From his own review of Piketty.
In this sense, Piketty is like a modern-day Ricardo, betting too much on the significance of one asset in the long run: namely, the kind of sophisticated equity capital that the wealthy happen to hold today.
Cowen notes that Ricardo’s prediction that wealth would ultimately accrue to owners of land proved inaccurate. Read his entire review, as well as his related blog post. In the latter, I like these sentences:
Piketty converts the entrepreneur into the rentier. To the extent capital reaps high returns, it is by assuming risk (over the broad sweep of history real rates on T-Bills are hardly impressive). Yet the concept of risk hardly plays a role in the major arguments of this book. Once you introduce risk, the long-run fate of capital returns again becomes far from certain. In fact the entire book ought to be about risk but instead we get the rentier.
Regular readers will note that I have expressed concerns about this issue.
Generally by the time these things are noted, the tide is already changing direction.
In good faith, what do you mean? That Piketty has changed the baseline of discussion? So thoughtful people on the RIght have to use too much type 2 reasoning to counter him, and it’s just easier for most people to say “those damn rich keep too much of their money?” Or what?