[Zzlist-deux] Beyond Piketty: The Democratic Conundrum

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A new posting -
Beyond Piketty: The Democratic Conundrum
<http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2014/05/beyond-piketty-democratic-conundrum.html>
- from Zoltan Zigedy is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/


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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, *Capital in the
Twenty-First Century*, 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.
 A month before its release, sensing that Piketty had something fresh to
offer, I wrote:
 *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.* (*ZZ's Blog*, Tuesday, February 11, 2014)
 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: *capitalism produces and reproduces inequality*.
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.
 My own thoughts on Piketty's provocative, stimulating book are posted
on *Philosophers
for Change. *<http://philosophersforchange.org/2014/04/29/reading-thomas-piketty-a-critical-essay/>
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, *Testing Theories of American Politics:
Elites, Interest Groups, and Average
Citizens*<http://www.princeton.edu/%7Emgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf>(forthcoming
in *Perspectives
on Politics*), offers results that could shake the complacency of political
theory in much the way that Piketty's book rocked bourgeois economics.... *To
read the rest of the article, go to: **http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
<http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/>*
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