> This dearth of reaction to such a critical work is not healthy. It is as if the rapturous reception by the public increased the resentment among Piketty’s academic economist colleagues. As an appeal to the public to resolve, or at least have a say in, what the experts consider their own domain, Piketty appears to have questioned the very value of having a credentialed economics elite empowered to make policy in the name of the public interest but not answerable to public opinion. The economics elite, it seems, answered by stonewalling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so it would not have the impact on economics research agendas that it merits.

This disdain for those that have found popularity is fairly common in many fields. There seems to be a simultaneous feeling of 1) but what about this super complicated way of viewing it, this popular piece misses all these details, and 2) maybe a bit of jealousy.

I'm not an economist, in case it's not clear, and haven't had the time to read the book, but the critiques were short enough to read in an hour and convinced me that Piketty is right, because the critiques were so shallow and seemed like such motivated reasoning.