Why Inequality Matters
I must say Bill Gates, in his post Microsoft avatar, continues to surprise me constantly. This is a refreshingly candid and sanguine review of Piketty's book from someone who was a ruthless capitalist not so long ago.<p>Gates rightly (and self-servingly) also points out that Piketty does not consider philanthropy as a means to correct some of capitalism's imbalances. Here's a few of Gates' conclusions:<p>> Piketty is right that there are forces that can lead to snowballing wealth (including the fact that the children of wealthy people often get access to networks that can help them land internships, jobs, etc.). However, there are also forces that contribute to the decay of wealth, and Capital doesn’t give enough weight to them.<p>> I am also disappointed that Piketty focused heavily on data on wealth and income while neglecting consumption altogether. Consumption data represent the goods and services that people buy—including food, clothing, housing, education, and health—and can add a lot of depth to our understanding of how people actually live. Particularly in rich societies, the income lens really doesn’t give you the sense of what needs to be fixed.<p>> Piketty’s favorite solution is a progressive annual tax on capital, rather than income. He argues that this kind of tax “will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instances of primitive accumulation.”<p>> I agree that taxation should shift away from taxing labor. It doesn’t make any sense that labor in the United States is taxed so heavily relative to capital. It will make even less sense in the coming years, as robots and other forms of automation come to perform more and more of the skills that human laborers do today.<p>But rather than move to a progressive tax on capital, as Piketty would like, I think we’d be best off with a progressive tax on consumption. Think about the three wealthy people I described earlier: One investing in companies, one in philanthropy, and one in a lavish lifestyle. There’s nothing wrong with the last guy, but I think he should pay more taxes than the others. As Piketty pointed out when we spoke, it's hard to measure consumption (for example, should political donations count?). But then, almost every tax system—including a wealth tax—has similar challenges.<p>Like Piketty, I’m also a big believer in the estate tax. Letting inheritors consume or allocate capital disproportionately simply based on the lottery of birth is not a smart or fair way to allocate resources. As Warren Buffett likes to say, that’s like “choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics.” I believe we should maintain the estate tax and invest the proceeds in education and research—the best way to strengthen our country for the future.