Capital in the Twenty First Century in The Majority Report Podcast Goodreads Group

Jul 12, 2014 Rob Smith rated it it was amazing

It is a seemingly universal truth that most people are bad at math. Anyone who's worked in retail can attest to this fact. A collorory that is equally true, is that people are equally incompetent in economics. Every once in awhile, you always read in some newspaper's opinion section of a clarion call for increased financial and economic literacy. This is especially true after 2008.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty is a provocatively titled study of wealth ine It is a seemingly universal truth that most people are bad at math. Anyone who's worked in retail can attest to this fact. A collorory that is equally true, is that people are equally incompetent in economics. Every once in awhile, you always read in some newspaper's opinion section of a clarion call for increased financial and economic literacy. This is especially true after 2008.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty is a provocatively titled study of wealth inequality in the West, with all the data currently available. Using graphs, statistics, and various economic formulas, Piketty breaks down his study of wealth and its inequality and lays down his conclusions as straightforwardly as possible.

The book is very clearly, a lowest common denominator book. Piketty squarely aims the tome at everyone in the West with basic reading and math skills. THIS IS NOT A BAD THING. This is actually fantastic. Given the uncouth marriage economics often finds itself with ugly politics, misinformation on economics abounds. Piketty employs a lot of unsexy economic information. The kind of stuff you learn in a macroeconomic class, but never makes it on the news or political shows in an nuanced way.

The book is extremely repetitive. Piketty will take time and text to tell you what he's about to discuss, what he's going to discuss in later chapters, and how it relates to what he's currently talking about. He'll define concepts repeatedly as they come up across all chapters. To someone knowledgably about economics, or quick to absorb such information, this will probably come off as a huge bore. To everyone else, it's enormously helpful.

The main thrust of his thesis and his findings are compelling and interesting. In short, Piketty posits in our capitalistic society, nineteenth century wealth inequality is the norm. The two worlds wars and the Great Depression were economic shocks that led to an equalizing of wealth through government action. The economically prosperous liberal consensus of America and the Les Trente Glorieuses in France were borne from these shocks. These were times, unprecedented in history, that wealth inequality was at it's lowest points. However, as Piketty notes, this is actually an economic aberration. Since the conservative revolution in the '80s, wealth inequality as been steadily increasing.

Piketty goes into great detail on the economics of wealth inequality. His book is full of graphs and statistics and sources to aid his points. In the interest of saving paper and making the text more accessible, the bulk of his data and sources are available online.

Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, at the heart of this book is Piketty's plea and urgency for statistics based economics. One that bases theories off data and not data off theories. For anyone interested in the current economic issues in the world today, this is a book worth taking a look at, if only to be part of a larger discussion of the place of economics in our modern world. ...more

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