Asked whether economists had to be mathematicians too, Keynes said no. What was needed was not maths as such, but rather "a sense of proportion". The discipline has since inverted this Keynesian rule. Honours are obtained, doctorates earned and tenure secured not by soaring up to see the big picture but more often by crunching endless data on this or that market, or postulating the arithmetic that supposedly governs particular relationships in very particular circumstances.
When the maelstrom surrounding Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century dies down, as all such publicity storms do in the end, its lasting achievement may be to give economics back its sense of proportion. Diligently and unnoticed outside his field, Mr Piketty – together with Emmanuel Saez and Tony Atkinson – spent years mining international tax records to demonstrate how, in Britain and the US, the portion of the national output gobbled up by the richest had first fallen by two-thirds or more in the 60 years after the first world war, but had then, from the 1970s on, more than doubled again. Having settled one century-long story, in the new book the professor moves on from top incomes to (even larger) top wealth and traces this through more than 200 years of data, while discussing how population growth and the march of technology have shaped capital's place in society since antiquity. This long view discourages worry about passing matters such as individual elections, or for that matter recession
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