Introduction
Last week’s column sought to make it very clear that, in my view, Guyana’s burgeoning inequality and poverty are the direct products of decisions and collective choices made by the ruling cabal of politicians, controllers of criminal networks, economic and financial rogues, and other marauders, who as I have indicated, consider themselves not only ‘too big to jail’ but also destined by the gods to rule Guyana. Specifically inequality and poverty are not the unintended and unfortunate outcomes of blind economic and social forces.
I had also introduced the recent study of Thomas Piketty on income and wealth inequality (Capital in the 21st Century) in support of this view. I emphasized the revolutionary and paradigm-shifting nature of this study and promised that today I will present a simple and hopefully faithful summary of the analytic method at its core work. I strongly encourage readers to try and follow this simple rendition.
As indicated, Piketty’s work provides 1) a theoretical framework that deepens our appreciation of the mechanisms underlying the distribution of income and wealth; 2) in so doing encourages economic science “to return to the tradition of the broader political economy of Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Mill in economic analysis”; and 3) as a result “to show that if wealth is concentrated (and centralized) in fewer hands, it inexorably yields inequality.” The study focuses on the