piketty on piketty: it’s not just r > g

Thomas Piketty has just published an interesting follow-up to his epic Capital in the 21st Century (a book important enough to already have its own wikipedia page). Perhaps the most surprising claim he makes is that commentators have put too much emphasis on the role of “r > g” in his analysis of the dynamics of inequality:

… the way in which I perceive the relationship between r > g and wealth inequality is often not well-captured in the discussion that has surrounded my book…

I do not view r > g as the only or even the primary tool for considering changes in income and wealth in the 20th century, or for forecasting the path of income and wealth inequality in the 21st century.

For an example of that overemphasis, see this delightful Colbert Report t-shirt:

the normative aspects of positive thinking

I love economics papers with “optimal” in the title. When I was first starting out in sociology, I planned to study immigration, remittances, and development. For a literature review I was working on, I spent some time reading about the economics of migration. I came across a gem titled Optimal Migration: A World Perspective. The first line of the abstract struck me as a brilliant example of “the normative aspects of positive thinking” – the way that economics sometimes emphasizes the normative conclusions of seemingly positive models. Here it is:

We ask what level of migration would maximize world welfare.

the imitation game

Quote from Alan Turing that I came across while reading Lee and Wagenmakers’s Bayesian Cognitive Modeling:

“I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.”