Enthusiastic Reader > Recent Status Updates

p. 175 - "letting go is more important than adding." I think the key takeaway from this book is going to be the importance of identifying what we really value, and figuring out how to prioritize that over all the noise. Kondo talks mostly about possessions, but I think for me the challenge is letting go of things I want to DO.

p 144 "the sharp price increases seen everywhere else after 1990 were checked in Germany by the effects of German reunification, which brought a large number of low-cost houses onto the market." Interesting (although there's more to it).

However, it makes me wonder why the US became enemies with the USSR so quickly after having been their allies, and before then, having had little to do with them.

In fairness, a lot of that progress was due to brutal treatment of large sections of the population.

P 137: “the fact that the Soviet Union joined the victorious Allies in World War II enhanced the prestige of the statist economy system the Bolsheviks had put in place. Had not that system allowed Soviets to lead a notoriously backward country, which in 1917 had only just emerged from serfdom, on a forced march to industrialization?”

p. 108-109: "It is surely no accident that money - at least in the form of specific amounts - virtually disappeared from literature." Piketty's point is that because of inflation and changes in relative prices due to the Industrial Revolution, it is more difficult for readers to understand the value of specific sums.

"In Great Britain, the average income was on the order of 30 pounds a year in the early 1800s, when Jane Austen wrote her novels." This puts Mr. Darcy's 10k/yr in a very favorable light!

p. 103 - "inflation is largely a twentieth century phenomenon." Interesting!

Not sure why the timeline in figures 2.4 and 2.5 is divided as it is; it's interesting that Piketty chooses a mark point of 1913 (before WWI) rather than 1918, at the end of the war.

p. 88 "productivity [in food production] has increased continuously and crucially over the very long run (thereby allowing a greatly increased population to be fed by ever fewer hands, liberating a growing portion of the workforce for other tasks)"

Yeah... perhaps also "cutting off a growing portion of the workforce from their source of employment and income"? perspective matters.

p 87 - "some prices have risen more rapidly than the 'average' price, while others have risen more slowly, so that purchasing power has not increased sixfold [between 1900-2010] for all types of goods and services." Basically, because of increases in technology, the cost of goods in the manufacturing sector has not increased as much as in the service sector.

Athelstane's funeral was absolutely delightful. Twain was jealous of Scott's dialogue XD

"the rate of return on capital measures the yield on capital over the course of a year regardless of its legal form (profits, rents, dividends, interest, royalties, capital gains, etc.) expressed as a percentage of the value of capital invested." I *think* I get this.

P 41: “In an ideal society, how would one arrange the division between capital and labor? How should one think about the problem?”

P 39: “the question of what share of output should go to wages and what share to profit - in other words, how should the income from production be divided between labor and capital? - has always been at the heart of distributional conflict.”

Really enjoying this so far.