Okay, everyone. This is the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Bologi Sreenavasin, and I'm here with Larry Summers.

Good to be with you, Bology.

Maybe we can talk about Thomas Piquetti, which 696-page Doorstop is the number one bestseller on Amazon against all expectation,

and he's been doing all the tours and so on. And we've kind of like had our criticism of him on Twitter, but I'm interested

to hear your takes, criticisms, plotts, et cetera.

It's a stunning thing, and it must reflect positively on the growing intellectualism of

the society that a book like that could be the best seller.

It is a book that touches the zeitgeist at a moment of great concern about inequality.

Now comes a learned tone proclaiming the gravity of the inequality problem.

The response reminds me a little bit of the book, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Paul Kennedy that worried about military and

military overstretch as a problem facing nations right at the end of Ronald Reagan's administration.

That book managed to miss the fact that the Berlin Wall was going to fall

and the Soviet Union was going to collapse. And while Peketti's diagnosis is, I think, a very

powerful one, I think it is pretty clear that the share of wealth and income going to the top 1% has risen,

and there's at least good reason to believe that the trends will continue.

I don't find his theory of the contradictions implicit in capitalism and his theory of where the wealth, why wealth is rising at this rate to be a terribly convincing one.

His basic argument is that rates of return are greater than growth rates, that capitalists just accumulate wealth,

and that eventually all the capital is going to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands. And I think there are two large problematic aspects of the

argument, and then there are other factors that are more important. The two problematic aspects

are that as capital is accumulated, the rate of return on

capital would be expected to go down, what economists refer to as the elasticity of substitution.

And essentially, all of the estimates, when you look at the proper concept of output, output adjusted for the depreciation

...