Palan on Piketty

In late August, 2014, we received an invitation from the New Left Project to comment on Ronen Palan’s article ‘Capitalising the Future’. Palan’s piece examines Thomas Piketty’s book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ (2014), and the editors felt it had strong affinities with our approach. The affinities are certainly there (albeit unmentioned). But they are largely superficial. Palan demonstrates little understanding of our framework, and we very much doubt he has comprehended Piketty’s. His article contains so many elementary errors and fallacies that it is unclear how it got published in the first place.

[The NLP piece has been revised to make the text less confrontational. For those interested, we also provide the original unedited version.]