大神Acemoglu , Robinson评最近火热的新书《Capital in the Twenty First Century》,顺便批判马克思。
大家可以一起学习当今世界最顶尖的制度经济学家是如何看待这本书里讲述的故事的。
如下是摘要内容
The Rise and Fall of General Laws of Capitalism
Daron Acemogluy James A. Robinsonz
August 2014.
Abstract
Thomas Piketty’s recent book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, follows in the tradition of
the great classical economists, Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, in formulating “general laws”to diagnose
and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that all of these general laws are unhelpful as a
guide to understand the past or predict the future, because they ignore the central role of political
and economic institutions in shaping the evolution of technology and the distribution of resources in a
society. Using the economic and political histories of South Africa and Sweden, we illustrate not only
that the focus on the share of top incomes gives a misleading characterization of the key determinants
of societal inequality, but also that inequality dynamics are closely linked to institutional factors and
their endogenous evolution, much more than the forces emphasized in Piketty’s book, such as the gap
between the interest rate and the growth rate.
JEL Classi…cation: P16, P48, O20.
Keywords: Capitalism, Inequality, Institutions.