I just finished reading Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. For those who are unaware (or who didn't finish it) Thomas Piketty's book is all about the past, present and future of wealth and income inequality. The increased public attention paid to this issue (Remember 'We Are The 99%'?) is probably what put this book on the New York Times Best Seller List. The relatively dry nature of the history of economic inequality is probably what left it one of the most unfinished.
All that being said, I found it to be a relatively easy and pleasant read. Piketty's treatise on the history of economic inequality could have been dense, arcane and completely incomprehensible to the normal reader- but it isn't. It is almost refreshing to read an economics book that isn't written for academic eyes only. Some of that is because, well, Piketty isn't exactly your average economist. (For one, his book made the New York Times Best Seller List. That probably makes him an outlier.)
Piketty is an economic historian and that makes all the difference. Capital reads like a history book and the portions dealing with the history of income inequality are really, the best parts. One of the more pleasant surprises is Piketty's use of literary examples of the stratified and highly inegalitarian societies he analyzes- Jane Austen, Honore de Balzac and Henry James are all referenced. Piketty manages to humanize the text and give the reader a better sense of scale when he begins to discuss inequality in more quantitative depth. Charts and graphs are presented where immediately relevant and useful, which is not often the case in books like Capital. (The footnotes and the book's website are for a specific type of power-reader.) Piketty managed to bring the highly stratified, inegalitarian society of the past to life- and that is no mean feat for an economics tome.
It is when Piketty strays from economic history that he begins to falter. The rest of the book is composed of his own forecasts of economic inequality and finally, his policy recommendations for how to deal with the 'contradiction of capitalism.' I'm not here to argue about his conclusions- plenty of more qualified people can waste their time doing so more effectively than I can. There's still plenty of good information to be found and a few bright points. (Ingenious indirect measurements always impress me, whether in the 'hard' or 'soft' sciences and Piketty's use of college endowment data to examine sovereign wealth funds is certainly ingenious.) It's just that these final portions of Capital were not as engaging and were much closer to what I imagined the entire book would be.
Overall, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century was a good read and certainly one I will revisit. The history is brilliant (especially when one realizes that Piketty is working on virgin soil- this is the first work to truly explore economic inequality in such depth.) Even where the rest of the book is less interesting, it is no less edifying. I'd highly recommend it to those interested in economics or social justice. It isn't often enough that those two interests coincide- and even more rare when they coincide in a book written for the modern reader.
Final musing: Piketty's policy recommendations were remarkably less radical than I had expected, given the vitriol directed at him by The Financial Times and FOX News, among others. It isn't often that a book all about economic inequality ends with "Let's tax all wealth at a marginal rate and strive for more transparent accounting practices" instead of "Kill the bastards" or "Property is theft".
NEXT UP: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink
No comments:
Post a Comment