I think the “bleak facts on black opportunity” Richard V. Reeves reports at Brookings:
There are race gaps in almost every conceivable social and economic dimension, many of which we have discussed on these pages before: incarceration, early learning, parenting, schooling, attitudinal racism, employment – the list goes on. There has been progress, too, of course. But one thing is clear. An inescapable requirement for building an opportunity society is improving the life chances of black Americans.
are even bleaker than he thinks. I wish the report distinguished between native-born African Americans and more recent immigrants. I believe that he would find that recent immigrants and their children fare much better than the descendants of slaves have and the policies put into place to remediate the situation have disproportionately benefited the wrong people.
His supporters don’t support him because his methods are solid but because they like his conclusions and prescription.
Take a look at someone like Paul Krugman. He likes Piketty and supports his conclusions because they confirm what he believes. However–Krugman was not always Krugman: the old Paul Krugman of the 90s would not have believed Piketty.
The real question is why has the conventional wisdom of authoritative intellectuals slid almost entirely in the direction of Piketty?
That’s actually a two-part question. Why is that the conventional wisdom and why are they considered authoritative?
I note that the discussion is overwhelmingly of an income tax rather than a wealth tax or taxes on the activities that are promoting the inequality. Not all investment is created equal.
Sorry about posting in the wrong place.
Piketty proposes a wealth tax, or a global tax on capital. It seems an impossible policy to imagine happening, which is why nobody discusses it.
It’s just a question. Krugman’s answer would most likely be that intellectuals fell out of their ivory towers during the Bush years and realized how ideological the belief in neoliberal capitalism was. This makes sense, except that there was no real reason to believe any of the claims made during the Clinton years about the eventual triumph of an deregulated market-based economy. The people who question Piketty’s findings seem to be arguing to an audience of the living dead, eg. the same types who believe that climate isn’t real, who both hate their lack of respectability and yet desperately crave it–thus the endless procession of rebuffs and disproofs of settled ideas simply in hopes of somehow winning, which will never happen. My answer is that the damage was done: people like Krugman are good at following which way the wind blows and the pay-off for obedience is the ability to sound like a person devoted to the truth, and perhaps even to believe it.