Further notes on Piketty's Capital

I published a first set of notes on the book a little while ago. I still have not finished it, but am now much further. It's still an excellent read that I would recommend to anyone.
Some of the slightly odd trends are maintained, but also the further developments answer several of the questions that came out of the first chapters.

An emergence of sense?

It had long been one of my examples of the world going mad. Supermarkets in the UK -certainly the ones around here- would be open 24/7 (except for weekends and bank holidays, when opening times would be less).

But it appears that this is no longer the case. Now opening hours are 6am to 1am. Still plenty of time, but at least a little bit of a break, and that is closer to something sensible!.

I wonder what caused the change. And what will be the explanations from the few economists who wrote articles explaining that 24/7 was pretty much a pre-determined conclusion from economic forces.

In defense of the tree-huggers

Paul Krugman has recently published a blogpost and a chronicle talking about the evolution of the economics of fighting climate change. In it he states that people of both the left and the right are guilty of fallacies -to be fair he also says that the fallacies of the right are much more serious and damaging.

But we have come to expect that. So let's see what are the fallacies of the left:
"there are some people on the left who keep insisting that economic growth is incompatible with reduced emissions, and that therefore we have to turn our backs on growth." is from the blog post.

Strictly understood, and in a theoretical economics framework, this is of course a fallacy, as you could have plummeting emission intensity (ie, emission per unit of GDP).

Now, let's look at what it means in practice, and when you are not just in an economics framework:

First notes on Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century

This has already been published on the European Tribune, but I guess I should have it there as well -especially as I expect there will be further notes.

Since being published in English (its original publication, in French, came a year sooner), Thomas Piketty's Capital in the XXIst Century has been heavily discussed - and reviewed.
I would like to comment and start discussions on some of its contents and assumptions. Since there have been questions about it, I will start writing even though I am yet to finish the book. Well, if I were to do it all in one go, it would be far too long a diary in any case. Please note that I am reading it in French, and thus cannot exactly quote the English version. At the point where I am in the book, little has been said of inequalities, which are the subject of part 3.

---

Is that a fair test?

Via Paul Krugman, I read Ezra Klein's opening tribune on his new, independent website venture.

And it purports to show that politics makes us brain dead because, when presented with a political problem that fits our prejudice (or goes against them), we tend to reply according to the prejudice rather than according to our abilities, in this case a simple maths proportions problem (yes, I am surprised that most people failed the problem in the first place, and that it be called "difficult", go take a look).

But the killer is that, while the study reports that it happened to liberals and conservatives alike, it also reveals that the question meant to go against the liberal prejudice (and thus that they would get wrong by answering against the data) used correct numbers presented incorrectly. That is, they showed crime rates to be higher in cities that banned handguns, whereas the actual data said the opposite.