More travel and recent travel

I will be reprising my talk on the Piketty book in a talk at the University of British Columbia Law School in Vancouver on Monday, October 27.  Details here.

Good session in Charlottesville last Thursday when I last presented this paper, although the air travel aspect was not as much fun.  (Five-hour delay heading out, including a flight that returned to NYC after many minutes in the air, due to mechanical problems; one-hour delay heading back.)

The main comments I got in Virginia concerned the likely virtues of spelling out, a bit more thoroughly than the current draft does, the implications for tax instrument design of (a) different normative concerns about rising high-end inequality, and (b) different sources of rising wage inequality that one might to address, if one modifies Piketty's assumption that r > g is doing most of the work.

I also got an interesting sidebar comment on my blog, generally praising it but saying that, when I discuss politics, I am (a) too ungenerous to Republicans, (b) at least implicitly too generous to Democrats who often are equally in bed with plutocracy (I say "implicitly" because I don't actually praise them much here), and (c) insufficiently mindful of the sharp divides within the Republican camp - as shown by the populist and anti-rent-seeking passions that helped to retire Eric Cantor to a life where he will have to accept multimillion-dollar paychecks in lieu of being an inside player.  Point taken; I will try to do better.