Apparently bedazzled by the book’s arguments, few reviewers mentioned its assault on the field. Yet Piketty’s disdain is unmistakable, the lament of a scholar long estranged from the mainstream of his profession. "For far too long," he writes, "economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content. Too much energy has been and still is being wasted on pure theoretical speculation without a clear specification of the economic facts one is trying to explain or the social and political problems one is trying to resolve."
Piketty’s first published paper appeared in the Journal of Economic Theory in 1993, when he was 22. It consisted of a mathematical model for designing an optimal income tax schedule—and featured abundant references to game theory, Pareto optimality, and Bayesian equilibriums. A precocious math student, Piketty had entered the elite École Normale Supérieure, in Paris, at 18, and by the time he turned 22 had a Ph.D. in economics and job offers from MIT, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. "They were very excited because I was a machine proving theorems, and they liked that," Piketty told me. He chose MIT and moved to Cambridge, Mass. He stayed just two years. He liked living in the United States and his colleagues at MIT, and it was exciting to teach graduate students, who were mostly older than he was. "At the same time that I was very happy, I was thinking that something strange was going on," he recalled. The problem, he quickly concluded, was that he "knew nothing at all about economics." He continued to publish theorems on income distribution but increasingly wondered how inequality looked in the real world. How had it evolved over time? "I realized that there was a lot of data out there that had never been used in a systematic way," he said. As a student, he’d been as interested in history and sociology as in economics, admiring the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Fernand Braudel, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Piketty’s parents, who never finished high school, had joined the student protests of 1968, and, as a teenager, Piketty spent a summer working for a grandfather—"an entrepreneur with a strong capitalist ethic"—who owned a stone quarry outside Paris. Yet greater influences on his development, he believes, were the dramatic events taking place in Eastern Europe. The year he entered the École Normale, the Berlin Wall fell, and by the time he left the Soviet Union had collapsed as well. "It was natural and important to me to ask the question: What can we say about inequality and social justice and the dynamics of distribution under capitalism? Why is it that people thought at some point that communism was necessary?" Piketty’s colleagues showed little interest in historical research. "What I found quite surprising when I was at MIT was that sometimes there was a level of arrogance with respect to other disciplines in the social sciences, which is really quite incredible," he said. "In the case of income distribution, which is what I was interested in, we had almost no historical facts about which we knew anything. I found the gap between the self-confidence of the profession and the actual achievement of the profession quite astonishing." full: http://chronicle.com/article/Capital-Man/146059/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
