The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism
By Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson. 2015
373 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Economists have long been drawn to the ambitious quest of discovering the general laws of capitalism. David Ricardo, for example, predicted that capital accumulation would terminate in economic stagnation and inequality as a greater and greater share of national income accrued to landowners. Karl Marx followed him by forecasting the inevitable immiseration of the proletariat. Thomas Piketty’s (2014) tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, emulates Marx in his title, his style of exposition, and his critique of the capitalist system. Piketty is after general laws that will demystify our modern economy and elucidate the inherent problems of the system—and point to solutions. But the quest for general laws of capitalism is misguided because it ignores the key forces shaping how an economy functions: the endogenous evolution of technology and of the institutions and the political equilibrium that influence not only technology but also how markets function and how the gains from various different economic arrangements are distributed. Despite his erudition, ambition, and creativity, Marx was led astray because of his disregard of these forces. The same is true of Piketty’s sweeping account of inequality in capitalist economies. In the next section, we review Marx’s conceptualization of capitalism and some of his general laws. We then turn to Piketty’s approach to capitalism and his general laws. We will point to various problems in Piketty’s interpretation of the economic relationships underpinning inequality, but the most important shortcoming is that,
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/236f4b24256595c62977a55c895fd251b5fcd571
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In Economics and Econometrics
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In Sociology and Political Science
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Citations in the corpus
- Varieties of institutional systems: A contextual taxonomy of understudied countries (2016, background): “For instance, Acemoglu and Robinson (2014) explain how worker protests in 1918 in Sweden and a political coalition of the ends of the income distribution laid the foundations for the establishment of the welfare state as a mechanism intended to compress income inequality and protect labor…”
- Skewed Wealth Distributions: Theory and Empirics (2018, neutral): “3For an extensive discussion and some criticism of Piketty (2014), see Blume and Durlauf (2015); see also Acemoglu and Robinson (2014), Krusell and Smith (2014), and Ray (2014).”
- IS LABOR'S LOSS CAPITAL'S GAIN? GROSS VERSUS NET LABOR SHARES (2017, background): “It is a central object in the controversy over the Piketty (2014) analysis of inequality [Rognlie (2014), Acemoglu and Robinson (2015), Jones (2015), Krusell and Smith (2015)].”
- The Dynamics of Inequality (2016, neutral): “Similarly, random growth theories of the wealth distribution include Wold and Whittle (1957) and more recently Benhabib, Bisin, and Zhu (2011, 2014, 2015), Jones (2015), and Acemoglu and Robinson (2015). All of these papers focus on the income or wealth distribution at a given point in time by study”
- Wealth Inequality and Democracy (2017, methodology): “This follows the approach used by Acemoglu & Robinson (2015).”