I was a student in the different Master’s Piketty taught ten years ago. The debate, at the time, was a bit binary; I know the 2007 crisis changed things a bit, but not significantly.

Binary: one side people arguing with simple models that one should look into rules and regulations that would promote growth, inherently leading to new elites. Cases mentioned include new wealth from tech, telcos & construction, where marginal cases where key (should software be copyrightable, licensed to be used but not copies when ‘proprietary’, patentable; should incumbent offer access to ‘essential assets’ to encourage investment in infrastructures). The support from old-money to the handful of cases of new-money was not mentioned; neither was the large role played of investment — simply (deregulated) algorithmic trading as another example of the lack of regulation replacing the old guard. Bluntly put: the assumption of perfect rationality meant that investment went to good ideas, therefore social access to wealth wasn’t supposed to be an issue. I am not making it up that any model without perfect rationality was until 2006 laughed out of most polite society: mentioning in passing a coherent model for financial bubbles with something as simple as private success information, two periods and two types of agents got two of my teachers in trouble repeatedly.

The other side, namely ‘heterodoxes’, was, and probably largely still is, a very varied group: from Transaction costs economists, the closest to mainstream, who argue things similar to what I mentioned, but with consistent models, nuances and many exceptions; to more exotic animals, including self-confessed Marxists and neo-Marxists. Piketty was part of the most vocal and least theoretical sub-group; mainly thanks to amusing cases of institutional ‘hacking‘ to access national databases for wealth and revenue, he was able to prove something that can come off as obvious to non-theoretical economist. However, redistribution hasn’t really been the focus on that discipline since the 70’s. “New economics” postulated Cliton-inspired steady strong growth, fueled by the digital revolution. One was only allowed one critic: Solow’s Missing computers (“You can see computers everywhere, except in production growth.”) I’ve personally tried to mention that computeres needed a different kind of company structure, with more ad-hoc internal communication tools: that got me “Yeah… Maybe”-s; but if I tried to argue that this meant a thousand employees (Google headcount at the time) could do the work of a million, potentially leaving a generation of obsolete workers, unable to find an explanation of what to do to find a job (with detailed official data in hand), I got into real trouble and I was scolded into remembering that “New economics” meant jobs for everyone. I never dared stay in public that internet-based job search meant faster finds, a lower structural unemployment and that the stable overall numbers actually meant a growing population of long-term unemployed, dropped out of sight by counting standards. Digital Lumpen-proletariat wasn’t a word, and describing Amazon warehouse working condition wasn’t acceptable.

Thanks to his incredible skill-set, Piketty was also able to stay active at the most prestigious institutions, rather than be labeled a marginal and ignored by national media. Until 2007, his position were fairly ignored by specialists. Since, critic has come, but still evolving slowly; the current leading edge to me was McAfee & Brynjolfsson last year, and more recenlty Piketty apologising for assuming that the 1% got rich, while it was the 1% of the 1%.