Thomas Piketty: evaluation

Transcript context

…As you know, Matt Rognlie and a number of other researchers have argued the relevant increase in wealth inequality really is centered in real estate and housing wealth. Do you agree? If so, isn’t it enough just to be a Georgist? Can’t we just do the redistribution there? If you look at the top of the wealth distribution, I don’t see a lot of real estate. I don’t think Matt Rognlie or anyone is saying that the huge rise in billionaire wealth in the US has anything to do with real estate. As far as I know, nobody has ever tried to put this theory on the table. I’m not saying real estate is not important. I think for middle-class assets and lower-middle-class and upper-middle-class assets — for the middle of the distribution — real estate is, of course, very important. The movement in real estate prices explains a lot of what’s going on, both in terms of aggregate value and distribution. I’m not saying it’s not important. It is very important. If you go back to our paper with Gabriel Zucman, which was published, now, almost 10 years ago in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2014, called “Capital is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries, 1700–2010,” you will see, we have complete decomposition about the role of real estate in aggregate wealth accumulation, and it’s absolutely central for many countries over many periods of time. We cannot have any disagreement of that because this is our data. This is what we did almost 10 years ago. That’s not going to explain, for example, what happens at the top of the distribution because real estate is absolutely ineligible when you look at the billionaire wealth. Here, you need other stories. Yes? For the distribution overall, it seems there are a lot of papers, quite recent, like Odran Bonnet, Jordà, the Rognlie work, Knoll, Pfeffer and Waitkus. They seem to think it’s primarily about real estate, if not 100 percent, predominantly real estate. You don’t agree with their estimates? Or you just think you’re addressing a separate problem of billionaire inequality at the top?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.