Bill Gates reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital for the 21st Century.
A 700-page treatise on economics translated from French is not exactly a light summer read—even for someone with an admittedly high geek quotient. But this past July, I felt compelled to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century after reading several reviews and hearing about it from friends.
I’m glad I did. I encourage you to read it too, or at least a good summary, like this one from The Economist. Piketty was nice enough to talk with me about his work on a Skype call last month. As I told him, I agree with his most important conclusions, and I hope his work will draw more smart people into the study of wealth and income inequality—because the more we understand about the causes and cures, the better. I also said I have concerns about some elements of his analysis, which I’ll share below.GatesNotes — The Blog of Bill Gates
Why Inequality Matters
Bill Gates
2 comments:
"It doesn’t make any sense that labor in the United States is taxed so heavily relative to capital. It will make even less sense in the coming years, as robots and other forms of automation come to perform more and more of the skills that human laborers do today."
Right.... after all, the govt has to get the "money" from somebody.....
Philanthropy is the equivalent of modern day charity?
We can't rely on charity for a well-functioning society. if we have to increase "philanthropy" and "charity" (Ryan style) to have a functioning society is that we are failing to utilize proper governance and sovereignty to fix our problems.
BTW Gates you and all the wealthy should be giving all that money to a) space exploration & colonization programs b) energy alternative & recycling technology development. We may find more resistance from the population to fund these programs which are our only salvation in the "long" term (next two centuries), but governments can (if there is enough political will) fix all the poverty and extreme inequality problems.
Use your excess savings for something useful for humanity, maybe there is hope and we can reconvert useless derivative traders & banker wanna-be's (math & physics phd) into an useful space & energy researchers and get some innovation going on.
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