Replication data for: The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism

Summary:  View help for Summary Thomas Piketty's (2013) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide to understanding the past or predicting the future because they ignore the central role of political and economic institutions, as well as the endogenous evolution of technology, in shaping the distribution of resources in society. We use regression evidence to show that the main economic force emphasized in Piketty's book, the gap between the interest rate and the growth rate, does not appear to explain historical patterns of inequality (especially, the share of income accruing to the upper tail of the distribution). We then use the histories of inequality of South Africa and Sweden to illustrate that inequality dynamics cannot be understood without embedding economic factors in the context of economic and political institutions, and also that the focus on the share of top incomes can give a misleading characterization of the true nature of inequality.

JEL Classification:  View help for JEL Classification
      B51 Current Heterodox Approaches: Socialist; Marxian; Sraffian
      D31 Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
      D63 Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
      D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
      O25 Industrial Policy
      O43 Institutions and Growth
      P16 Capitalist Systems: Political Economy