Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century": A Comprehensive Analysis of Wealth and Inequality in the Modern Age

Jeremy W: I bought this book in 2014, when it received a lot of attention and rave reviews. The protests that were happening in Hong Kong at the time especially piqued my interest when it came to wealth inequality, meritocracy (vs. democracy), etc., so I decided to pick this up. To be completely honest, I did not make it past the first 100 pages at the time. The first few chapters read like an economics textbook, and it was incredibly dry. Despite having taken economics in university and suffered through an MBA program, I couldn't force myself to continue reading what felt like a very tedious academic paper.

Fast forward by 7 years, I decided to pick this up again and started from the beginning. I once again found the first few chapters quite labourious to get through. But in the last 7 years, the pandemic had changed my threshold for boredom, and I managed to get through James Joyce's "Ulysses" which made me feel like I could get through any book. To my surprise, after I got through the first 6 chapters, the rest of this book was a breeze. So for those who were in a similar situation, i.e. gave up on the book at some point, I encourage you to give it another chance. Maybe start from...

Canada on Jan 26, 2022

Freh: In his introduction to this book, Piketty states, “When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.” He further states that “Intellectual and political debate about the distribution of wealth has long been based on an abundance of prejudice and a paucity of fact.” He then addresses this paucity with the presentation and analysis of the results the project he led to acquire an enormous volume of historical data about global income and wealth.

In the introduction, he briefly reviews the contributions but also the errors of earlier debate without data. These included Malthus’s concern with overpopulation and the need to end all welfare, Ricardo’s principle of scarcity with population and production growing as land becomes increasingly scarce, and Marx’s principle of infinite accumulation with the industrial revolution leading to no limit on the accumulation of capital (which...

United States on Aug 24, 2017

Peter de Toma sen.: The most brilliant idea of this book is the title 'CAPITAL in the Twenty-First Century' which reminds the world of 'DAS KAPITAL' by Karl Marx published in 1867.

Wikipedia Nov. 6th, 2015: 'On May 18, 2014, the English edition reached number one on the New York Times Best Sellers List for best selling hardcover nonfiction[2] and became the greatest sales success ever of academic publisher Harvard University Press.[3] As of January 2015, the book had sold 1.5 million copies in French, English, German, Chinese and Spanish.
Can you imagine such a success with a book title 'TAXATION in the Twenty-First Century'?
This small difference ' using CAPITAL instead of TAXATION ' made Piketty a millionaire, a rich man for normal people.

The popularity of Picketty and his book provides several options between ignoring the book and trying to digest the 685 pages to develop one's own Position which I have tried to do. Below I quote directly from the book and add my comments marked as MC.

Picketty identifies two fundamental laws of capitalism.
The First Fundamental Law of Capitalism: ' = rxß. Share of income from capital (') = rate of return on capital (r) multiplied...

Germany on Nov 11, 2015

Yehezkel Dror: Avant-Garde Politician: Leaders for a New Epoch

The author succinctly sums up his impressive achievement, stating "I have presented the current state of our historical knowledge concerning the dynamics of distribution of wealth and income since the eighteenth century, and I have attempted to draw from this knowledge whatever lessons can be drawn for the century ahead" (p. 571).

I would not add a review to the many already published if they did not miss a critical error, namely "drawing lessons for the century ahead" largely with eyes glued to the past. The author, in line with many others, ignores the metamorphosis into which humanity is cascading, which constitutes a break with the continuity of history of the species that makes many lessons based on the past inapplicable to the emerging future. A main cause for this sleepwalking into the future is science and technology ignorance, which prevents appreciation of the radical transformations into which humanity is pushed, willing or unwilling so.
Leaving aside secondary issues, such as the neglect of defense hardware in considering public capital, which in some countries significantly changes the public/private...

United Kingdom on Apr 04, 2015

TWB: Piketty's tome is undoubtedly a work of tremendous importance, if only thanks to the political influence that it has already exerted in France, the USA and the UK. In many ways, it is an irreverent book that snubs its nose at economists as a class and tries to break down academic barriers in pursuit of an honest analysis of economic history. Piketty studies not only tax records and schedules of wills in pursuit of the development of capital and wages but also literature and uses popular culture to illustrate his arguments to a lay audience. This makes is remarkably readable even considering that it weighs in at almost 600 pages (plus footnotes and a website of economic source data).

Piketty's principal innovation is in drawing together data sets (predominantly for the three countries named above but segueing into other developed and developing economies) that are unparalleled in their range and depth, covering centuries of economic data. Working with a number of colleagues to refine and analyse the data, Pikkety has produced perhaps the most complete study of the transformation of agrarian economies into industrial economies and beyond into service economies. In doing so,...

United Kingdom on Jul 30, 2014

Athan: Piketty argues three points:

1. Throughout human history income distribution and (even more so) wealth distribution has almost inevitably been skewed very heavily toward the top. This is the result of powerful economic laws that reinforce each other.

(i) Over time, total wealth in a society tends to the ratio of the savings rate to the growth rate, which has typically resulted in wealth (=capital) of 4 to 7 times more than total income. In the US today this ratio is at 4, in Italy today it's more like 6, the same as it was in pre-1914 France, for example. The composition of capital has changed (e.g. arable land has gone from very important to totally unimportant) but not its ratio to income (as measured by GDP or GNP or GNI).

(ii) World growth has throughout history been abysmally low. It averaged 0.1% per annum between year 0 and 1700, 1.6% per annum between 1700 and today and a mere 3% per annum from 1913 to 2013. Ergo, it's a tiny denominator that's been keeping this ratio up, rather than particularly impressive savings rates. Only a smidge more than half of that growth has been per capita growth, incidentally, with the rest attributable to population...

United Kingdom on May 03, 2014

A. J. Sutter: This is a monumental work about inequality. Despite the title's allusion to Marx's classic (a point emphasized by the dust jacket design), it's neither a primarily theoretical nor a primarily polemical work, though it has elements of both theory and advocacy. Nor is its author (TP) a radical: he taught at MIT, and is thoroughly at home in the concepts and categories of mainstream neoclassical theory. Nonetheless, I think even many who hold less orthodox views about economics will find this book stimulating, valuable and sympathetic in many respects. And all readers ought to find it disturbing.

In the ultra-long comments below, I begin with the book's audience and style (§ 1); then turn to some of the book's main arguments, which are more nuanced than usually reported (§§ 2-6); then to some things that are unclear or missing (§§ 7-8); and I end with some comments about the book's production (§ 9) and some concluding remarks.

1. In the original French edition, TP says that he intended this book to be readable for persons without any particular technical knowledge. In principle, it could be read by a broad, college-educated audience. TP's prose is very clear and...

United States on Mar 17, 2014