Digressions&Impressions

Madison and Stanley on anti-Democratic speech (I)

Liberal democratic rhetoric is supposed to unify citizens with diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and make visible previously discounted perspectives (for example, the perspective of women during the struggle for women’s right to vote). Trump’s and Carson’s comments are explicitly antidemocratic. The fact that they seem to have been rewarded — at least in immediate improvements in poll standings — confronts defenders of the American political system with...questions..--Jason Stanley

The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations. The valuable improvements made by the American constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality, to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side, as was wished and expected.--Madison, Federalist 10.

Recently, Jason Stanley noted, while commenting on some remarks by Donald Trump and Ben Carson, in the New York Times that "There once was a facade of equal respect that required political strategists to use code words to avoid accusations of violating it."* Stanley explains their apparent popular success (among a non-trivial segment of the voters) as a rejection of political hypocrisy and the inability of politicians that defend the common interest to survive in the present media landscape. He then goes on to claim that if politicians "demonstrated their supposed honesty and sincerity by explicitly targeting groups that are disliked by the voters they seek to attract. Such open rejection of democratic values would be taken as political bravery, as a signal of sincerity." Undoubtedly, Stanley is right that there is a deep yearning for sincerity and authenticity; it is not restricted to American racists nor to voters for the new British Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. It is also the ruling value of all forms of religious fundamentalism.

By drawing on Madison, Stanley thinks, by contrast, that "an election campaign is supposed to present candidates seeking to show that they have the common interests of all citizens at heart." Stanley subtly misreads Madison (who certainly did hope that the electoral process would facilitate the rise of elected aristocracy). This is obvious if we remind ourselves that Federalist 10 explicitly addresses the problem of anti-democratic values (in Stanley's sense) among the electorate. Madison calls it the disease of faction: "By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."**

Stanley somehow wishes for circumstances in which people elect folk that campaign on the "common interest" and thereby transcend their own interests. But that would demand a reform of human nature that Madison thinks unlikely; it would only be possible to get rid of factious sentiments by constraints on liberty that Madison thinks worse than the disease (Stanley implies, without mentioning Madison, that this is "excellent argument").

Stanley seems to hope that a suitably Enlightened citizenry will -- once it understands that "democratic values are not weaknesses" -- vote in the common interest. By contrast, Madison does not think one can eliminate the problem of faction, for there always remains "the latent causes of faction," one can only "control its effects." After all, "it is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm."

Madison's solution to the problem of demagoguery is to focus on institutional design: the hope is that by having fairly large electoral districts (which will require coalitions among local interests) in a continental republic will prevent, or quarantine, the spread of demagogic ideas. Moreover, even if the factious ideas dominate  in Congress, the Constitution is designed to ensure permanent gridlock among competing interests; thus a ruling faction is "unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression." Madison's position turns out to be a decent, albeit imperfect, response to the problem of faction; as the history of American democracy reveals, it also requires civil rights movements in every generation and a fairly activist judiciary to guard against the remaining excesses of faction. 

Madison notes that "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property." It would follow that Madison ought to advocate -- in line with say Plato's scheme in the Laws -- a limitation on the extent of possible inequality of property. But he worries that this would generate more abuses than it would solve. I mention this because while Stanley mentions the role of money in politics and the role of (media) corporations, he never quite faces up to the fact that from Madisonian vantage point we should expect a lot more factionalism given the huge disparities of wealth, status, and recognition in our contemporary polity. (Given what I know of his politics, I suspect Stanley would agree with the Madisonian diagnosis.) Huge inequality is not a natural phenomenon, but the deliberate result of government policy of the last few decades; the political system is reaping the turbulence it has sown.***

Stanley is right to note that contemporary demagogues are thought sincere. But not all sincerity, or even sincere authenticity, generates winning electoral politics. So, we need an analysis of demagoguery. Here Madison is of little help because he underestimated the possibilities and dangers of mass media. So, tomorrow I'll explore the reflections of Madison's French contemporary, Sophie de Grouchy, who experienced the political effectiveness and dangers of popular demagogues up close. 

 

 

On Ethics & Economics and the Pre-History of Friedman’s ‘as if’

But this, measured by the standard of natural science, is not very far. There are no data for a science of conduct in a sense analogous to natural science. The data of conduct are provisional, shifting, and special to individual, unique situations in so high a degree that generalization is relatively fruitless. For the time being, an individual acts (more or less) as if his conduct were directed to the realization of some end more or less ascertainable, but at best provisional and vague. The person himself is usually aware that it is not really final, not really an "end"; it is only the end of the particular act, and not the ultimate end of that. F.H. Knight (1922) "Ethics and the Economic Interpretation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 475.(Emphases in original--ES.)

"[E]conomic hypothesis that under a wide range of circumstances individual firms behave as if they were seeking rationally to maximize their expected returns (generally if misleadingly called "profits")16 and had full knowledge of the data needed to succeed in this attempt; as if, that is, they knew the relevant cost and demand functions, calculated marginal cost and marginal revenue from all actions open to them, and pushed each line of action to the point at which the relevant marginal cost and marginal revenue were equal." Milton Friedman (1953) "The Methodology of Positive Economics" (Emphases in original--ES.)

The distinguished historian of economics, Ross Emmett, called my attention to the 1922 piece by Frank Knight. For, as Emmett notes, in the passage quoted above Knight partially anticipates the central methodological stance made famous by Milton Friedman in his 1953 piece (hereafter F1953). There is a known biographical connection between the two—Knight is what I call 'the Godfather' of Chicago economics because he taught so many future 'Chicago-economists' (and non-Chicago Nobel laureates), including Friedman.

In the quoted passages Knight and Friedman both recognize that the mathematical structure of economics should not be taken as a literal description of what goes on inside the minds of individuals or the decision procedures of economic agents (Friedman talks as much about "firms" as about "businessmen"); they also agree that in real life there is no "full knowledge" of the relevant data. Knight had just published a famous book, Risk, Uncertainty, Profit, in which he had defended the idea that because such relevant data were absent – that is we really live in a world of (unmeasurable) uncertainty -- entrepreneurs could make a profit. Friedman takes a different approach: according to him the as-if strategy is vindicated by the predictions that follow from assuming as-if maximization (etc.); these, Friedman expects, will be good enough (in part because, following a hint of Alchian, he assumes that in markets economic agents that deviate too much from the assumption will not survive).

Knight and Friedman both distinguishing economics from ethics; economics is independent and capable of generating agreement--a realm free from "controversies" (Knight 455; recall this post on Friedman). Before I go into the details of the distinction between ethics and economics (in both), it is worth stressing that Knight's defense of the independence and scientific nature of economics is also extremely deflationary; "it is substantially correct for practical purposes." (462) But Knight goes on to claim that,

"A science of conduct is…possible only if its subject-matter is made abstract to the point of telling us little or nothing about actual behavior. Economics deals with the form of conduct rather than its substance or content. We can say that a man will in general prefer a larger quantity to a smaller (the principal trait of the economic man) because in the statement the term "wealth" has no definite concrete meaning; it is merely an abstract term." (Knight 475; the position is echoed partially by Friedman: "Viewed as a language, [economic] theory has no substantive content; it is a set of tautologies." (F1953, 11; see also 7))

Piketty's Taxation --> Transparency Argument

The benefit of the global progressive tax on capital is that it will help to stop tax havens and make wealth inequalities a matter of public record:

3E. Lack of Transparency: r > g entails high levels of wealth inequality that are easy to hide under present legal conditions. This makes the true distribution of wealth inaccessible to the voting public, preventing them from making rational collective decisions.

3P. Increasing Transparency: A global progressive tax on capital will stop tax havens and other institutions that make it difficult if not impossible for the general public to know the distribution of wealth, as the taxing power will generate accurate records.

Piketty is happy to place a great deal weight on 3P. This means that if 3P fails, it is an enormous problem for the normative arguments in the book.--Kevin Vallier

Vallier and I agree that 3E/3P play a huge role in Piketty's book. I had called attention to them in one of my earlier posts, but Vallier's post is very useful for the careful focus he puts on them. Vallier goes on to argue that (i) that taxation is not necessary for generating this transparency; (ii) the goal of transparency can’t justify the level of taxation Piketty endorses. Let's grant (ii), although Piketty has different arguments for the level he advocates. Let's grant (i), too.

Even so, all Piketty needs is the argument that (i*) taxation is among the most likely to succeed means for generating transparency. One might worry that because Piketty has been working with tax-related-data he might be biased in favor of (1*). So, here's an argument-strategy (3P*) in favor of (i*) that Vallier does not consider and that I am pretty sure is what Piketty is after and that deploys premises that are independent of his framework:

• When governments have an interest in the matter then they will do their very best to get the data on the table.
• Governments survive on taxation.
• There is a LOT of global wealth
• So, once governments tax global wealth, governments will put their full power behind getting the best data on global wealth on the table.

On Teaching Political Positions to Students and Polities

it was my political commitments that led me to choose political theory as an academic discipline. Theory is a very special field because it provides a license to do something that academics generally are not supposed to do: that is, defend a political position in the classroom and in the learned journals...Without that license to move back and forth, to write and talk inside and outside the academic world about the political questions that interested me, I don't think that I could have survived either as a student or as a professor.--Michael Walzer.

I don’t wholly agree...if it means that political theorists especially have such a permit. Indeed I think we need to be more careful than many other social scientists, because often the standards of evidence in our research are unclear. We only sometimes venture falsifiable empirical hypotheses, we only sometimes engage in philosophical syllogism-construction, we only sometimes engage in historical archival work of the sort that allows the documentary record to bear us out or not. That makes it too easy for us to slip back and forth between theory and mere editorializing in defense of our normative priors. I admire Walzer’s own ability to move back and forth while still making real theoretical advances, but I think there’s a lot that one needs to be careful about in general.--Jacob Levy.

Alerted by Jacob Levy, I read Walzer's auto-biographical essay from which I have quoted above. In his post, Levy offers many sensible criticisms of the piece when conceived as a survey, so I don't have to focus on that here. Levy is also critical of of Walzer's two-fold idea that doing political theory offers a "license to do something that academics generally are not supposed to do: that is, defend a political position in the classroom and in the learned journals." But Levy's criticism is rather narrow (it's focused primarily on the methodological weaknesses of political theory as a foundation for articulating normative commitments). I find both Walzer's and Levy's stance surprising from the vantage point of the history of political thought (both of them acknowledged masters of that genre). Let me explain why.

As Fred Beiser reminds us in his majestic book on the German Historicist Tradition, Max Weber famously argued that due to the advanced (intellectual) division of labor, we cannot expect value-consensus in advanced political economies. In the class-room, professors, therefore, cannot be expected to offer the kind of moral education that was taken for granted, say, in eighteenth century Scottish universities or the kind of Bildung familiar from Humboldtian German universities. If we value, say, our students' intellectual development and their capacity for individual judgment (that is, if we try to teach them as future citizens of a democratic polity), we ought to prepare them for the complexities of the modern world by offering them analytical tools, scientific skills, and a wide exposure to a variety of normative traditions and political-historical exemplars. One way we do so, is to introduce political/moral perspectives into the class-room which make some alternatives to the status quo subject for discussion (or entirely  invisible, etc.). Yet, in my experience, many students resist more obvious political stances adopted by professors anyway, so attempts at political indoctrination tend to backfire.

What Causes Revolutions? Vallier on Piketty

Piketty is right that there exists a margin of wealth and/or income inequality that will produce a social revolution of some sort. If, for instance, the top 1% owned 99% of all wealth, then we’d almost certainly see some violence. However, what Piketty never seems to see is that whatever forms of social revolution or instability might be exacerbated by inequality, revolution is also a function of the absolute well-being of the groups in revolt. If, for instance, the income and wealth held by the least-advantaged largely provides them with a decent form of life, then they will be much less likely to revolt or use violence than if they were impoverished. So, social revolution is a function of both wealth inequality and absolute levels of wealth (among many other factors). Piketty never acknowledges this.--Kevin Vallier, Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

Vallier -- whose blog posts I read religiously - is an up-and-coming political philosopher. I am eager to learn from his detailed criticism(s) of the normative underpinnings of Piketty's Capital (cf. my ongoing series). But Vallier's post poses the following question:

What causes revolution?

That is, in some sense, an empirical question (although I argue below that it is not wholly an empirical question). It's not obvious that a given economist, Piketty, or given philosopher, Vallier, has a comparative advantage on this issue. Even so, a lot turns on it.  Vallier offers us a proto-theory of revolution:

• [A] there exists a margin of wealth and/or income inequality that will produce a social revolution of some sort.
• [B] revolution is also a function of the absolute well-being of the groups in revolt.
• [C] If...income and wealth held by the least-advantaged largely provides them with a decent form of life, then they will be much less likely to revolt or use violence than if they were impoverished.
• [D] Social revolution is a function of both wealth inequality and absolute levels of wealth (among many other factors).

We can recognize in [B-C] a watered-down version of an application of the difference principle. (I say 'watered down' because [B-C] do not require that boats are being lifted along the way, only that a level of decency is maintained.)*

Now, as we learn from 18th century political economy, 'decent' is culture/society relative. So, how people and theorists understand what is decent will be influenced not just by the 'facts,' but als by people's beliefs about what counts as 'decent.' Once one reflects on this, one recognizes that what really matters is how would-be-revolutionaries interpret their circumstances: this interpretation can, in fact, include considerations of fairness and equity borrowed from moral theory. It will also include expectations about trends. In fact:

Piketty, Ray, and Economic Explanation

Inequality has been rising, and to see it well, one should study “top incomes,”: those of the top 1% or even, in a variant which we might call SuperOccupy, the top 0.1% or 0.01%. This is an extremely important observation. There are lots of people in the top 1% (more in India, for instance, than in a good-sized European country), and they cast a long and enviable shadow...Even a large sample survey will often fail to pick these people up, so Piketty’s meticulous examination of tax records (along with co-authors) in different countries is to be applauded. This is data work at its best, with a well-defined reason for doing it, and when I read the papers with Emmanuel Saez and Tony Atkinson that put these findings together, I felt I had learnt something.--D. Ray, on Piketty's Capital. [HT Hülya Eraslan]

One of the most important economists today that you probably have never heard of, Debraj Ray,* wrote a careful, amusing, and -- as one ought to expect -- very insightful response to Piketty's Capital. Ray matters in economics: he is the co-editor of the leading journal. Ray is one of the intellectual leaders of the new generation of 'theorists' that combine mathematical sophistication and data with a focus on policy relevance.* Ray is also an important figure in development economics, which he has helped move to the center of the discipline. You might think such sociology is irrelevant, but as Ray notes, Piketty's Capital has a self-presentation and narrative which is a form of "positioning" that appeals to his once-inside now purported outside-status in the profession. Part of Piketty's rhetoric is to rail against "simplistic mathematical models" (16; 574, and, especially, the autobiography on p. 31-2 culminating in an indictment against "petty mathematical problems.") This is not just a matter of mere positioning within economics; for, -- and Ray does not comment on this -- at crucial junctures, Piketty relies on a contrast between the esoteric mathematical models of the experts and democratic decision-making under conditions of transparency (e.g., 480, 513; recall also this post; Vallier also picks up on this [3E/3P] and will blog about in the future). But it is also a matter of positioning oneself as being the privileged expert with the public. Even if Ray's irritation were wholly self-interested, he has put his finger on on a non-trivial feature of Piketty's rhetorical strategy. (Don't get me wrong lots of economists become such privileged experts with worse strategies: i.e., they are bought by some interested party, or they get chosen by a politician who likes what s/he hears, etc.)

That Piketty's is, in part, a rhetorical strategy is clear from two facts: first, when it suits him he, too, relies on fairly simple mathematical models (often he is disarmingly upfront about this, e.g. 364). Second, he relies in non-trivial ways on existing economics. I had pointed to this in my second post on Piketty, but I am really an amateur and Ray's post adds a lot more detail, insight, and depth to what I had said. In particular, what becomes clear is that in some non-trivial respects Piketty is working with commitments that are found in the old economics work-horses (that is, the descendants of the "models of Harrod and Domar") and some so-called "dynamic efficiency" assumptions (see Ray's slightly more technical appendix here.)  Piketty is a world-class economist, so this should not surprise. But as I pointed out before, it is unclear what constraints are driving his partial appropriation of existing economic theory.

Now, the core of Ray's piece is actually applied philosophy of science:

On Parochial Philosophy

Our 2,200 articles and 34,000 citations works out to an average of about 15 citations per paper. To academics outside of philosophy this will seem like a very low number.--K. Healy

[T]he young Parsons began a run of intellectual luck that would carry him over the course of the next decade--and with relatively little design on his own part--to some of the great academic centers of the interwar period...it stamped his thinking with a peculiarly self-referential quality, or tendency to regard the ideas he personally encountered in local surroundings as those ideas most worth engaging and vesting with epochal import."--Charles Camic on Talcott Parsons.*

We philosophers tend to claim that we work on eternal problems with topic neutral tools that allow us to capture the most fundamental features of reality. Yet because it appears that most of us prefer thinking over reading, the range of influences we expose ourselves to is, by necessity, going to be fairly limited. (Time is scarce, after all.) This entails that we will tend to engage with those ideas which we have encountered locally in our teachers (and their assignments) as well as our friends, colleagues, and those we meet at conferences. Undoubtedly we will take note of folk we suspect may be prospective referees of our work or those we imagine highly valued by such referees. It's possible, of course, that scholar.google encourages us sometimes to cast our net more widely, but given that our discipline has a tendency to discourage citation, in practice this probably does not happen much.

It also happens to be the case that a very large proportion of the English language philosophy professoriate is trained in a fairly limited number of PhD programs (for evidence see here).+ Most such programs are, in fact, in great academic centers populated with distinguished and eminent thinkers. These have, in fact, incentives to encourage the idea that it's folk like them that are worth taking seriously. So, it's very likely that lots of us share in this peculiarly self-referential quality that Camic ascribed to Parsons above. 

I had never before noticed such peculiarly self-referential quality in the professional philosophers that I admire until I was struck in a short sequence of events by: the exceedingly narrow range of privileged interlocutors that Thomas Nagel engages with in his Mind and Cosmos;  the oddity to me that Elliott Sober was one of OUP's referees of Nagel's book in light of his subsequent review;** the generous reviewing of Nagel by Plantinga and Plantinga by Nagel (recall and here).

Taxation, Transparency, and Technocracy (Piketty)

Note that I do not believe at all in technological determinism. My point is simply that we cannot bet everything on the caprices of technology and market forces, and that we ought to develop democratic transparency and fiscal institutions that allow us to adapt our policies to the speed at which the various income and wealth groups are rising.--Piketty to Schliesser, Personal Correspondence, May 2014 (quoted with permission).

It's clear from Piketty's reacton above (and Kervick's reactions here and here) that one of my earlier posts about Piketty's book was taken to imply that I attribute to Piketty the idea [1] (a) that technological developments necessitate economic outcomes, and that this entails (a') that governments are impotent in the face of this. I understand why they read me like this, although I had explicitly allowed that governments "can impact the distribution of wealth," and can generate policies that ensure (or prevent) that a country is at, or catches up with, the so-called "technological frontier." (So, I deny (a1).) My concern was really with the very idea of a 'technological frontier,' which fits uneasilly with the empirical methodology of Capital (and which I think embraces "a form of technological determinism," such that [2] if one (say, a country) is on the frontier, then one's growth potential is limited in a determinate way regardless of one's macro-economic policy).+ Some other time I return to this, but let me grant, at once, that Piketty's book advocates both 'democratic transparancy' and active government policies to combat the consequences of "the speed at which the various income and wealth groups are rising."* In fact, these two points are introduced early in the book in a remarkable passage that so far seems to have escaped commentary:

Taxation is not only a way of requiring all citizens to contribute to the financing of public expenditures and projects and to distribute the tax burden as fairly as possible; it is also [A] useful for establishing classifications and [B] promoting knowledge as well as [C] democratic transparency. (Piketty, Capital,  12 [letters added to faciliate discussion--ES)

Here I largely ignore [A] and the issues of reflexity, social control, and social fact generation (until the last sentence). Rather, I focus on [B] and [C]. The idea that taxation promotes knowledge might seem odd, but what he has in mind becomes clear throughout the book.

The basic ideas is  this: absent efforts to tax some X (say, wealth) a lot of information about X remains private and unavailable to the public and researchers alike. One very significant aspect of this is that information about X remains so widely distributed and dispersed that nobody has any accurate information about X. Now, as Hayek taught, ordinarily, markets are epistemic machines and might generate some such information in the neighborhood of X (such that 'market prices' might give us some proxy about features of X, i.e., relative supply and demand, scarcity, etc.); but even though wealth management is a huge market, the agents in THAT market are actively concealing socially relevant facts (including from each other), such that one must rely on very bad 'unofficial sources' about X (Piketty discusses the limitations of such sources in Part 3). But as Piketty notes (518) once X is taxed everywhere, then governments and other institutions create circumstances in which a lot of information about X gets collected such that the very possibility of knowledge of X is, in principle, available to researchers and a wider public (put nods to Bentham and Foucault here). This is an epistemic point about the role of state bureaucracy.** But it is connected  to a normative point.

From Hume to Piketty

Mankind are, in all ages, caught by the same baits: The same tricks, plated over and over again, still trepan them. The fear of an everlasting destruction of credit [due to government default—ES], allowing it to be an evil, is a needless bugbear." David Hume "Of Public Credit," [hereafter OPC]) Essays, 2.IX.31

There has been an attempt in ENGLAND, to dive the landed and trading part of the nation; but without success. The interests of these two bodies are not really distinct, and never will be so, till our public debts encrease [sic] to such a degree, as to become altogether oppressive and intolerable.—David Hume "Of Parties in General," Essays, 1.VIII.10

As the second quoted passage reveals, David Hume views economic life as a non-zero sum-game. Even if agents often perceive there to be irreconcilable conflicts, on his view of political economy all groups can all gain under certain institutional regimes, which we now tend to associate with classical Liberalism (free trade, impartial law, competitive elections, etc.).* This is not to deny that according to Hume some groups may gain more rapidly than others, so relative gains may well be non-uniform.

Hume recognizes only one major exception to his generalization: when government debt goes beyond a certain point that repaying them off turns out to be "altogether oppressive and intolerable." Now, he does not specify such circumstances, but we can imagine cases where just paying interest on the debt leads to very high taxes. Here, we do not need to worry about the meaning of 'oppressive and intolerable,' which Hume recognized may be a matter of habit and existing expectations. What matters for present purposes, is high taxes is not the main issue here; for if these fall uniformly on groups say in proportion to ability to pay, or some equitable maxim, then even under a-high-taxes-regime, there need not be conflicting interests by itself.

Rather, Hume makes two extra, unstated assumptions. He tacitly rules out a scenario where [I] the majority of debt is held by non-nationals. For, in that case, too, the interest of the country is united against the foreign creditors of government debt.+ But a moment's reflection on this ruled out scenario suggests that Hume is envisioning a situation when [II][A] the vast majority of government debt is held by citizens (not foreigners) and that [B] among the citizens some are more willing or more capable of lending to the government.** When [II][A-B] obtains, then even though there may be some shared interest in national survival, the general presupposition that 'wise' economic decisions benefits all falls apart. For, once economic and tax-policies are designed to benefit government creditors, then we're turning a potentially expanding pie, to a zero-sum universe. In a crucial way it is unlike "transferring money from the right hand to the left; which leaves the person neither richer nor poorer than before." (OPC, 2.IX.17)

Piketty's Modal Economics, or where ideology and historical data meet

The history of income and wealth is always deeply political, chaotic, and unpredictable. How this history plays out depends on how societies view inequalities and what kinds of policies and institutions they adopt to measure and transform them. No one can foresee how these things will change in the decades to come. (Piketty, Capital 35)

In fact, neither economic liberalization that began around 1980 nor the state interventionism that began in 1945 deserves such praise or blame. France, Germany, and Japan would very likely have caught up with Britain and the United States following their collapse of 1914-45 regardless of what policies they had adopted (I say this with only slight exaggeration.) The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm. Similarly, once these countries had attained the global technological frontier, it is hardly surprising that they ceased to grow more rapidly than Britain and the United States or that growth rates in all of these wealthy countries more or less equalized....Broadly speaking, the US and British policies of economic liberalization appear to have had little effect on this reality, since they neither increased growth nor decreased it. (Piketty 99)

The first quoted passage urges us to take political control ("transform") over our economic destiny (see also p. 234 where Piketty endorses the claim that "political forces were central.") In Piketty's book 'chaotic' tends to be used to describe unstable, ad hoc political decision-making in context of great disruptive, social upheaval (war, inflation, "shocks," etc.). (His 'chaotic' is unconnected to the stochastic view of randomness beloved by mathematical economists.) It's precisely because politics has an influence on the economy that the world becomes unpredictable. The italicized passage is the central dogma of the political historian's craft.*

Yet, in the second quoted passage, Piketty embraces a form of technological determinism on growth in which much macro-policy has no discernible influence at all on growth. I am not claiming that the two passages contradict each other. For, Piketty's position seems to be that (a) macro-economic policy is largely impotent on growth; (b) governments can make macro-economic mistakes (embrace too much autarky; embrace too much capital liberalization (71);+ (c) governments can impact the distribution of wealth; (d) ensuring the diffusion of technology and education is key to long-term growth (71;  572; see also the emphasis on productivity at 234). So, while governments can invest in education (307), the impotence of traditional macro-economic policy on growth is also emphasized in the conclusion: "countries at the world technological frontier--and thus ultimately for the planet as a whole--there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1-1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted." (572)

Clearly, the crucial concept in Piketty's analysis here is the 'technological frontier.' Amazingly enough I have just quoted two out of four mentions of the term in the whole (long) book, and these are the most detailed descriptions of it. Curiously, the term is introduced on p. 97 without a footnote or explanation. It is one of the few places in his book where Piketty assumes a background in economics in his reader. But its meaning is clear from context: (i) a country's (world's) technological frontier clearly limits the possibilities for growth. (As we philosophers like to say, it's a modal concept.) And (ii) growth can be faster toward the frontier than being on the frontier, where a "relatively slow pace" is "characteristic" (97).