Roundup #83: I told you so!

Photo by B. Sutherton via Wikimedia CommonsHowdy, folks! Today’s roundup is mostly a bunch of follow-ups to posts I wrote before. It’s very hard to decide when to post about a particular topic, and it often happens that some relevant news story or piece of data comes out a little bit later. These roundups are a good way of cleaning up those loose ends.Today we start with a truly wacky policy proposal by the esteemed Thomas Piketty…1. What on Earth is Thomas Piketty talking about?Unlike many people, I never pretended to have read Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I simply didn’t read it. I did read a number of the papers that the book was based on, which is often a better and quicker way of getting the key points of a book like that. I thought those papers were a good and important addition to the economics literature, even if the messy reality of inequality didn’t always fit the simple story Piketty told, and the data he relied on was less reliable than we…