<div dir="ltr">A new posting - <br><h3 class="" itemprop="name"><a href="http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2014/05/beyond-piketty-democratic-conundrum.html">Beyond Piketty: The Democratic Conundrum </a></h3><h3 style="color:rgb(0,102,0)">
</h3> - from Zoltan Zigedy is available at:<br><span><a href="http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/</a></span><br>
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<span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif"><span style="font-size:medium">In
a country where sports stars are offered as role models and actors
aspire to political office, celebrity intellectuals are a rarity.
Thus, the meteoric rise of economist Thomas Piketty to celebrity
status comes as a surprise. The English language edition of his book,
<b>Capital in the Twenty-First Century</b>, sold out swiftly while
reaching best-seller stature, a unique achievement for a book
originating from an academic press. Possessing charm, wit, and
youthful good-looks, Piketty toured the US, generating demand from
myriad talk-show hosts and magazine interviewers. </span></span>
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<span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif"><span style="font-size:medium">A
month before its release, sensing that Piketty had something fresh to
offer, I wrote:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif"><span style="font-size:medium"><i>Piketty's
argument is a welcome antidote to the paucity of explanatory theory
presented by the liberal and social democratic punditry. The
controversy stirred by Piketty's argument well before its
English-language availability is a sure sign that he offers something
beyond the conventional... Closer examination of Piketty's
interesting thesis must await publication of the book.</i> (<b>ZZ's
Blog</b>, Tuesday, February 11, 2014)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif"><span style="font-size:medium">Little
did I suspect that Piketty-mania would spawn a sustained discussion
penetrating the highest reaches of the mass media. Piketty's argument
has shattered the navel-gazing of academic economists, while
demonstrating an intuitively obvious fact in a way that even the most
thick-headed pundit can understand: <b>capitalism produces and
reproduces inequality</b>. Unfortunately, Piketty timidly hesitates to
draw an equally compelling conclusion: the only way to eliminate
unjust inequality is by eliminating capitalism. It's as though a
researcher has discovered the cause of cancer, but is reluctant to
endorse its cure.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family:Arial Unicode MS,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:small"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif"><span style="font-size:medium">My
own thoughts on Piketty's provocative, stimulating book are posted on
</span></span><a href="http://philosophersforchange.org/2014/04/29/reading-thomas-piketty-a-critical-essay/" target="_blank"><span style="color:blue"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif"><span style="font-size:medium"><u>Philosophers
for Change. </u></span></span></span></a></span></span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial Unicode MS,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:small"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif"><span style="font-size:medium">The
Piketty phenomenon overshadows what may well be an even more
provocative, suggestive study by two US professors, Martin Gilens and
Benjamin I. Page. Their paper, </span></span><a href="http://www.princeton.edu/%7Emgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color:blue"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif"><span style="font-size:medium"><i><u>Testing
Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average
Citizens</u></i></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif"><span style="font-size:medium">
(forthcoming in </span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif"><span style="font-size:medium"><b>Perspectives
on Politics</b></span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif"><span style="font-size:medium">),
offers results that could shake the complacency of political theory
in much the way that Piketty's book rocked bourgeois economics.... <span style="color:rgb(204,0,0)"><i><b>To read the rest of the article, go to: </b></i></span></span></span></span></span><span style="color:rgb(204,0,0)"><i><b><a href="http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/">http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/</a></b></i></span><br>
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