| Reviews |
This past July, I felt compelled to read Thomas Piketty 's Capital in the Twenty-First Century after reading several reviews and hearing about it from friends. I'm glad I did. I encourage you to read it too...I agree with his most important conclusions, and I hope his work will draw more smart people into the study of wealth and income inequality., New research from the Fed shows incomes of the richest Americans are bouncing back strongly after the crisis while average incomes have fallen...In essence, French economist Thomas Piketty 's contention that wealth breeds wealth--and that increasing inequality is part of capitalism's inherent structure, rather than an occasional condition--looks largely correct, at least since the early 1990s., There are books that you read and there are books that hit the nail on the head so hard that you want to get your teeth into them. T homas Piketty 's Capital in the Twenty-First Century ...clearly belongs to the second category., The impact of the book will be [deep] and long lasting... Piketty has elevated many issues to a higher level by making the study of inequality as one of political economy embedded in history, data and configuration of socio-political groups... This book has all the makings of a classic. It has already changed the way economists think about inequality. One hopes that these ideas will percolate into the chambers of policy-makers in governments and lending institutions and bring about changes in their policies to reduce inequality., Piketty 's great achievement, and one possible reason for the enthusiastic reception of his book, is his effective empirical demonstration of a fact long denied by neoclassical economics and its champions throughout the world: markets, when left to their own devices, do not provide individuals with rewards that are proportional to their efforts and contributions towards producing goods and services, nor do they ensure the most optimal distribution of those goods and services. Instead, they tend to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, giving rise to what Piketty calls a system of 'patrimonial' capitalism in which a few major players derive disproportionate benefit simply by virtue of possessing high amounts of capital... As a work of economic history, and a source of data, it effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality, reward effort and innovation, and deliver the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people. At a point in time where slogans about the 1 per cent vs the 99pc abound, this book provides conclusive evidence in support of the idea that the modern-world economy is one that is inherently unjust and exploitative., This book is not only the definitive account of the historical evolution of inequality in advanced economies, it is also a magisterial treatise on capitalism'e(tm)s inherent dynamics. Piketty ends his book with a ringing call for the global taxation of capital. Whether or not you agree with him on the solution, this book presents a stark challenge for those who would like to save capitalism from itself., Very readable and often slyly witty... Piketty does economics in a new way; or more accurately, he returns to an older way. He still uses formal economic theory but regards economics as a sub-discipline of social science, alongside history, sociology, anthropology and political science and prefers to characterize his work as political economy rather than economic science. Piketty draws wonderfully upon the novels of Jane Austen and Honore de Balzac to portray the gross inequality of 19th-century societies. He argues that the degree of inequality is not just the product of economic forces; it is also the product of politics, including the tax, expenditure and regulatory decisions of government, and the discourse of justification of inequality...Piketty starts in the 19th century and examines the three eras. He wants to understand the longue duree of capitalism, as did the pioneers of political economy such as Malthus, Ricardo and Marx. And like them, he places the distributional question--the distribution of pre-tax income and the distribution of wealth--at the heart of economic analysis. This approach, which is both empirical and historical, is much needed if we are to understand income inequality and more generally to understand how capitalist economies operate. The ahistorical perspective of hedge fund managers and their risk pricing models helped cause the financial crisis in 2007-08...Piketty's focus is not labor income but capital income, and here lies his originality., Piketty has shown that we are living in a Second Gilded Age...It is too early to expect actual public policies to emerge from his insights. But the significance of his contribution is already apparent in the breadth of his vision. Nestled under the book's mass of data, elegant mathematical formulae, and literary references is an insistence that the turmoil of capitalism is a human turmoil, within the control of human beings. Piketty's book is a call to citizenship, not as a series of fatalistic poses, but as a political responsibility. That spirit of engagement is more radical, at this moment in history, than any other proposal., In this monumental, vitally important work, [ Piketty ] forces us to reconsider what we think we know about the baseline functioning of capitalist economies over the long haul, and to grapple with the implications for ourselves and our times. Piketty's approach is data-driven. In detective-like fashion, he has collected the most complete historical series on distributions of income and wealth ever assembled, and this data allows him to articulate a penetrating and highly accessible account of the long evolution of inequality within advanced industrial nations...The findings are numerous and sobering, and nearly every page of the book rewards a careful reading with new insights and intriguing questions., Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high--and is only bound to grow worse., It's a brilliant, surprisingly readable work that synthesizes a staggering amount of careful research to make the case that income inequality is no accident. Indeed, Piketty argues that it is a feature of capitalism itself--unless governments take action to rein in capitalism's excesses... But the value of Piketty's work is that it shows that capitalism's postwar heyday--in which incomes at the bottom and the top actually converged --was a historical anomaly. Piketty's analysis of the last two centuries makes the case that capital in its natural state does not tend to spread out or trickle down, but to concentrate in the hands of a few... He has starkly and convincingly outlined the stakes for future generations. Either we'll have a new birth of reformed capitalism...or we'll have wealth concentration on such a colossal scale that it will threaten the democratic order., After receiving widespread attention in his native France, Thomas Piketty 's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has received even greater attention on this side of the Atlantic, and deservedly so. It offers a stark and depressing picture for those who believe that some combination of democratic politics and economic growth can protect us from rampant inequality., Riveting'e¦[ Piketty ] embodies a model of engaged and sophisticated public debate, the sort of which politicians can only dream'e¦One of Piketty'e(tm)s main messages is that the structures of inequality societies choose to live with are the results of political choices, not natural or immutable economic tendencies, and that to pretend otherwise is an 'e~ideological'e(tm) fiction'e¦Capital inequality has dispossessed us of our 'e~democratic sovereignty,'e(tm) and that'e(tm)s something we should all really worry about'e¦ His book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality'e¦When Piketty'e(tm)s insights are eventually fused into new histories of economic and political thinking about global competition from the French Revolution to the present, the results will be...electrifying, particularly when it comes to revisiting the political and economic ideas of the global wars of the first half of the twentieth century'e¦[This book] will certainly also shake the foundations of many university courses in political philosophy. That is itself quite a remarkable achievement, and perhaps the sort of achievement that might lead to the sort of political consciousness-raising Piketty is clearly keen to promote. In that, he really is an heir to a long-standing tradition of public intellectuals in French academic life since the Revolution., The extraordinary resonance of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century suggests that inequality has become the most pressing economic issue of our time., Piketty 's book bespeaks the palpable upset that American society, indeed, the world's societies, seems increasingly rigged; that inequality is worsening and darkening the future. Capital in the Twenty-First Century might be more aptly titled Inequality in the Twenty-First Century... Piketty is relentless in his indictment of inequality...Piketty assembles a mountain of numbers and tables to demonstrate that economic inequality is intensifying; that the wealthier are wealthier; and that the rich own more...Piketty hits bullseye after bullseye about the exacerbating inequalities that disfigure society--especially American society...For [those] who suffer from the relentless blather about why the minimum wage cannot be raised; why 'job creators' cannot be taxed; and why American society remains the most open in the world, Piketty is what the doctor ordered., Rarely does a book come along...that completely alters the paradigm through which we frame our worldview. Thomas Piketty 's magisterial study of the structure of capitalism since the 18th century, Capital in the 21st Century , is such a book... As leaders from Pope Francis to Barack Obama have proclaimed, growing inequality is the defining issue of our time. Much indeterminate discussion has swirled around its key causes, from job-displacing technologies to wage-deflating outsourcing of jobs. Capital in the 21st Century clears up all the confused thinking and presents us with the most compelling analysis to date of the key dynamic that drives ever-increasing inequality. This book is more than a must read. It is a manual for action that provides a fresh framework for the new politics of the 21st century., Capital in the Twenty-First Century convinces because Piketty supports his arguments about inequality with two innovative forms of evidence largely neglected by his predecessors on both the left and the right. The first is an unprecedented trove of historical economic data, which Piketty uses to demonstrate increasing inequality due to the long-term tendency of returns on capital to outpace economic growth. The second is a series of literary works, which Piketty uses to reveal the social and psychological consequences of this inequality in its erosion of human dignity. The depth and range of evidence Piketty marshals allows him to deliver a devastating blow to the confidence of many economists that capitalism is a tide that gradually lifts all boats. In the process, he mounts an effective critique of the tendency of economic writers on both left and right to rely on theories and formal systems. Many who were content to ignore the warnings of [David] Harvey and company that our economic system will produce unsustainable levels of inequity find that they cannot ignore Piketty's...His book challenges both mainstream economists' faith in untested mathematical models, as well as radicals' resistance to subjecting Marx's economic theory to rigorous testing., [A] sweeping study of wealth in the modern world... Piketty makes his case with three centuries' worth of economic data from around the world organized in a trove of detailed but lucid tables and graphs. This is a serious, meaty economic treatise, but Piketty's prose (in Goldhammer's deft translation) is wonderfully readable and engaging, and illuminates the human reality behind the econometric stats--especially in his explorations of the role of capital in the novels of Jane Austen and Balzac. Full of insights but free of dogma, this is a seminal examination of how entrenched wealth and intractable inequality continue to shape the economy., Instantly influential... [Its] euphoric reception is richly merited... [ Piketty 's] chief intellectual accomplishment is to show how the basic forces of capitalism tend inevitably toward an ever-greater accumulation of wealth at the tip of the pyramid... Over the past couple decades, we have started to realize that capitalism is no longer delivering for the vast majority of people in most Western democracies. The middle class is being hollowed out, even as fortunes continue to grow at the very top. Piketty has now delivered the most empirically grounded, intellectually coherent explanation of what is going on... His masterwork... That's why the most successful societies of the 21st century will be the ones whose plutocrats read Piketty and help come up with the political answers to the economic forces he so powerfully describes. Piketty shows that the economics of the postwar era--when the West enjoyed strong, widely-shared growth--was a historical exception. For our Western democracies, it was also a political necessity. Capitalism is facing an existential challenge; smart plutocrats will be part of the solution., Marx believed that free markets produce inequality, social division and violence. Piketty appears to side with Marx, but this is deceptive. When Piketty talks about 'capital,' he means the kind of investments held by today's leisured rentier class whose money is tied up in property and pensions. Piketty argues that a free market overloaded with this kind of capital may or may not lead to anger and alienation, but it will certainly act like lumpy blockages in the smooth running of the economy. Piketty only wants the economy to work better., Thomas Piketty 's new book, Capital in the 21st Century, painstakingly details the dynamics of wealth and income inequality throughout the last two centuries, and offers a somewhat grim picture of the future of economic inequality. Along the way, Piketty also offers his theory of the cause of exploding executive pay and how we can successfully combat this destructive trend., Impressive, provocative... The richness, scope and detail of Piketty 's analysis means that it is impossible to summarize it without losing much of the vibrancy which makes it such an exceptionally gripping read... The special conditions for growth created by the two world wars have now evaporated. The forces of convergence are in large measure spent, and the forces of divergence are in the ascendant. Capitalism is reverting to type... The first three parts of Piketty's book are devoted to describing and analyzing this transition. They represent a brilliant, mesmerizing re-statement of technical matters for a non-specialist readership. Here Piketty's achievement is superb... There is a huge amount to admire and welcome in this book... Like the radicals of the 1790s, who toasted Edmund Burke in gratitude for the fundamental debate his writings on the French Revolution had provoked, even those who find Piketty's remedies unpalatable and in some ways worse than the disease he is trying to cure should nevertheless applaud his industry, his acuity, and his humane commitment to the ideal of rational, temperate and informed public debate., This book is not only the definitive account of the historical evolution of inequality in advanced economies, it is also a magisterial treatise on capitalism's inherent dynamics. Piketty ends his book with a ringing call for the global taxation of capital. Whether or not you agree with him on the solution, this book presents a stark challenge for those who would like to save capitalism from itself., Riveting...[ Piketty ] embodies a model of engaged and sophisticated public debate, the sort of which politicians can only dream...One of Piketty's main messages is that the structures of inequality societies choose to live with are the results of political choices, not natural or immutable economic tendencies, and that to pretend otherwise is an 'ideological' fiction...Capital inequality has dispossessed us of our 'democratic sovereignty,' and that's something we should all really worry about... His book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality...When Piketty's insights are eventually fused into new histories of economic and political thinking about global competition from the French Revolution to the present, the results will be...electrifying, particularly when it comes to revisiting the political and economic ideas of the global wars of the first half of the twentieth century...[This book] will certainly also shake the foundations of many university courses in political philosophy. That is itself quite a remarkable achievement, and perhaps the sort of achievement that might lead to the sort of political consciousness-raising Piketty is clearly keen to promote. In that, he really is an heir to a long-standing tradition of public intellectuals in French academic life since the Revolution., Piketty 's treatment of inequality is perfectly matched to its moment. Like [Paul] Kennedy a generation ago, Piketty has emerged as a rock star of the policy-intellectual world... But make no mistake, his work richly deserves all the attention it is receiving... Piketty, in collaboration with others, has spent more than a decade mining huge quantities of data spanning centuries and many countries to document, absolutely conclusively, that the share of income and wealth going to those at the very top--the top 1 percent, .1 percent, and .01 percent of the population--has risen sharply over the last generation, marking a return to a pattern that prevailed before World War I... Even if none of Piketty's theories stands up, the establishment of this fact has transformed political discourse and is a Nobel Prize-worthy contribution. Piketty provides an elegant framework for making sense of a complex reality. His theorizing is bold and simple and hugely important if correct. In every area of thought, progress comes from simple abstract paradigms that guide later thinking, such as Darwin's idea of evolution, Ricardo's notion of comparative advantage, or Keynes's conception of aggregate demand. Whether or not his idea ultimately proves out, Piketty makes a major contribution by putting forth a theory of natural economic evolution under capitalism... Piketty writes in the epic philosophical mode of Keynes, Marx, or Adam Smith... By focusing attention on what has happened to a fortunate few among us, and by opening up for debate issues around the long-run functioning of our market system, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a profoundly important contribution., In Capital in the Twenty-first Century , Piketty sums up his research, tracing the history and pattern of economic inequality across a number of countries from the eighteenth century to the present, analyzing its causes, and evaluating some policy fixes. Spanning nearly 700 densely packed pages, it's a big book in more than one sense of the word. Clearly written, ambitious in scope, rooted in economics but drawing on insights from related fields like history and sociology, Piketty's Capital resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned work of political economy by the likes of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes. But what is particularly exciting about this book is that, due to advances in technology, Piketty is able to draw on data that not only spans a substantially longer historical time frame, but is also necessarily more complete and consistent than the records earlier theorists were forced to rely on. As a result, his analysis is significantly more comprehensive than those of his predecessors-- and easily as persuasive... Capital is a consistently engrossing read, encompassing topics including the stunning comeback that inherited wealth has made in today's advanced economies, the dubiousness of the economic theory that a worker's wage is equal to his or her marginal productivity, the moral insidiousness of meritocratic justifications of inequality, and more. But the book's major strength lies in Piketty's ability to see the big picture. His original and rigorously well-documented insights into the deep structures of capitalism show us how the dynamics of capital accumulation have played out historically over the past three centuries, and how they're likely to develop in the century to come... America's twenty-first-century inequality crisis is, if anything, even more daunting and complex than the one we experienced a century ago. But as Piketty reminds us, the solutions to this problem are political, and they lie within our grasp. Should Americans choose to deploy those solutions, not only would we be doing the right thing, we'd be living up to our deepest traditions and most cherished ideals., It proves, irrefutably and clearly, what we've all suspected for some time now--the rich ARE getting richer compared to everyone else, and their wealth isn't trickling down. In fact, it's trickling up... And as Piketty 's book makes so uncomfortably clear, it's likely to get worse before it gets better... It's going to be remembered as the economic tome of our era. Basically, Piketty has finally put to death, with data, the fallacies of trickle down economics and the Laffer curve, as well as the increasingly fantastical notion that we can all just bootstrap our way to the Forbes 400 list... We can only hope that the politicians crafting today's economic programs will take this book to heart., Thomas Piketty 's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come. In the way it is written and the importance of the questions it asks, it is a book the classic authors of economics could have written if they lived today and had access to the vast empirical material Piketty and his colleagues collected... In a short review, it is impossible to do even partial justice to the wealth of information, data, analysis, and discussion contained in this book of almost 700 pages. Piketty has returned economics to the classical roots where it seeks to understand the 'laws of motion' of capitalism. He has re-emphasized the distinction between 'unearned' and 'earned' income that had been tucked away for so long under misleading terminologies of 'human capital,' 'economic agents,' and 'factors of production.' Labor and capital--those who have to work for a living and those who live from property--people in flesh--are squarely back in economics via this great book., It's a brilliant, surprisingly readable work that synthesizes a staggering amount of careful research to make the case that income inequality is no accident. Indeed, Piketty argues that it is a feature of capitalism itself-unless governments take action to rein in capitalism's excesses... But the value of Piketty's work is that it shows that capitalism's postwar heyday-in which incomes at the bottom and the top actually converged -was a historical anomaly. Piketty's analysis of the last two centuries makes the case that capital in its natural state does not tend to spread out or trickle down, but to concentrate in the hands of a few... He has starkly and convincingly outlined the stakes for future generations. Either we'll have a new birth of reformed capitalism...or we'll have wealth concentration on such a colossal scale that it will threaten the democratic order., Monumental...Translated beautifully by Arthur Goldhammer, [ Capital in the Twenty-First Century ]...smashed into the intellectual world with incredible force...But beyond the media phenomenon, how much substance was there? The answer is: a considerable amount. The book is important, first and foremost, because it brings together a vast trove of research by Piketty and others on the evolution of income and wealth over two centuries. One also has to admire the way Piketty marshals the data to create a sweeping historical narrative, in a style reminiscent of the great thinkers of the 19th century., Thomas Piketty 's Capital in the 21st Century is arguably the most important popular economics book in recent memory. It will take its place among other classics in the field that have survived changing theoretical and political fashions, such as its namesake by Karl Marx ( Das Kapital , 1867) or other ambitiously titled books such as John Maynard Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion about the economic landscape will have to read Piketty., This is a truly path-breaking book offering a hard-hitting and well-founded critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century. Piketty is concerned with the dynamics of income and wealth since the eighteenth century to draw lessons for the century ahead. The book has an admirably wide scope, offering systematic comparisons not only across advanced and emerging economies, but also across modern history...It is an exceptionally well-researched book. His sources are well documented. Piketty's overall analysis and conclusions cannot be waved away by those who feel threatened by the book's analysis and policy recommendations...In addition to uncovering [some] fundamental contradictions of capitalism and documenting the ensuing inequality in great detail, Piketty's book contains a large number of less central, but nevertheless very arresting insights and findings...Very importantly, Piketty goes beyond uncovering the dynamics of capitalism and the ensuing inequalities and goes on to suggest policy measures to arrest/reverse them. These are not merely an afterthought but form a significant and well-reasoned part of the book...Piketty shows himself to be not only a supereconomist but also a skilled politician. No wonder his thoughts have resonated even at the highest political levels. One can only hope that his work will actually influence adoption of his policy recommendations., Piketty has come in for a lot of praise for the clarity of his writing, and I think it's deserved. There's very little math in this book, and it assumes very little prior knowledge of economics. In part, this is because Piketty is offering something fresh in the discourse: an unimaginably massive data-set that traces the ebb and flow of wealth and productivity around the globe for three centuries...Piketty challenges the idea that modernity somehow led to 'merit' asserting itself as the new determinant of wealth. Instead, he makes a very convincing case that the increasing size of the capital class--which expanded comfortably during the period of colonial expansion--created a hunger for wealth that turned the aristocracy on itself in a squabble over who got to loot the colonies, which was World War I...This is a crisis. The reason for capitalism is that it is supposed to allocate reward based on 'merit'--it is supposed to move capital into the hands of the people who can do the most with it--and if all our policy decisions are made in service to a class of supermanagers whose wealth comes from squatting on a fortune managed by some green-eyeshade quants who grow it without its owner ever doing a notable thing apart from being born to dynasty, there is no more reason for capitalism. Piketty darkly hints that the last time this happened, the world tore itself to pieces, twice, in an orgy of destruction that left millions dead and whole nations in ruin...It's a rare thing to see economists, especially pro-capitalist economists, praising taxation itself, but Piketty--careful, unemotional Piketty--dares...Besides, he says, the thing every red-blooded entrepreneur wants to see is people getting rich by their wits and deeds, not by the birthright of kings...Piketty wants desperately to salvage captalism, even if that means proposing something that every capitalist will hate: a global wealth tax., [A] magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality... The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven't just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we're also on a path back to 'patrimonial capitalism,' in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties... Piketty has written a truly superb book. It's a work that melds grand historical sweep--when was the last time you heard an economist invoke Jane Austen and Balzac?--with painstaking data analysis... A tour de force of economic modeling, an approach that integrates the analysis of economic growth with that of the distribution of income and wealth. This is a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics... Capital in the Twenty-First Century is, as I hope I've made clear, an awesome work. At a time when the concentration of wealth and income in the hands of a few has resurfaced as a central political issue, Piketty doesn't just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame... Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes it clear that public policy can make an enormous difference, that even if the underlying economic conditions point toward extreme inequality, what Piketty calls 'a drift toward oligarchy' can be halted and even reversed if the body politic so chooses... His masterwork... Sometimes it seems as if a substantial part of our political class is actively working to restore Piketty's patrimonial capitalism. And if you look at the sources of political donations, many of which come from wealthy families, this possibility is a lot less outlandish than it might seem... [A] masterly diagnosis of where we are and where we're heading... Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an extremely important book on all fronts. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we'll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to., Magisterial... Piketty 's Capital feels very much like a Category 4 hurricane that hasn't yet made landfall...Piketty draws on a vast store of historical data to argue that the broad dissemination of wealth that occurred during the decades following World War I was not, as economists then mistakenly believed, a natural state of capitalist equilibrium, but rather a halcyon interval between Belle poque inequality and the rising inequality of our own era...Piketty's most provocative argument is that the discrepancy between the high returns to capital and much more modest overall economic growth--briefly annulled during the mid-century--ensures that the gulf between the rich (who profit from capital investments) and the middle class (who depend chiefly on income from labor) will only continue to grow...The best reason to raise tax rates is not to punish the rich, of course, but to raise the revenue which the United States needs to invest in infrastructure and research, not to mention to pay for Social Security and health care. That investment gap poses a clear and present danger to American global economic leadership. Rising inequality exacerbates the problem by sapping the collective political will needed to address the problem., Using sophisticated computer modeling and analyses, the professor from the Paris School of Economics debunks a long-held assumption--that income from wages will tend to grow at roughly the same rate as wealth--and instead makes a compelling case that, over time, the apparatus of capitalism grows wealth faster than wages. Result: Inequality between the wealthy and everyone else will widen faster and faster; and, without progressive taxation, his data show we'll return to levels of inequality not seen since America's Gilded Age., [ Piketty 's] overarching theme--that increased income disparity as a threat to democratic capitalism--remains prominent...His concerns about social unrest cannot be ignored: the movement from personal interdependence to impersonal global interdependence tends to erode trust and voluntary sharing, and wealth disparities are increasingly seen as unmerited and unfair., When the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate (which [ Piketty ] says is what happened until the beginning of the 20th century and is likely to happen again as growth slows), then the money that rich people make from their wealth piles up while wages rise more slowly if at all. The implications of this should be frightening for anyone who believes in a merit-based system. It means we are in danger of entering into an era that, like the 19th century in France and England, is socially and politically dominated by those with vast amounts of inherited wealth...Piketty's book is important because of the way he has clarified the magnitude of the problem and its dangers. And he has done so at a time of increasing soul-searching about the role technology plays in exacerbating inequality., This year's most unlikely best seller, a crossover from the world of scholarship into general public discussion of a kind that seems rarer than it used to be. The book's thesis--that economic inequality in the developed world is increasing, with potentially dire consequences for social justice and democratic governance--has struck a nerve in the American body politic. But its implications extend beyond the realm of political economy...The book invites the re-examination of deeply held assumptions about the world., Thomas Piketty 's Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics., Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century laid bare the deep structural forces that have made our brave new neoliberal economic order so dangerously topheavy and unstable., In Capital in the Twenty-first Century , Piketty sums up his research, tracing the history and pattern of economic inequality across a number of countries from the eighteenth century to the present, analyzing its causes, and evaluating some policy fixes. Spanning nearly 700 densely packed pages, it's a big book in more than one sense of the word. Clearly written, ambitious in scope, rooted in economics but drawing on insights from related fields like history and sociology, Piketty's Capital resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned work of political economy by the likes of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes. But what is particularly exciting about this book is that, due to advances in technology, Piketty is able to draw on data that not only spans a substantially longer historical time frame, but is also necessarily more complete and consistent than the records earlier theorists were forced to rely on. As a result, his analysis is significantly more comprehensive than those of his predecessors- and easily as persuasive... Capital is a consistently engrossing read, encompassing topics including the stunning comeback that inherited wealth has made in today's advanced economies, the dubiousness of the economic theory that a worker's wage is equal to his or her marginal productivity, the moral insidiousness of meritocratic justifications of inequality, and more. But the book's major strength lies in Piketty's ability to see the big picture. His original and rigorously well-documented insights into the deep structures of capitalism show us how the dynamics of capital accumulation have played out historically over the past three centuries, and how they're likely to develop in the century to come... America's twenty-first-century inequality crisis is, if anything, even more daunting and complex than the one we experienced a century ago. But as Piketty reminds us, the solutions to this problem are political, and they lie within our grasp. Should Americans choose to deploy those solutions, not only would we be doing the right thing, we'd be living up to our deepest traditions and most cherished ideals., It proves, irrefutably and clearly, what we've all suspected for some time now-the rich ARE getting richer compared to everyone else, and their wealth isn't trickling down. In fact, it's trickling up... And as Piketty 's book makes so uncomfortably clear, it's likely to get worse before it gets better... It's going to be remembered as the economic tome of our era. Basically, Piketty has finally put to death, with data, the fallacies of trickle down economics and the Laffer curve, as well as the increasingly fantastical notion that we can all just bootstrap our way to the Forbes 400 list... We can only hope that the politicians crafting today's economic programs will take this book to heart., It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century , the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty , will be the most important economics book of the year--and maybe of the decade. Piketty, arguably the world's leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we're on the way back to 'patrimonial capitalism,' in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent., As befits a book of such size, Capital is broad-ranging, both historically and geographically...This impressive book contains the odd equation and chart that might not appeal to the general reader, but I hope this work will not go the way of A Brief History of Time-- a book more talked about than read., A book of such magisterial sweep... Piketty deserves huge credit for kickstarting a debate about inequality and illuminating the distribution of income and wealth., In this magisterial work, Thomas Piketty has performed a great service to the academy and to the public. He has written a pioneering book that is at once thoughtful, measured, and provocative. The force of his case rests not on a diatribe or a political agenda, but on carefully collected and analyzed data and reasoned thought. The book should have a major impact on our discussions of contemporary inequality and its meaning for our democratic institutions and ideals. I can only marvel at Piketty's discipline and rigor in researching and writing it., Reading Thomas Piketty 's famous book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, after all the fuss about it, is a bit of a shock. It's both much more radical and much less radical than its reputation...I was anticipating a left-wing rant, but Piketty's tone is modest and polite--not at all what you expect from a rock-star French intellectual...Piketty and his book remind me of my favorite economist, the 19th-century American Henry George, and his best-selling book, Progress and Poverty (1879). Both men's books offer a comprehensive explanation of the world, in particular the problem of poverty. Both men acknowledge the importance of market incentives and entrepreneurship and the evils of protectionism and all of that good conservative stuff, even as they rail against the plutocrats. Both think we can end or reduce inequality without giving up the benefits of capitalism. And both see the answer in a new tax on capital...This is beginning to sound sort of reasonable, both in its demands on people at the top and its generosity to those on the bottom., About as close to a blockbuster as there is in the world of economic literature--easily the most discussed book of its genre in years. The central premise is provocative and profoundly bleak... Piketty challenges one of the underpinnings of modern democracies--namely, that growth and productivity make each generation better off than the previous one., In this magisterial work, Thomas Piketty has performed a great service to the academy and to the public. He has written a pioneering book that is at once thoughtful, measured, and provocative. The force of his case rests not on a diatribe or a political agenda, but on carefully collected and analyzed data and reasoned thought. The book should have a major impact on our discussions of contemporary inequality and its meaning for our democratic institutions and ideals. I can only marvel at Piketty'e(tm)s discipline and rigor in researching and writing it., Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high-and is only bound to grow worse., Thomas Piketty 'e(tm)s Capital in the 21st Century is arguably the most important popular economics book in recent memory. It will take its place among other classics in the field that have survived changing theoretical and political fashions, such as its namesake by Karl Marx ( Das Kapital , 1867) or other ambitiously titled books such as John Maynard Keynes'e(tm)s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion about the economic landscape will have to read Piketty., Piketty 'e(tm)s great achievement, and one possible reason for the enthusiastic reception of his book, is his effective empirical demonstration of a fact long denied by neoclassical economics and its champions throughout the world: markets, when left to their own devices, do not provide individuals with rewards that are proportional to their efforts and contributions towards producing goods and services, nor do they ensure the most optimal distribution of those goods and services. Instead, they tend to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, giving rise to what Piketty calls a system of 'e~patrimonial'e(tm) capitalism in which a few major players derive disproportionate benefit simply by virtue of possessing high amounts of capital'e¦ As a work of economic history, and a source of data, it effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality, reward effort and innovation, and deliver the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people. At a point in time where slogans about the 1 per cent vs the 99pc abound, this book provides conclusive evidence in support of the idea that the modern-world economy is one that is inherently unjust and exploitative., This book is not only the definitive account of the historical evolution of inequality in advanced economies, it is also a magisterial treatise on capitalism's inherent dynamics., Belief in markets may be crumbling but as platoons of mercenaries, lawyers, accountants and management consultants continue to plunder the world's resources on behalf of unaccountable corporations, the tipping point has not yet been reached. Thomas Piketty 's Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows how privateers use privatization, debt creation and capital inflation as a mechanism for rent extraction, with catastrophic consequences for public services., Very readable and often slyly witty... Piketty does economics in a new way; or more accurately, he returns to an older way. He still uses formal economic theory but regards economics as a sub-discipline of social science, alongside history, sociology, anthropology and political science and prefers to characterize his work as political economy rather than economic science. Piketty draws wonderfully upon the novels of Jane Austen and HonoreÌ� de Balzac to portray the gross inequality of 19th-century societies. He argues that the degree of inequality is not just the product of economic forces; it is also the product of politics, including the tax, expenditure and regulatory decisions of government, and the discourse of justification of inequality...Piketty starts in the 19th century and examines the three eras. He wants to understand the longue dureÌ�e of capitalism, as did the pioneers of political economy such as Malthus, Ricardo and Marx. And like them, he places the distributional question--the distribution of pre-tax income and the distribution of wealth--at the heart of economic analysis. This approach, which is both empirical and historical, is much needed if we are to understand income inequality and more generally to understand how capitalist economies operate. The ahistorical perspective of hedge fund managers and their risk pricing models helped cause the financial crisis in 2007-08...Piketty's focus is not labor income but capital income, and here lies his originality. |
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