---------------------------------------- > Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:22:59 -0400 > From: [email protected]
> full: > http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/03/31/140331crbo_books_cassidy?currentPage=all ================= http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/03/31/140331crbo_books_cassidy?currentPage=all [snip] Given that inequality is a worldwide phenomenon, Piketty aptly has a worldwide solution for it: a global tax on wealth combined with higher rates of tax on the largest incomes. How much higher? Referring to work that he has done with Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva, of M.I.T., Piketty reports, “According to our estimates, the optimal top tax rate in the developed countries is probably above eighty per cent.” Such a rate applied to incomes greater than five hundred thousand or a million dollars a year “not only would not reduce the growth of the US economy but would in fact distribute the fruits of growth more widely while imposing reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior.” Piketty is referring here to the occasionally destructive activities of Wall Street traders and investment bankers. [snip] The last sentence is hilarious; a perfect demonstration of Cassidy still succumbing to the quip that it's hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it. [snip] Defenders of big pay packages like to claim that senior managers earn their vast salaries by boosting their firm’s profits and stock prices. But Piketty points out how hard it is to measure the contribution (the “marginal productivity”) of any one individual in a large corporation. The compensation of top managers is typically set by committees comprising other senior executives who earn comparable amounts. “It is only reasonable to assume that people in a position to set their own salaries have a natural incentive to treat themselves generously, or at the very least to be rather optimistic in gauging their marginal productivity,” Piketty writes. [snip] It seems to me this is where leftists have a wedge; Chapter 6' sections on marginal productivity and his all too brief aside on the two Cambridge' Controvery were a major disappointment where he utterly punted on the problems of *power* at the micro scale of corporate governance and the macro scale regarding the legal regimes that establish the rules for bargaining over the terms of compensation based on the utter malleability of just what norms shall be constitutive of ownership. See pages 213-215 and 230 to the end of the chapter. This from a man who claims Pasinetti as an significant influence! E. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
