It's getting very social!

Top stories

Top stories

Thomas Piketty
Jumps the Shark

Bloomberg

21 hours ago

Thomas Piketty's
new book uses
data to trace how
inequality changes ...

Boing Boing

19 hours ago

Is Inequality Losing
Its Political Power?

Bloomberg

14 hours ago

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Let's go back-in-time to 2014 to this article

Thomas Piketty doesn’t hate capitalism

He just wants to fix it

By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesias matt@vox.com Apr 24, 2014, 7:00am EDT

"Thomas Piketty is not the anti-capitalist radical that his critics fear.

Piketty is unimpressed by arguments about political futility. A century ago, he says, the progressive income tax would have been regarded as an impossible pipe dream.
And yet it happened. Not just in a Europe terrified by the Bolshevik Revolution, but in the United States as well.
"The Constitution of the US made it, in principle, impossible to have an income tax," he observes, "and yet it happened." The role of scholars, he thinks, should not be to prognosticate on the political viability of various proposals but simply to try to assess their merits.
. . . "One of the main purposes of the wealth tax is that it should produce more information on wealth"

Piketty's eyes light up when he explains that "one of the main purposes of the wealth tax is that it should produce more information on wealth."
His key early contribution as an economist was to show that earlier studies of income inequality based on Census Bureau survey data were seriously misleading and that it's possible to use IRS income tax data to get a much clearer view.
The survey data only lets you look at relatively broad swaths of the population — the top 10 percent or the top 20 percent — and thus ended up entirely discounting the possibility that the top 1 or 0.1 or 0.01 percent would look very different. Since taxes are paid by individuals rather than representative samples, tax data lets you see what the extremely rich are up to. For the United States, that IRS data goes back to the origins of the income tax in the early 20th century but not further.. . . it's "the lack of financial transparency" — rather than interest group politics, sincere normative disagreement, or human tribal instincts — that "makes it very difficult to have a quiet political conversation and democratic debate about these things."
Data utopianism aside, it is true that not only is Piketty perhaps not so left-wing for a Frenchman but a bit less in line with mainstream Democratic Party politics than it at first appears.

. . . . It's easy for the wealthy to disparage a tax-raising agenda as simply meaning higher taxes and wasteful spending with no benefits for the rest of the population.
"I think it's a big trick and it's possible to do away with it."
We ought to organize ourselves and do the best out of capitalism and the market economy which, at the end of the day, is a system that has a lot of merit. But we need to find a way that everyone can get to share in this process.
You can read the interview with Matthew Iglesias > https://www.vox.com/2014/4/24/5643780/who-is-thomas-piketty 
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