MARK ANDREESSEN ON PIKETTY’S NONSENSE Timothy B. Lee: This relates to another to

MARK ANDREESSEN ON PIKETTY’S NONSENSE

Timothy B. Lee: This relates to another topic I wanted to ask about. You’ve had some harsh words for Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose new book is trendy in liberal circles right now. Do you think he’s right that we’re going to see a growing gap between the rich and the poor in the coming years?

Marc Andreessen:The funny thing about Piketty is that he has a lot more faith in returns on invested capital than any professional investor I’ve ever met. It’s actually very interesting about his book. This is exactly what you’d expect form a French socialist economist. He assumes it’s really easy to put money in the market for 40 years or 80 years or 100 years and have it compound at these amazing rates. He never explains how that’s supposed to happen.

Every investment manager I know is sweating the opposite problem, which is: what do I do? Where do I get the growth? I can’t get into the public market, so I have to go into the private market. The problem in the private market is there isn’t much growth. Maybe a dozen hedge funds. After that they’re not that good. The returns degrade down to S&P 500 levels.

Timothy B. Lee: That’s not so bad is it? The S&P 500 has returned 6 or 7 percent real growth for the last few decades.

Marc Andreessen:Yeah, 6 or 7 percent. But if you look at the last 15 years they’re much less than that. Jeremy Siegel put out his book about how there’s never been a 10-year period where you lose money in the stock market — right at the beginning of a very long period where you lose money for 10-plus years.

Piketty thinks it’s really easy to compound capital at scale. There’s just a lot of evidence that that’s not true. The shining example of that is: where are all the big companies and the big families?

If you look at what’s actually happening in the Forbes 400 and the Fortune 500, churn is accelerating. One year it’s some real estate family, and then the next year it’s like, “There’s Larry Page, where did he come from?” Somehow Piketty looks through that to a world where all this change is going to just stop. [He has] this idea that normal is 18th-century feudal France, and we’re going to go back to it.

He does this other dodge where the 20th century doesn’t conform to his theory, but that’s because of the wars and economic dislocations. And so it’s like the 21st century is predicted to be much more peaceful and calm. I don’t know about you but that’s not what I see happening. I look around the world right now and I see exciting things happening that’s causing a lot of changes.