Thomas Piketty Quotes
Economists should be modest and be aware that they are part of the broader social science community. We need to be pragmatic about the methods we use. When we need to do history, we should do history. When we need to study political science, we should study political science.
Piketty, Thomas. "New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century." TED, Oct. 2014.
This quotation polarized the economists into those who thought that economics was held back by the rigidity of the scientific method and those who thought that economics was a backward science because it did not follow the standards of the more developed scientists. Scientists from other fields are almost universally in agreement and accuse many economists of making predictions and pronouncements from analyses that in other sciences would only be called guesses. The same is said of politics by many scientists.
The Institute was just getting started then. The stock market had crashed the year before, and we were one year into the Great Depression. Several of the trustees that that they should devote the first department of the institute to the study of economics to focus on the challenge of the depression. Flexner, the first Director, thought that a bad idea giving this quotation as his reason. He then persuaded the trustees to start with mathematics where the Institute has since done its finest work.
His view is different from many other historians who see history as a good guide for current politics. Some others see history as a useful backup tool for current politics but must not be used rigidly.
He was discussing his unprecedented steps that as Federal Reserve Chairman he took to cope with the Great Recession after the Meltdown of 2008. He had, as a graduate doctoral student, studied the economic history of the Great Depression of 1929 and the government attempts to ameliorate some of the effects. He was one of the few people in government who had this historical perspective.
Thomas Piketty is a French economist who is Professor of Economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (French: École des hautes études en sciences sociales: EHESS), Associate Chair at the Paris School of Economics and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics.
