Thomas Piketty

ver$hy ver$h

ver$hy ver$h

Well-known member
Anyone read him? Thoughts? I remember a lot of fuss over his big book a few years ago and him ending up advising Corbyn for a while and now an even bigger one's being published in English this month.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
Nah but I read some reviews by Marxists slagging it off obviously because I’m a cliche.

Will try to dig them out.
 
ver$hy ver$h

ver$hy ver$h

Well-known member
john eden said:
Marxists slagging it off
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"The book has often been presented as a twenty-first century substitute for Karl Marx’s nineteenth century work of the same title. Piketty actually denies this was his intention, which is just as well since his is not a book about capital at all. It does not tell us why the crash of 2008 occurred and why it is taking so long for so many people to get out from under the dual burdens of prolonged unemployment and millions of houses lost to foreclosure. It does not help us understand why growth is currently so sluggish in the US as opposed to China and why Europe is locked down in a politics of austerity and an economy of stagnation. What Piketty does show statistically (and we should be indebted to him and his colleagues for this) is that capital has tended throughout its history to produce ever-greater levels of inequality. This is, for many of us, hardly news. It was, moreover, exactly Marx’s theoretical conclusion in Volume One of his version of Capital. Piketty fails to note this, which is not surprising since he has since claimed, in the face of accusations in the right wing press that he is a Marxist in disguise, not to have read Marx’s Capital."
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
I think it was one of those books that way more people talked about than had read. And possibly for a while was the cool thing to have on your coffee table.

I was struck at the time that it was actually even bigger (page count etc) than Marx’s Capital vol 1 because I was reading that at the time.

Also interesting that all the right wing pundits basically just slagged him off for being French and being a Marxist (despite him clearly not being one and making many statements pointing this out). So you can’t really win this argument by being polite about it.
 
D

DannyL

Wild Horses
How hard was Capital to read? I've always assumed that Piketty would be relatively easy, once one got going. Not read it myself but I do read economics and enjoy it (pervert) so maybe I will.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
DannyL said:
How hard was Capital to read? I've always assumed that Piketty would be relatively easy, once one got going. Not read it myself but I do read economics and enjoy it (pervert) so maybe I will.
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Bits of it Capital are a breeze and bits are harder. The David Harvey commentary lectures are really really good and I don’t think I would have managed it without them.

Try the first few chapters and see if you like them. The bits in there about value are pretty cool.

Don’t read the foreword or things by other people “explaining” it.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
Reviewing Marx seems as pointless as reviewing Miles Davis in 2020.

Both have helped me see the world in new ways though.

Marx’s analysis is a really useful tool which informs much/most of my guff on here about politics.
 
ver$hy ver$h

ver$hy ver$h

Well-known member
It is the economics book that took the world by storm. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, written by the French economist Thomas Piketty, was published in French in 2013 and in English in March 2014. The English version quickly became an unlikely bestseller, and it prompted a broad and energetic debate on the book’s subject: the outlook for global inequality. Some reckon it heralds or may itself cause a pronounced shift in the focus of economic policy, toward distributional questions. The Economist hailed Professor Piketty as "the modern Marx" (Karl, that is). But what is his book all about?

Capital draws on more than a decade of research by Piketty and a handful of other economists, detailing historical changes in the concentration of income and wealth. This pile of data allows Piketty to sketch out the evolution of inequality since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In the 18th and 19th centuries western European society was highly unequal. Private wealth dwarfed national income and was concentrated in the hands of the rich families who sat atop a relatively rigid class structure. This system persisted even as industrialisation slowly contributed to rising wages for workers. Only the chaos of the first and second world wars and the Depression disrupted this pattern. High taxes, inflation, bankruptcies and the growth of sprawling welfare states caused wealth to shrink dramatically, and ushered in a period in which both income and wealth were distributed in relatively egalitarian fashion. But the shocks of the early 20th century have faded and wealth is now reasserting itself. On many measures, Piketty reckons, the importance of wealth in modern economies is approaching levels last seen before the first world war.

From this history, Piketty derives a grand theory of capital and inequality. As a general rule wealth grows faster than economic output, he explains, a concept he captures in the expression r > g (where r is the rate of return to wealth and g is the economic growth rate). Other things being equal, faster economic growth will diminish the importance of wealth in a society, whereas slower growth will increase it (and demographic change that slows global growth will make capital more dominant). But there are no natural forces pushing against the steady concentration of wealth. Only a burst of rapid growth (from technological progress or rising population) or government intervention can be counted on to keep economies from returning to the “patrimonial capitalism” that worried Karl Marx. Piketty closes the book by recommending that governments step in now, by adopting a global tax on wealth, to prevent soaring inequality contributing to economic or political instability down the road.

The book has unsurprisingly attracted plenty of criticism. Some wonder whether Piketty is right to think that the future will look like the past. Theory argues that it should become ever harder to earn a good return on wealth the more there is of it. And today’s super-rich (think of Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg) mostly come by their wealth through work, rather than via inheritance. Others argue that Piketty’s policy recommendations are more ideologically than economically driven and could do more harm than good. But many of the sceptics nonetheless have kind words for the book’s contributions, in terms of data and analysis. Whether or not Professor Piketty succeeds in changing policy, he will have influenced the way thousands of readers and plenty of economists think about these issues.
 
D

DannyL

Wild Horses
john eden said:
Reviewing Marx seems as pointless as reviewing Miles Davis in 2020.

Both have helped me see the world in new ways though.

Marx’s analysis is a really useful tool which informs much/most of my guff on here about politics.
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I was impressed by the account of Marxist ideas in that Corbynism book. They basically critiqued the idea of value as a fixed quantity that resides in the objects produced by workers and explain how this leads to the conception leads to the idea that you can preserve it within national boundaries i.e. Lexit. They explain value as a social relationship instead which seems much more acute.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
DannyL said:
I was impressed by the account of Marxist ideas in that Corbynism book. They basically critiqued the idea of value as a fixed quantity that resides in the objects produced by workers and explain how this leads to the conception leads to the idea that you can preserve it within national boundaries i.e. Lexit. They explain value as a social relationship instead which seems much more acute.
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That’s good.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
DannyL said:
How hard was Capital to read? I've always assumed that Piketty would be relatively easy, once one got going. Not read it myself but I do read economics and enjoy it (pervert) so maybe I will.
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Vol 1 is easy if you read it as something explaining the underlying mechanisms of being on the dole.

Vols 2-3 are much more hardcore.

honestly though, most marxists haven't even read vol 1 and that's a walk in the park if you read it from the perspective of the reserve army of labour (unemployment) so dive straight in.

Oh and read it from the perspective of peasants being thrown off the land and reduced to a class of criminal vagabonds during the enclosures. then it all makes much more sense.
 
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