Capital in the Twenty First Century by Thomas Piketty

Browsing the bookstore recently, I found this tiny summary on the shelf and picked it up, intrigued by the prospect that I might be able to at least understand a summary of Capital in the Twenty-First Century without needing to read all 685 pages of the full-sized book. Giving in to the hype machine, I too purchased Piketty Thomas' 2013 Capital in the Twenty-First Century becoming one of the 97.6% of readers that stopped reading and never finished the formidably sized book. In addition, the two authors demonstrate the limits, contradictions and errors of the so-called ‘Piketty revolution’. What is correct in it? What are the criticisms of it? And what should we make of it-both of the book itself and of the criticism it has received? This book lays out the argument of Piketty’s monumental work in a compact and understandable format, while also investigating the controversies that this book has caused. Given the sensational reception of the not-so-easily digested 800-page study that spans back to the eighteenth century, the question as to where the hype around Piketty’s book comes from deserves to be asked.

Thus, a small elite becomes simultaneously richer and richer and more and more powerful. The ‘rock star economist’s’ (Financial Times) underlying thesis: inequality under capitalism has reached dramatic proportions in the last few decades and continues to grow-and not by coincidence. Piketty has been described as a new Karl Marx and placed in the same league as the economist John Maynard Keynes. It has sparked major international debates, dominated bestseller lists and generated a level of enthusiasm-as well as intense criticism-in a way no other recent economic or sociological work has. US Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman described Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as “perhaps the most important book of the last decade”. An introduction to Thomas Piketty’s monumental work

Capital in the Twenty First Century by Thomas Piketty