Closet Confidential

Thomas Piketty's resources in the Twenty-First Century is in addition ambitious and modest. The book is ambitious because Piketty sets out to tell a high-level history of the global economy and to outline a fresh theory of where we are heading. It's the sort of grand intellectual enterprise that was common in the 19th century, but has become a rarity in our era of more specialised scholarship. But Capital's also modest because Piketty wants to put economic science, his own discipline, back in its place. Refreshingly, he regards economics as merely a branch of the social sciences, eschewing the hubristic claims for supremacy made by some practitioners.

Are the ambitions achieved? On the historical side the answer is yes. Perhaps the greatest contribution of this book is the data it brings to the family table. Piketty throws a spotlight on the very wealthiest and those with the chunkiest incomes and puts these patterns in a long historical wording. This is important because it tells the story of our time: huge wealth and huge incomes are now concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people. Disparity is approaching 19th-century levels in the rich world. Piketty has been critiqued, but no one quibbles with his data. He has compelled people to confront and debate our winner-takes-all economy.

 

But what next? Piketty's recommended argument is that there is a herbal tendency for the rich to get richer. This contradicts the widely held assumption that as, economies grow and become more sophisticated, the spoils will tend to be more equally shared across society. Piketty acknowledges that such a levelling occurred in the 20th century but he describes this as a historical aberration. The old business forces driving inequality, he says, are back. There are good reasons to be sceptical of Piketty's theory. But it's a valid hypothesis. And the facts of the past a variety of decades certainly seems to support his matters.

The French scholar is a fine teacher. One of the reasons behind why for the book's 600-plus page amount is that he takes the reader back to first theory, assuming no specialist knowledge. The English translation by Arthur Goldhammer is limpid. Piketty says he wants the book to be widely read and his ways debated. He has succeeded. Questions of economical theory have now reached an uncommonly large audience.

One could, of course, fill a book twice the size with the evaluations and the commentary Capital has prompted. But there is a better way into the debate than consuming the Piketty media phenomenon: spend a little valuable capital and read the starting yourself.

Read more : capital in the twenty-first century pdf