Capital in the Twenty First Century in Daily Show / Colbert Report / Nightly Show / The Opposition

Dec 26, 2018 Letitia rated it liked it

Shelves: 2018-to-read, textbooks

Let me 'splain...No, there is too much. Let me sum up...

1. Income from inherited capital is a greater predictor of wealth than income from labor.
2. Math.
3. The United States has greater wealth disparity than any other developed nation.
4. Math.
5. To solve massive wealth disparity, we should tax capital, not income. Except that is utopian and will never happen haha.

Ok...thanks, I guess?

I dithered on offering 3 stars to such a thoroughly researched and painstakingly written treatise on wealth inequ Let me 'splain...No, there is too much. Let me sum up...

1. Income from inherited capital is a greater predictor of wealth than income from labor.
2. Math.
3. The United States has greater wealth disparity than any other developed nation.
4. Math.
5. To solve massive wealth disparity, we should tax capital, not income. Except that is utopian and will never happen haha.

Ok...thanks, I guess?

I dithered on offering 3 stars to such a thoroughly researched and painstakingly written treatise on wealth inequality, something which the world needs. Unfortunately I can't see my way to offering more than that for this dense thousand pages of rigorous scholarship. Picketty has written himself out of an audience, in my mind, since he explains basic terminology to make his book accessible, but then engages in such detail with enormous concepts of political economy that the layperson will quickly find themselves out of their depth. I can't determine if he is writing to economics professors or the factory worker who wants to understand why his dumb boss makes more than he does. I myself am somewhere between the two, and I couldn't tell you if I was lost or bored half the time.

What this does incredibly well, albeit without resolution, is explain the relationship of national growth to private capital, and how the latter had long outperformed the former until the turbulence of two world wars led mid-century economists to the erroneous conclusion that such trends had been forever reversed. Now, a hundred years after the first World War, the cataclysmic shift of private capital has digressed to following a pattern that capitalism was created to follow: wealth for the already wealthy. This has brought about a return to the enormous wealth disparities that we associate with 18th and 19th century Europe (remember all those revolutions???), except that Europe responded accordingly and has less disparity than the United States, which clings to an ideal of capitalism that has been disproved so many times it's ridiculous to even mention the tenets of this model here.

Picketty's argument is quite convincing (did I mention the math?), but it's so convoluted that it can't be fully distilled, and for that reason does not serve the general populace well. His enormous body of research will be useful to PhD candidates who want to fact-check him and see the source materials, but it serves to make his book unreadably dry, and it dilutes the importance of his primary message, which is that the natural movement of markets is to reinforce wealth that already exists, not to redistribute it. This reality requires political action, which the United States is reluctant to take, and which is hard to enforce because no laws currently exist to restrict atrocities such as off-shore tax shelters and shell companies. The result is a labor class that will forever be a labor class and will continue to slide backwards as the patrimonial middle class born in the 20th century struggles to keep up with the truly wealthy. Meanwhile there is no end in site to the massive gains that can be accrued through inherited wealth. An important message, but one that gets lost in Picketty's verbosity and fastidious scholarship. ...more

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Oct 09, 2014 Peter rated it did not like it

Shelves: stopped-reading

In all fairness there is no way I was going to read nearly 700 pages of this pretentious crap.

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Sep 18, 2017 Dea rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book attempts to provide a solution to a problem that many, if not most, do not see as a problem. Be it because people think that those who are rich deserve to be rich, or because the wealth inequality is a natural state of things, many do not see the need in solving the problem, let alone willing to listen to an argument about how to solve the problen. Hell, it is difficult for me to think of a single prominent voice in our day and age that has stated that capitalism is something that need This book attempts to provide a solution to a problem that many, if not most, do not see as a problem. Be it because people think that those who are rich deserve to be rich, or because the wealth inequality is a natural state of things, many do not see the need in solving the problem, let alone willing to listen to an argument about how to solve the problen. Hell, it is difficult for me to think of a single prominent voice in our day and age that has stated that capitalism is something that needs fixing or reigning in. This book, grand in its fact gathering and data analysis, nonetheless gets ahead of itself assuming that the part about convincing people that there is a problem is already done.

As a red blooded communist I agree with the general argument of the book. Wealth tends to accumulate in the hands of the few, and the more wealth those few have the faster it accumulates. In our day and age so much of wealth is no longer tied to property, thus is not limited geographically. Nor is it tied to anything physical, thus is not restricted by any physical limit. This means that wealth can accumulate anywhere in the world and without limit.

World wide accounting and taxation of wealth can slow our roll towards a dystopian future where corporations rule, but only if the governments of the world agree there is a problem and band together to solve it. Current political climate makes me think this not merely improbable but quite impossible.

I would have liked to hear more on the climate change, and its effects on the global economy and growth in general. But I do understand this book is already 1000 pages and climate was not the primary focus.

Before I conclude this short review I wanted to leave the single quote that stuck with me days after I finished the book, that I think is not only a call to action but a good summary of how we got into the situation that we find ourselves in now.

There are a thousand and one ways to do social science, and accumulating data is not always indispensable or even (I concede) especially imaginative. Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.

...more

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