Garnaut versus Piketty: inequality in the coming century

Abstract

If something cannot go on for ever, states Herbert Stein’s law, it will stop. In itself this is not very informative, but it opens the way to three interesting questions: (1) why can’t it go on forever?; (2) where and when will it stop?; and (3) why? Generations of economists have applied this line of inquiry to the accumulation of wealth (or its narrower version, capital) and to its close relative, the share of national income going to the holders of wealth. Their answers have varied widely.