Bar Buzz: To Picketty or not to Picketty.

Byline: Kevin Featherly

Free association question, meet informed answer.

During the Feb. 28 presentation of the state's February economic forecast, we noticed something that made us think about the semi-obscure French economist Thomas Piketty. So we asked Gov. Tim Walz about it.

Luckily, Walz knows all about Piketty's door-stop-sized 2013 book, "Capital in the 21st Century." He even seemed glad to get asked about it. (The thing is a chore to read, so who wouldn't want credit?)

"Thank you for doing that," Walz said. "I spent about a month reading that."

But before we get deeper into his response, let's back up a moment. What made us think about "Capital" was the state's increasingly tepid forecast for revenue growth.

The forecast predicts that a 3.2 percent state-revenue growth rate for fiscal years 2018-19 will tumble to 3.0 percent in 2020-21. (We asked some smart folks in the room that day and they assure us that revenue growth is roughly analogous to economic growth, which is important to our theme here.)

After that, revenue growth is projected to fall to 2.3 percent in 2022-23: Piketty territory.

Piketty's central argument is that the return on capital (the money rich folks get off their investments) is historically greater than any returns from pure economic growth (the factors that generate income for the rest of us schmoes).

And since real economic growth has been slow throughout all of human historywith a big exception of the anomalous post-WWII eraPiketty argues that money usually concentrates into the hands of the richest. Because capital usually does OK.

The Frenchman further argues that those old slow-growth normswhich he measured from the 1700s onare re-establishing themselves and will dominate this century. One measure of that is global output growth, which Piketty predicts will drop from 3 percent to a more historically normal 1.5 percent annually during this century.

Which means, to him at least, without a redistributive change in economic policy, wealth concentration is only going to get worse.

So we asked the governor if that...

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