On Friday March 6 at Harvard Law School, renowned economist Thomas Piketty, professor of Economics, EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics, visited the law school to debate his bestselling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century with several Harvard faculty, including: Sven Beckert Laird Bell Professor of American History, Harvard University; Christine Desan, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; David Kennedy, Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; and Stephen Marglin, Walter S. Barker Chair in the Department of Economics, Harvard University.

Comments

1. an interesting perspective on inequality is that it is primarily due to skill shortage rather than inter-generational concentration of wealth
2. that very good
3. I have no idea what I just watched (for the most part) but I am damn interested in figuring it out.  Thank you for the video.
4. It is worth adding to this discussion that a serious analytical problem is created by the failure on the part of most economists (and even other social scientists) to distinguish between gains associated with financial transactions and gains associated with actual capital goods. And, of course, in the real world capital goods do not appreciate in value; they depreciate down to scrap value, even though during the life of a building or machine or even a software program the asset requires ongoing infusion of labor and new capital goods just to maintain functional utility.
   
   What are the consequences of this failure? The easiest to identify is the declaration of gains on the sale of assets as "capital gains" and, on the theory that such gains should be encouraged, the rate of taxation imposed on such gains is kept lower (and often far lower) than income earned by producing goods and services.