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Branko Milanovic Profile picture
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26 Oct, 6 tweets, 2 min read
I had a very nice conversation with @EconTalker about the methodology and objective of economics. We mentioned also the "Nobel" prize in economics. Here are several of my slides.
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More from @BrankoMilan

Branko Milanovic Profile picture
19 Oct
I decided to arrange thematically a selection of posts I have written since corona started in the US in March.

First, on corona itself:
braveneweurope.com/branko-milanov…
foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-…
braveneweurope.com/branko-milanov…
Read 8 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
16 Oct
A bit, I hope, of relevant background to @MarcoRanaldi_ and @BrankoMilan paper that we just posted today and that looks at various capitalist systems and their inequality.
lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/803…
It is an area of research that would grow now that we have the methodology, the data, and interest to compare various countries/systems.

This background info is from my perspective. Marco might have a bit of a different one.
@PikettyLeMonde has emphasized in C21C the importance of the rising K share in driving income inequality.
The impact of that rising (macro) share obviously depends on how K income is distributed. If K income is distributed like L income, rising K share has no effect on Gini.
Read 7 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
15 Oct
One of the vignettes in my "The haves and the have-nots" has to do with data from Obama's "Dreams from my father". In the book Obama gives the wage of his grandfather in 1927 Kenya (the wages were entered into a special booklet used to control Black laborers...
...so White employers could write whether the worker was hard-working, lazy etc.)
Now it so happens that we have an income survey for 1927 Kenya & can locate Obama's grandfather in Kenyan income distribution of the time.
His wage was good for a Black man ~2x the subsistence but only 1/66 (not a typo) of European average income in Kenya. Image
Read 5 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
13 Oct
(Long thread--but worth reading)

I received lots of pushback (including some pretty nasty comments) on my tweets re. the most recent “Nobel Prize” in economics.
I believe that most comments reflect two entirely different views of economics: what it is and what its objectives are.

Rather than engaging in the methodological debate let me help you understand my views by giving examples of what are the big economic issues today--
--which a big prize should acknowledge.

Not so much to give these people money (they are rich anyway) but as a signaling device so that young economists should study topics that matter to people’s wellbeing in the entire world, and not minor issues.
Read 21 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
19 Sep
It is I think wrong to interpret Friedman's essay on shareholding capitalism in normative terms: is profit-maximization a "nice" policy or not.
It should be interpreted as the statement of the obvious: capitalists are not going to sacrifice their profits. Period.
They are not going to give up a penny. We see that every day. They might do some virtue-signaling but only if gains from it are greater than the costs.
Marx would have fully agreed with Friedman.
Accepting that Friedman was right (as he was) has strong implications for economic policy.
If you want businesses to pay for something or to do something, you tax them or regulate them. You do not expect they would do things because of their "civic duty".
Read 4 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
10 Sep
After watching a recent talk by Margaret McMillan on the Paris Peace Conference in 1919...
pandemoniumu.com/library/how-th…
and reading a nice piece on the economic impact of the Conference by a colleague, I reread parts of Etienne Mantoux's "La paix calomniee".
It is a long and v. detailed book. In many instances (data, forecasts) he shows that Keynes was wrong.
Yet the book also showcases the ineffectiveness of many such "debunking" books. The strength of "The ECP" was not in the estimates of Belgian coal production, but in seizing on the political madness of the treaty & in the use of powerful imaginary.
Read 4 tweets

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