Thomas Piketty Turns Marx on His Head
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/books/review/capital-and-ideology-thomas-piketty.html
CAPITAL AND IDEOLOGY
By Thomas Piketty
By Paul Krugman
Seven years ago the French economist Thomas Piketty released Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a magnum opus on income inequality. Economists already knew and admired Pikettys scholarly work, and many
myself included offered the book high praise. Remarkably, the book also became a huge international best seller.
In retrospect, however, what professionals saw in Capital wasnt the same thing the broader audience saw. Economists already knew about rising income inequality. What excited them was Pikettys novel hypothesis about the growing importance of disparities in wealth, especially inherited wealth, as opposed to earnings. We are, Piketty suggested, returning to the kind of dynastic, patrimonial capitalism that prevailed in the late 19th century. But for the book-buying public, the big revelation of Capital was simply the fact of soaring inequality. This perceived revelation made it a book that people who wanted to be well informed felt they had to have.
To have, but maybe not to read. Like Stephen Hawkings A Brief History of Time, Capital in the Twenty-First Century seems to have been an event book that many buyers didnt stick with; an analysis of Kindle highlights suggested that the
typical reader got through only around 26 of its 700 pages. Still, Piketty was undaunted.
His new book, Capital and Ideology, weighs in at more than 1,000 pages. There is, of course, nothing necessarily wrong with writing a large book to propound important ideas: Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species was a pretty big book too (although only half as long as Pikettys latest). The problem is that the length of Capital and Ideology seems, at least to me, to reflect in part a lack of focus.
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