‘No Empirical Evidence’ for Thomas Piketty’s Inequality Theory, IMF Economist Argues

The data clearly says that he is wrong. Have you even read the article?

Read that quote again. It's the guy from the IMF disagreeing with the theory, not him disagreeing with the guy from the IMF.

But the data says that Piketty is wrong.

Well they're saying that the data shows the opposite.

The article says he's wrong.

It doesn't give us anything else to back it up except Mr. Goes's word on it.

But you aren't trying hard enough. You don't really want yacht. You aren't truly motivated.

Go get some guns, a gang team of fellow yachtsmen, and earn some money for yacht.

This literally makes no sense. The issue is private debt has been exploding. People are not "richer" they are just more in debt. Piketty says returns on ALL investments have been growing faster than economic growth [some form of accumulation by dispossession must occur for this to happen]. He includes gains on stuff like real-estate in this. When the bubble bursts people will be repossessed upon by lenders. Marx claims that returns on fixed-capital investment should actually naturally diminish explaining the necessity for the development of finance capital.

You know I always suspected this was the case but it's good to finally have some proof. .

What was the case? That the IMF are neoliberal shits? You didn't need this to conclude that.

Economists as a profession are basically spin doctors for porky (with a healthy dose of autism to boot), or as the other guy said high priests for capitalism.

Ah yes, as always the proper solution is always implied to be tax cuts, free trade and deregulation deregulation deregulation (heh, I graduated from the University of Chicago with a masters, did you scrub? Didn't think so)

Here's the actual article.

Here's your answer:
He talks about Piketty's causal argument.

...

Friendly reminder that the the only way to interpret the history of IMF 'development' policy is either as effective efforts of neo-liberal penetration or as a litany of repeated empirical failure.

IMF is pretty much the vanguard for the bourgeoisie, look at what they did to Argentina and what they currently doing in Greece.

I'm not sure if I'm reading his data right, but it looks like directly subsequent to a "shock," returns on capital rise immediately thereafter before returning to zero after X number of years. This seems to correlate with his graph showing that when returns rise, the share that belongs to "1%" also rises, but not in the way that Piketty describes.

I don't know. There's alot of economics jargon in here that is just flying over my head.

From the Takeaway

So it's not like they've defeated Piketty's ultimate point that inequality tends to increase, just that Goes's functions don't indicate that the relationship between capital returns and growth reflect or are the cause of that inequality.

You're not imagining it, you're just basing it on misrepresented graphs.

Look for the words family or household whenever you see people talk about inequality, any graph showing it will be talking about the drop in relative household income because that's how the taxes get filed.

The problem is that household size has decreased to around two thirds the former size. There are less earners per household, so the household income for a random prole family doesn't go up as much. While the mega-corp ceo's and high end professionals don't rely on combining multiple incomes to achieve their spot on the household income graph.

...

...

I think that's a part of the explanation sure. When there are higher capital gains there is a boost in bank liquidity thanks to how much capitalists save their income, so banks can now suddenly lend more to consumers. This doesn't necessarily make consumers richer since they'll always have to pay that money and unlike businesses they aren't investing that money in production to make money so they can't just get more credit forever. The other alternative is that in less developed countries capital itself is more equally distributed thanks to capital having less time to accumulate, so more people get the proceeds from a greater share in capital. This of course, would not be the case in more developed countries.

I don't have data to back up this theory tho, so its just a hunch.

Kek, once again this idiots have no idea what they're talking about.

Just look at who the richest people are in the country, they got rich from investing and owning companies! Either that, or they were CEO's who's pay itself is tied to what the capitalists make from the enterprise! The fact that CEO's are even counted as labor while their income is irrevocably tied to capital is exactly how you get to these nonsensical results.

Tbh it sounds like they aren't denying that inequality is rising, they're just saying that the causes identified by Piketty are wrong. So basically /liberty/ is retarded and can't read.

Strictly speaking, there is no "empirical" evidence for anything in economics because it's all stats and predictions.

kek