How to Preserve Capitalist System? Review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty

Notes

1. See http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fr/capital21c.

2. See http://topincomes.g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/.

3. After she was nominated as ambassador at the United Nations, Susan Rice said in an interview to Michele Norris, a journalist of NPR News (February 23, 2009, Washington), that “America is back.” This arrogant sentence, which was also used by Hillary Clinton as a leitmotiv describing American Foreign Policy, suits very well, in my opinion, the economic return of Capital. Can we say, in the same time, that Marx is back? Personally, I am not sure.

4. This expression is not new. Thorstein Veblen published his Theory of the Leisure Class, an Economic Study of Institutions in 1915. Twelve years later, Nicolaï Bukharin published his Political Economy of the Leisure Class (1927), which was translated in French as Economie Politique du Rentier.

5. I one more time precise the difference between the Piketty approach of capital and mine. For Piketty, capital is a quantity, and, according to me, a quantity the definition of which is questionable because he puts housing in his definition. But the main point here is that he analyses capital only as a quantity, a statistical result. I think that capital is a relationship and not only a quantity. Of course, there is relation between quantity and power given by relationship. But I could be the biggest capitalist in China without possessing a big capital as a quantity. For example, to be a capitalist needs money for business. I do not need to be the owner of this money (of this quantity of capital) if I am able to get access to the banks and get the credit I want. There is a qualitative difference between capital as a quantity and capital as a relationship. Because he is only a statistician, Piketty is confusing the two kinds of approaches and does not see any interest in the second one.