Is it worth reading? Martin Wolf of the Financial Times called it “enthralling” a couple people I know have described it as “a slog.” I’d liken it to a big river - muddy and occasionally meandering, but with a powerful current that keeps pulling you along, plus lots of interesting sights along the way. Over the past few weeks it has become one of those things that everybody’s talking about just because everybody’s talking about it. It came out in France last year to great acclaim, which meant that those in the English-speaking world who pay attention to such matters knew that something big was coming. It is massive (696 pages) and massively ambitious (the title is a very conscious echo of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital). Piketty was behind similar projects in France, Britain, Japan, and other countries.Īnd now this book. In the U.S., Piketty and UC Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez transformed a tame discussion of income quintiles and deciles into a sharp debate about the skyrocketing incomes of the 1% - and the mind-boggling gains of the 0.1% and 0.01% - by gathering and publishing income tax data that nobody had bothered with before. There’s a lot of interest in economic inequality these days, and research conducted over the past 15 years by Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, is a big reason why. The reasons start with the confluence of subject matter and author. It was only published in English a few weeks ago, but French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has already become inescapable.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |