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Capital in the Twenty-First Century / Капитал в XXI веке


Год: 2014
Автор: Thomas Piketty / Томас Пикетти
Переводчик: Arthur Goldhammer / Артур Голдхаммер
Жанр: экономическая теория
Издательство: Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London (England)
ISBN: 067443000X / 978-0674430006
Язык: Английский
Формат: PDF
Качество: Отсканированные страницы
Интерактивное оглавление: Нет
Количество страниц: 696
Описание: «Капитал в XXI веке» — книга, которую французский немарксистский экономист Тома (Томас) Пикетти посвятил экономическому неравенству в Европе и Соединенных Штатах, начиная с XVIII века. Первоначально опубликована на французском языке в августе 2013 года, английский перевод вышел в апреле 2014 года. Центральный тезис книги состоит в том, что концентрация богатства будет возрастать, если уровень доходности капитала (r) выше, чем уровень экономического роста (g). Пикетти приводит аргументы, что в долгосрочной перспективе это приведёт к концентрации богатства и экономической нестабильности. Левенький реформист Пикетти предлагает создать глобальную систему прогрессивных налогов на богатство с тем, чтобы обеспечить условия для равенства и избежать попадания львиной доли богатств под контроль абсолютного меньшинства.

Следует подчеркнуть, что под «капиталом» Пикетти понимает сумму любых активов (за исключением «человеческого капитала»), которые можно иметь в собственности и обменивать на каком-либо рынке. Капитал может находиться в собственности отдельных индивидов (частный капитал) или в собственности государства (публичный капитал). У Пикетти понятия капитала и богатства взаимозаменяемы.

Thomas Piketty, a 43 year old, left leaning, French economist, has written a 700 page book on inequality which has achieved something few would have thought possible. He has rocked the neo-liberal economic establishment to its foundations. To read the tidal wave of reviews by economics professors and others across the world is to get a sense of the impact that Piketty’s conclusions are having: that inequality is even more extreme than most experts thought, is worse than at any time since the 19th century and is set to reach nightmare proportions in the years ahead. Even some of the most ideologically blinkered of free market economists, having read this book, now openly admit that the Professor Piketty has laid down a challenge which they dare not ignore and which could change the political environment. Many say he has “re-written the economic text books for this century.”

The experts are impressed less by his conclusions than the mountain of evidence he marshals in support of them. This book has been written with the active collaboration of many experts working on data - which has never been properly collated or analysed before - about how wealth and income differences have evolved over the centuries. Only with the latest data processing systems has this been made possible.

Examining the history of income and wealth inequality, Piketty recounts the extreme inequalities which marked the centuries before the First World War. In a fascinating section which follows, he links the reduction of inequalities between 1914 and 1945 in large measure to the sheer destruction by war of so much (mainly inherited) wealth. But he also underlines that in post-war Europe, between 1945 and the mid 1970s, an unprecedented combination of higher taxes, social reform and strong trade unionism resulted in a gradual narrowing of inequality. But his documentation of trends since the 1970s is bleak in the extreme. In describing the accelerating concentration of wealth in the hands of the infamous “1 per cent”, Piketty demonstrates the interaction between outlandishly extreme salaries paid to top business executives and the way in which this boosts not merely income but feeds directly into wealth inequality. In the US not only do the richest 10 per cent own 75 per cent of the country’s wealth but between 2010 and 2012 an almost unbelievable 95 per cent of the overall growth of income went to just one per cent of the population.

At the heart of his detailed analysis Piketty insists that “the central contradiction of capitalism” is the tendency for inequality to grow when the rate of return on capital (by which he means something broader than the conventional Marxist definition of the rate of profit) is higher than the economy’s rate of growth. He also notes that as developing countries industrialise, inequalities get worse, not better. In the developed capitalist world he warns that the prospect of slower economic growth in the years ahead combined with the political domination of the interests of the super rich in our political systems threatens to make these extreme inequalities even more grotesque.

Given this analysis, and Piketty’s title for the book “Capital in the 21st Century” it might be thought that he is fairly obviously a Marxist. But although he was brought up in a family of Marxists (his parent were militants in the French Trotskyist Lutte Ouvriere organisation) this is not really the case. While acknowledging his debt to Marx’s pioneering work, he highlights distributional issues and insists there are potential reforms which can and should be taken even within the existing capitalist system. In essence this comes down to the blunt conclusion that there should be a coordinated, world wide annual tax on all forms of wealth (not just property). He suggests this might start at one per cent on wealth between $1 million and $5 million rising to 10 per cent or possibly more on fortunes above $1 billion. Piketty of course understands the enormity of this challenge but argues that “Although this risk is real, I do not see any genuine alternative: if we are to regain control of capitalism, we must bet everything on democracy – and in Europe, democracy on a European scale.”

This, of course, is where the political dialogue on the left should begin. Piketty admits such an approach is a very long shot. So could such a strategy have to await some prior existing “socialist order” or might the struggle to redress the Kafkaesque world of income and wealth inequality trigger a revival of international movements directed at achieving a new economic and social system? At the very least this “extraordinarily important book” (as the Financial Times described it) provides the left with the arguments and the evidence for action which not even the most blinkered of defenders of the present neo-liberal order can challenge. We should take advantage of the obvious intellectual disarray which Piketty has inflicted on our enemies. This book should be in everyone’s local library.

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1
A Debate without Data? 2
Malthus, Young, and the French Revolution 3
Ricardo: The Principle of Scarcity 5
Marx: The Principle of Infinite Accumulation 7
From Marx to Kuznets, or Apocalypse to Fairy Tale 11
The Kuznets Curve: Good News in the Midst of the Cold War 13
Putting the Distributional Question Back at the Heart of Economic Analysis 15
The Sources Used in This Book 16
The Major Results of This Study 20
Forces of Convergence, Forces of Divergence 22
The Fundamental Force for Divergence: r >g 25
The Geographical and Historical Boundaries of This Study 27
The Theoretical and Conceptual Framework 30
Outline of the Book 33

Part One: Income and Capital. 37

1. Income and Output 39
The Capital-Labor Split in the Long Run: Not So Stable 41
The Idea of National Income 43
What Is Capital? 45
Capital and Wealth 47
The Capital/Income Ratio 50
The First Fundamental Law of Capitalism: α: = r X β 52
National Accounts: An Evolving Social Construct 55
The Global Distribution of Production 59
From Continental Blocs to Regional Blocs 61
Global Inequality: From 150 Euros per Month to 3,000 Euros per Month 64
The Global Distribution of Income Is More Unequal Than the Distribution of Output 67
What Forces Favor Convergence? 69

2. Growth: Illusions and Realities 72
Growth over the Very Long Run 73
The Law of Cumulative Growth 74
The Stages of Demographic Growth 77
Negative Demographic Growth? 80
Growth as a Factor for Equalization 83
The Stages of Economic Growth 86
What Does a Tenfold Increase in Purchasing Power Mean? 87
Growth: A Diversification of Lifestyles 90
The End of Growth? 93
An Annual Growth of 1 Percent Implies Major Social Change 95
The Posterity of the Postwar Period: Entangled Transatlantic Destinies 96
The Double Bell Curve of Global Growth 99
The Question of Inflation 102
The Great Monetary Stability of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 103
The Meaning of Money in Literary Classics 105
The Loss of Monetary Bearings in the Twentieth Century 106

Part Two: The Dynamics of the Capital/Income Ratio. 111

3. The Metamorphoses of Capital 113
The Nature of Wealth: From Literature to Reality 113
The Metamorphoses of Capital in Britain and France II6
The Rise and Fall of Foreign Capital 120
Income and Wealth: Some Orders of Magnitude 122
Public Wealth, Private Wealth 123
Public Wealth in Historical Perspective 126
Great Britain: Public Debt and the Reinforcement of Private Capital 129
Who Profits from Public Debt? 131
The Ups and Downs of Ricardian Equivalence 134
France: A Capitalism without Capitalists in the Postwar Period 135

4· From Old Europe to the New World 140
Germany: Rhenish Capitalism and Social Ownership 140
Shocks to Capital in the Twentieth Century 146
Capital in America: More Stable Than in Europe 150
The New World and Foreign Capital 155
Canada: Long Owned by the Crown I57
New World and Old World: The Importance of Slavery 158
Slave Capital and Human Capital 162

5· The Capital/Income Ratio over the Long Run 164
The Second Fundamental Law of Capitalism: β =s/g 166
A Long-Term Law 168
Capital's Comeback in Rich Countries since the 1970s 170
Beyond Bubbles: Low Growth, High Saving 173
The Two Components of Private Saving 176
Durable Goods and Valuables 179
Private Capital Expressed in Years of Disposable Income 180
The Question of Foundations and Other Holders of Capital 182
The Privatization of Wealth in the Rich Countries 183
The Historic Rebound of Asset Prices 187
National Capital and Net Foreign Assets in the Rich Countries 191
What Will the Capitall/Income Ratio Be in the Twenty-First Century? 195
The Mystery of Land Values 196

6. The Capital-Labor Split in the Twenty-First Century 199
From the Capital/Income Ratio to the Capital-Labor Split 199
Flows: More Difficult to Estimate Than Stocks 203
The Notion of the Pure Return on Capital 20S
The Return on Capital in Historical Perspective 206
The Return on Capital in the Early Twenty-First Century 208
Real and Nominal Assets 209
What Is Capital Used For? 212
The Notion of Marginal Productivity of Capital 213
Too Much Capital Kills the Return on Capital 215
Beyond Cobb-Douglas: The Question of the Stability of the Capital-Labor Split 217
Capital-Labor Substitution in the Twenty-First Century: An Elasticity Greater Than One 220
Traditional Agricultural Societies: An Elasticity Less Than One 222
Is Human Capital Illusory? 223
Medium-Term Changes in the Capital-Labor Split 224
Back to Marx and the Falling Rate of Profit 227
Beyond the "Two Cambridges" 230
Capital's Comeback in a Low-Growth Regime 232
The Caprices of Technology 234

Part Three: The Structure of lnequality. 235

7. Inequality and Concentration: Preliminary Bearings 237
Vautrin's Lesson 237
The Key Question: Work or Inheritance? 240
Inequalities with Respect to Labor and Capital 242
Capital: Always More Unequally Distributed Than Labor 244
Inequalities and Concentration: Some Orders of Magnitude 246
Lower, Middle, and Upper Classes 250
Class Struggle or Centile Struggle? 252
Inequalities with Respect to Labor: Moderate Inequality? 255
Inequalities with Respect to Capital: Extreme Inequality 257
A Major Innovation: The Patrimonial Middle Class 260
Inequality of Total Income: Two Worlds 263
Problems of Synthetic Indices 266
The Chaste Veil of Official Publications 267
Back to "Social Tables" and Political Arithmetic 269

8. Two Worlds 271
A Simple Case: The Reduction of Inequality in France in the Twentieth Century 271
The History of Inequality: A Chaotic Political History 274
From a "Society of Rentiers" to a "Society of Managers" 276
The Different Worlds of the Top Decile 278
The Limits of Income Tax Returns 281
The Chaos of the Interwar Years 284
The Clash of Temporalities 286
The Increase of Inequality in France since the 1980s 290
A More Complex Case: The Transformation of Inequality in the United States 291
The Explosion of US Inequality after 1980 294
Did the Increase of Inequality Cause the Financial Crisis? 297
The Rise of Supersalaries 298
Cohabitation in the Upper Centile 300

9. Inequality of Labor Income 304
Wage Inequality: A Race between Education and Technology? 304
The Limits of the Theoretical Model: The Role of Institutions 307
Wage Scales and the Minimum Wage 310
How to Explain the Explosion of Inequality in the United States? 314
The Rise of the Supermanager: An Anglo-Saxon Phenomenon 315
Europe: More Inegalitarian Than the New World in 1900-1910 321
Inequalities in Emerging Economies: Lower Than in the United States? 326
The Illusion of Marginal Productivity 330
The Takeoff of the Supermanagers: A Powerful Force for Divergence 333

10. Inequality of Capital Ownership 336
Hyperconcentrated Wealth: Europe and America 336
France: An Observatory of Private Wealth 337
The Metamorphoses of a Patrimonial Society 339
Inequality of Capital in Belle Epoque Europe 343
The Emergence of the Patrimonial Middle Class 346
Inequality of Wealth in America 347
The Mechanism of Wealth Divergence: r versus g in History 350
Why Is the Return on Capital Greater Than the Growth Rate? 353
The Question of Time Preference 358
Is There an Equilibrium Distribution? 361
The Civil Code and the Illusion of the French Revolution 364
Pareto and the Illusion of Stable Inequality 366
Why Inequality of Wealth Has Not Returned to the Levels of the Past 368
Some Partial Explanations: Time, Taxes, and Growth 372
The Twenty-First Century: Even More Inegalitarian Than the Nineteenth? 375

11. Merit and Inheritance in the Long Run 377
Inheritance Flows over the Long Run 379
Fiscal Flow and Economic Flow 381
The Three Forces: The Illusion of an End of Inheritance 383
Mortality over the Long Run 385
Wealth Ages with Population: The μ X m Effect 388
Wealth of the Dead, Wealth of the Living 390
The Fifties and the Eighties: Age and Fortune in the Belle Epoque 393
The Rejuvenation of Wealth Owing to War 396
How Will Inheritance Flows Evolve in the Twenty-First Century? 398
From the Annual Inheritance Flow to the Stock of Inherited Wealth 401
Back to Vautrin's Lecture 404
Rastignac's Dilemma 407
The Basic Arithmetic of Rentiers and Managers 410
The Classic Patrimonial Society: The World of Balzac and Austen 411
Extreme Inequality of Wealth: A Condition of Civilization in a Poor Society? 415
Meritocratic Extremism in Wealthy Societies 416
The Society of Petits Rentiers 418
The Rentier, Enemy of Democracy 422
The Return of Inherited Wealth: A European or Global Phenomenon? 424

12. Global Inequality of Wealth in the Twenty-First Century 430
The Inequality of Returns on Capital 430
The Evolution of Global Wealth Rankings 432
From Rankings of Billionaires to "Global Wealth Reports" 436
Heirs and Entrepreneurs in the Wealth Rankings 439
The Moral Hierarchy of Wealth 443
The Pure Return on University Endowments 447
What Is the Effect of Inflation on Inequality of Returns to Capital? 452
The Return on Sovereign Wealth Funds: Capital and Politics 455
Will Sovereign Wealth Funds Own the World? 458
Will China Own the World? 460
International Divergence, Oligarchic Divergence Are the Rich Countries Really Poor? 465

Part Four: Regulating Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 469

13. A Social State for the Twenty-First Century 471
The Crisis of 2008 and the Return of the State 472
The Growth of the Social State in the Twentieth Century 474
Modern Redistribution: A Logic of Rights 479
Modernizing Rather Than Dismantling the Social State 481
Do Educational Institutions Foster Social Mobility? 484
The Future of Retirement: Pay-As-You-Go and Low Growth 487
The Social State in Poor and Emerging Countries 490

14. Rethinking the Progressive Income Tax 493
The Question of Progressive Taxation 493
The Progressive Tax in the Twentieth Century: An Ephemeral Product of Chaos 498
The Progressive Tax in the Third Republic 502
Confiscatory Taxation of Excessive Incomes: An American Invention 505
The Explosion of Executive Salaries: The Role of Taxation 508
Rethinking the Question of the Top Marginal Rate 512

I5. A Global Tax on Capital 515
A Global Tax on Capital: A Useful Utopia 515
Democratic and Financial Transparency 518
A Simple Solution: Automatic Transmission of Banking Information 521
What Is the Purpose of a Tax on Capital? 524
A Blueprint for a European Wealth Tax 527
Capital Taxation in Historical Perspective 530
Alternative Forms of Regulation: Protectionism and Capital Controls 534
The Mystery of Chinese Capital Regulation 535
The Redistribution of Petroleum Rents 537
Redistribution through Immigration 538
16. The Question of the Public Debt 540
Reducing Public Debt: Tax on Capital, Inllation, and Austerity 541
Does Inflation Redistribute Wealth? 544
What Do Central Banks Do? 547
The Cyprus Crisis: When the Capital Tax and Banking Regulation Come Together 553
The Euro: A Stateless Currency for the Twenty-First Century? 556
The Question of European Unification 558
Government and Capital Accumulation in the Twenty-First Century 562
Law and Politics 565
Climate Change and Public Capital 567
Economic Transparency and Democratic Control of Capital 569

Conclusion 571
The Central Contradiction of Capitalism: r >g 571
For a Political and Historical Economics 573
The Interests of the Least Well-Off 575

Notes 579
Contents in Detail 657
List of Tables and Illustrations 665
Index 671

Отсканировал: mladovesti