Almost everybody except the Germans. Thomas Piketty’s very French diatribe in Die Zeit (in German, so paste it into Google Translate for a ricketty English version) against current German behavior towards Greece skips just about everything related to World War I and the Cold War. Eduardo Porter’s Picketty mimicry in the New York Times is even more myopic. Neither mentions the ideological American interest in assuring an economic miracle in West Germany after 1945, let alone the international political interplay between war reparations and foreign loans to the Weimar government after 1918. Anybody remember the Dawes Plan of 1924 or the Lausanne Conference of 1932? Hit the stacks, gentlemen! One small measure of the subject’s complexity is that in 1922 the German government invited an international committee of distinguished economists, including John Maynard Keynes and Gustav Cassel, to study the currency situation. Presumably Picketty and Porter remember how that decade played out.
