… is from my friend Brian Mannix’s comment at EconLog on this post by Scott Sumner:
As you go through the remainder of the [Thomas Piketty’s] book, see if you are as surprised as I was at the total lack of thinking at the margin, even when he drills down from national statistics to talk about individual firms. Instead, he talks about “shares” of income — and not simply in a measurement sense (as in market “shares”), but in the “can’t we all share” sense.
Yep. In Piketty’s book, there is surprisingly little economic analysis. Armen Alchian or Harold Demsetz or Yoram Barzel or Jim Buchanan or David Friedman or Ronald Coase – to choose just some examples – each has more economic analysis on any one randomly chosen page of any of his works than Piketty has throughout his entire book.
