This piece from @psantacl explains the error in the degrowth agenda furthered by @PikettyWIL @stiglitzian and others who signed the @guardian article theguardian.com/commentisfre… @JonSteinsson @albertobisin It is well worth reading. If you teach undergraduates: make sure they read @psantacl’s arguments. The level of hubris demonstrated by the signers of the Guardian piece is extraordinary.

"The pie is fixed. The Earth is a closed system. You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet." I hear this constantly, and it's delivered like a law of physics — case closed, only a compromised economist could disagree. It's wrong. And the mistake is revealing, because it isn't in the physics. It's in the economics smuggled inside the physics.

The same people preaching sovereignty and dunking on Mistral today will come crawling back to Fable the moment Anthropic switches it on again

How often do you think about the Roman empire?

L’esthétique contemporaine, épurée, sans fioritures, fonctionnelle et efficace, qu’on retrouve dans la déco, l’ameublement, l'urbanisme, les objets, les logos des marques... me rappelle ce qu’écrit le philosophe sud-coréen Byung-Chul Han dans Sauvons le beau 👇

La Maison-Blanche vient de forcer Anthropic à couper ses modèles avancés à tous les étrangers—qu’il soient ou non sur le sol américain. Les effets géopolitiques de cette décision historique sont massifs. Analyse à chaud @victorstorchan, très conseillée. legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2026/…

What would it require to enforce Piketty’s plan? About this matter, he is conveniently vague. Confiscating something on the order of 10% of world GDP and redirecting it through a newly created supranational body does not happen by asking nicely. You cannot restructure the global economy at that scale without a coercive apparatus that dwarfs anything in human history. The mechanism must be authoritarian. It would require a world government with the power to tell billions of people which jobs they may and may not hold, what they may build, what they may eat and how many hours they are permitted to work. And to what end? “Climate change” is an insufficient answer when Picketty’s entire edifice is built on a discredited foundation. The report relies on a baseline from the RCP8.5 climate scenario that projects Earth warming by as much as 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. But last month, the UN’s own climate panel officially retired RCP8.5 (always a high-end estimate) as “implausible.” A more central projection is about 2.7 C. Replies to Piketty’s X feed pointed this out immediately. His response, as far as anyone can tell, has been silence. That leaves the inequality argument. Worldwide income inequality is nearing a 150-year low, but Piketty insists that radical redistribution of wealth is essential for the Global South. And where have billionaires and wealth been popping up fastest in recent decades? Embarrassingly, data from Piketty’s World Inequality Database confirms that it’s in South and Southeast Asia, as well as East Asia. These are the exact Global South regions that have spent recent decades rescuing hundreds of millions of people from poverty through market-directed economic growth. latimes.com/opinion/story/20…

I see we're in day 7 of the 'we're scientific economists, the other are lefty cranks' discourse of the status-quo evangelists.

Important context to the AI accusation flying around on here about the recent Guardian growth op-ed. Thanks, @sc_cath. It's always easy to pile on, but more important to get the facts, especially when accusing someone of academic impropriety. "Would I still make this accusation if I agreed with their viewpoint?" is a good test.

Thank you for answering questions Mr Piketty. I also have one. Like you, I also don’t want to live in a world where some are vastly richer than others and thereby have vast control over others. I’m with you on that. But I’m wondering how you are thinking about yourself in relation to your proposal. Given your work, I’d imagine you earn perhaps 500,000? Or given just how large your sales figures are, probably more? How do you square this with your proposal? Will you stop working as much so your salary goes down to 60,000? Or are you perhaps already giving away almost all your income?