Por que Piketty está errado?

Abstract

Thomas Pikettyís recent book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, follows in the tradition of
the great classical economists, Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, in formulating ìgeneral lawsî to diagnose
and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that all of these general laws are unhelpful as a
guide to understand the past or predict the future, because they ignore the central role of political
and economic institutions in shaping the evolution of technology and the distribution of resources in a
society. Using the economic and political histories of South Africa and Sweden, we illustrate not only
that the focus on the share of top incomes gives a misleading characterization of the key determinants
of societal inequality, but also that inequality dynamics are closely linked to institutional factors and
their endogenous evolution, much more than the forces emphasized in Pikettyís book, such as the gap
between the interest rate and the growth rate.

Fonte: aqui