With nearly perfect timing, the ideological and malicious scaffold of Lefty-union politics, these days, about income distribution happens to coincide with a massive data based research project by a French economist, Thomas Piketty. Piketty is consequently the subject of great interest in the professional economics world.
I have not read Piketty and have no reason to do so. My knowledgeable readers need to know the issues. My primary source is an article in the New Republic by Robert Solow. My secondary source is the senior economics professor at Harvard, Gregory Mankiw.
In the event that you don't know who Robert Solow is, he is the economist who created the modern backwards ideological framework for Third World development. Solow created the idea of a ‘take-off period’ that said all developing countries need is money. The same perverse logic that leads Lefties to think that giving money to poor people will end poverty.
You can also tell the orientation of Solow's antique thinking because the review is in the New Republic.
Clearly what Piketty has done is to look at major nations’ data on income distribution and productivity going as far back as he can. In some cases he can go back several centuries. In most cases he gets less than a century of data. His conclusion is that there is a simple linear relationship between national output, productivity and income distribution. His data apparently is different for most of the world from the United States, which he admits. He is unable to understand why this data distinction exists. Nevertheless he goes on to predict that significant and perverse income distributions will persist into the future because productivity increases go to capital which in turn goes to the richest top of the society.
I see numerous problems with this material. First anything abstract at this level is subject to ideological distortion. The best example is Malthus. His linear projections of food production and population growth did not take into account technological improvements in food production. The abstract equations looked fine. The reality had no connection except in countries that continued to have Malthusian levels of food production.
The second problem is that Piketty has no idea how much income distribution in the United States has changed. We no longer have an elite class that can pass on its capital to its family. Nearly 100% of the top economic class in America has earned its money de novo since 1960 as a byproduct of productivity. Moreover the middle class in America gets nearly all of its benefits in income from capital improvements and capital investments which are promptly passed on in the form of bonuses and stock options to the workers. Separation in income distribution from the middle to the top income brackets has no reason to expand adversely.
Third and lastly, projections into the future, have been disastrously bad for the population explosion and global warming…. also projections made by Lefty ideologues. One more Lefty ideologue making a linear projection into the future should have no credibility with anyone except a Lefty.