Most of the reviews of Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century have already been written. But I thought it might be best to read it all the way through before offering my own thoughts on this book, which startlingly rose to the top of the best seller lists last April. It has taken me five months, but I finished it.
One of the things the book has in common with the Karl Marx’s Das Capital (1867) is that it serves as a rallying point for the many people who are passionately concerned about inequality, regardless whether they understand or agree with the specific arguments contained in the book in question. To be fair, much of what Marx wrote was bizarre and very little was based on careful economic statistics. Much of what Piketty says is based on careful economic statistics, and very little of it is bizarre.