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Capital in the Twenty-First Century Hardcover – Illustrated, 18 Mar. 2014
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- ISBN-10067443000X
- ISBN-13978-0674430006
- Edition0
- PublisherHarvard University Press
- Publication date18 Mar. 2014
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions16.76 x 4.72 x 24.36 cm
- Print length696 pages
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Product description
Review
SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2014
Chosen as a book of 2014 in Observer, Financial Times, The Economist, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times
"This book is not only the definitive account of the historical evolution of inequality in advanced economies, it is also a magisterial treatise on capitalism's inherent dynamics. Piketty ends his book with a ringing call for the global taxation of capital. Whether or not you agree with him on the solution, this book presents a stark challenge for those who would like to save capitalism from itself" --Dani Rodrik, Institute for Advanced Study
"The author, an inequality expert, is distinguished. The work is acclaimed. The book's empirical detail is already the stuff of legend." -- Karl Smith, Financial Times Blog Alphaville
"(Piketty's) thesis is simple. The growing concentration of capital in fewer hands has enabled its owners to keep it relatively scarce and thus valuable. (...) You many think that it doesn't require 600 pages to get this message across. This would be wrong. The strength of Piketty's book is his close attention to the different sources of inequality, the massive documentation underpinning his history and conclusions, and his impressive culls from sociology and literature, which exhibit the richness of 'political economy' compared to its thin mathematical successor that has attained such prominence. [...] Piketty's book is a timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes." --Lord Robert Skidelsky, Prospect
"Thomas Piketty who spent long years, during which the mainstream neglected inequality, mapping the distribution of income is making waves with Capital in the 21st Century. Nodding at Marx, that title helps explain the attention, but his decidedly classical emphasis on historical dynamics in determining who gets what resonates in a world where an increasing proportion of citizens are feeling fleeced by the elite." --The Guardian
"The Frenchman's new book Capital in the 21st Century is already causing a stir. Some reviewers have called it the economic book of the year, others of the decade. Piketty's ground-breaking work on the historical evolution of income distribution is impressive." --Paul Sweeney, Irish Times
"With an extraordinary sweep of history backed by remarkably detailed data and analysis, Piketty shows that, for several centuries leading up to World War I, the financial returns to the owners of capital exceeded the rate of growth of modern economies, creating a wide divergence between incomes and wealth and, with that divergence, widening inequality between those owners and people who worked for a living... Piketty's economic analysis and historical proofs are breathtaking." ----Robert B Reich, The Guardian
"Piketty's book Capital is being acclaimed as the most important work of political economy to be published in decades. It has certainly caught the attention of Ed Miliband's inner circle."--Nick Pearce, New Statesman
"Thomas Piketty's Capital is a compelling, evidence based critique of capitalism...It is packed with anecdotes and literary references that illuminate the narrative. It also helps that it is fluently translated by Arthur Goldhammer, a literary stylist who has tackled the works of the likes of Albert Camus." --Andrew Hussey, Observer
"French economist Thomas Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book. Open-minded readers will surely find themselves unable to ignore the evidence and arguments he has brought to bear." -- Martin Wolf, Financial Times
"If you haven't heard of Thomas Piketty, the chances are you will before long. A French economist turning in a book of 640 closely-argued pages might not sound like author of the month, but Capital in the Twenty-First Century is one of those works that catches a moment." -- Ian Bell, Glasgow Herald
Piketty has won interest and enthusiasm on the left of the political spectrum...for this ambitious work. It is not, however, a politically sectarian argument; perhaps that explains why it has become a surprise bestseller. The strength of his thesis is that it is founded on evidence rather than ideology. Piketty has researched data over more than a century in order to derive his understanding of the dynamics of modern capitalism. He is able to point convincingly to a recent reversal of historical trends, so that the share of national income taken by the owners of capital has expanded over the past generation... What Piketty has done is provide a strong factual understanding for how modern capitalist economies diverge from the image of risk-taking and productive commercial activity. At the very least, the book effectively debunks the notion that there is an economic imperative for low tax rates and a smaller state. Oliver Kamm, The Times
A book of such magisterial sweep... Piketty deserves huge credit for kickstarting a debate about inequality and illuminating the distribution of income and wealth. Stephanie Flanders, The Guardian
Magisterial... Bursting with ideas... This book is economics at its best. Philip Roscoe, Times Higher Education
Seven hundred pages on the evolution of inequality in economically advanced societies by the most fashionable new theorist to emerge for a long time. Many have been waiting for such a comprehensive critique of capitalism. --David Sexton, The Evening Standard
Piketty s book Capital is being acclaimed as the most important work of political economy to be published in decades. It has certainly caught the attention of Ed Miliband s inner circle. --Nick Pearce, New Statesman, April 2014
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Harvard University Press; 0 edition (18 Mar. 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 696 pages
- ISBN-10 : 067443000X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0674430006
- Dimensions : 16.76 x 4.72 x 24.36 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 68,888 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 43 in Economic Systems
- 95 in Economic Policy & Development
- 115 in Macroeconomics (Books)
- Customer reviews:
About the author

Thomas Piketty (French: [tɔˈma pikɛˈti]; born on 7 May 1971) is a French economist who works on wealth and income inequality. He is a professor (directeur d'études) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), professor at the Paris School of Economics and Centennial professor at the London School of Economics new International Inequalities Institute.
He is the author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which emphasises the themes of his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. He considers that to be a problem, and to address it, he proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Gobierno de Chile [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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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 growth, which cannot but stop dead in its tracks In the next fifty years due to physical, Malthusian limitations to demographics.
(iii) Wealth, once you've got it, can work for you to make you richer. So those at the top of the wealth pyramid get a leg up in staying near the top of the pyramid.
(iv) The more wealth you command, the harder it works for you because you can hire experts to manage it, get access to better ways of investing etc.
(v) The bottom 50% of society has never saved a penny anywhere, not even in 1970's Sweden, it's always and everywhere lived hand-to-mouth.
(vi) Meantime, a large chunk of wealth in history has typically been inherited.
(vii) Return on capital is higher than the rate of GDP growth, which is Piketty's famous r>g inequality. An explanation the author offers is that there needs to be some type of compensation for risk.
So, for example, from 1800 to 1900 both in the United Kingdom and in France, the top 10% of society owned 90% of the wealth (=capital) and indeed the top 1% owned comfortably more than 50% of wealth. This wealth generated itself a lot of income, a fact that ensured there was very little chance a pauper could ever work his way to the top without marrying into wealth. This top 1% of society enjoyed income equivalent to 30 times the average. This income, was in turn used to employ the staff that would supply its masters with fresh food (no refrigerators back then, remember), clothing (a very labor-intensive set of goods up until the industrial revolution), transport (somebody needed to take care of the horses!) etc. etc.
2. We are now living in the tail end of a brief interlude in history when it appeared that we had been moving away from this status quo. The first and second world war decimated the built-up capital (=wealth) of the western world if four different ways:
(i) The loss of European (mainly British and French) colonies eliminated in one fell swoop somewhere between a quarter and a third of all accumulated wealth in the west.
(ii) The taxation that became necessary to wage WWI and WWII was obviously borne by those who could pay, i.e. the rich, and it remained truly confiscatory for years after the end of conflict, with marginal rates on passive income hitting 98% in the UK, for example.
(iii) The wars themselves brought destruction of property and capital on a massive scale.
(iv) Inflation on an equally massive scale followed, which wiped out the purchasing power of nominal savings (e.g. bonds and bank deposits) of many a saver, much as the flip side of this silent confiscation was a de facto forgiveness of public debts.
So for the first time in a couple thousand years, the top 10% of the population only controls 40% to 60% of the wealth (depending on the country). The bottom 50% controls zero, as always, but there is a 40% of the population that controls some 60% to 40% of wealth (depending on the country). A middle class!
Our parents' generation inherited very little, was born into as equal a society as there has been in at least two thousand years and made something of it. Not only does it feel fully entitled to its wealth, it also believes very strongly (and justifiably) that this status was acquired in an environment of fairness and meritocracy. Moreover, these events took place against the background of an equally generation-defining struggle between the free market and communism. At the apogee of its success, our parents' generation voted in people like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and more recently George W Bush that enshrined this right to succeed and enjoy the fruits of one's success in low taxation rates on both income and capital.
3. Piketty argues that our parents are confused. It was not only the free market that contributed to the creation of a middle class. The free market has always been there. The other ingredient was the "thirty year war" that started in 1914 and ended in 1945. Now we've had peace for a good seventy years, and especially now that we have (among other things)
(i) States competing with one another to provide low taxation for corporates
(ii) Tax havens for the rich to hide their savings
(iii) Supermanagers earning 500 times what the shop-floor workers earn (as a result of the incentives offered by lower taxation rates)
...we are moving full-speed-ahead toward re-establishing the status quo of 1800-1913 and eliminating the middle class. As proof, he shows what has happened to the ratios of wealth to GDP that are approaching the Ancien Regime and Belle Epoque levels (though he does not provide any corroborating evidence from wealth distribution tables)
Having made these arguments, Piketty goes on to propose a global tax on capital, which he hopes can be one measure that will ensure we do not see the types of wealth concentration that pre-dated WWI.
I must confess that I find myself nodding in agreement with every single word of the book and then disagreeing with the conclusion. Perhaps because I don't understand why r>g. Fine, it's true for the past, but where is it written that capital can grow faster than GDP forever? Last I checked, Elon Musk's crowd were looking to mine asteroids for minerals, for which endeavor I'm very happy to warrant that E(r) = 0
Similarly, and pardon me for going technical, I really don't think that Wealth / GDP necessarily equals s / g (the saving rate divided by the growth rate) because savings can disappear if they are misinvested. What's China going to have to show for all the misinvestment going over there at the moment in ghost cities, for example? Sure, we can mark our wealth to market, but ultimately we need to be able to convert it to spending. The value of Klimts and Basquiats and Ferrari 250s is proof, if any was needed, that the super-wealthy are struggling to find something to do with their superwealth that you and I would truly covet.
Just because investment is not worthwhile if r is not much higher than g it does not mean that r must be higher than g, is my point.
More fundamentally, and Piketty himself makes this point very eloquently, some 200 years ago you needed the income to pay for the 30 servants who'd get you the fresh fruit and freshly hunted meat and fresh clothes and groomed horses if you wanted to live long, have the spare time to read and write books etc. These days, you can be in the bottom 50% of the population and enjoy all of the above (assuming a Ford Focus will do in lieu of a stable of horses), as well as decent free healthcare and education in this very bastion of inequality (according to Piketty) that is the United Kingdom. In Piketty's words, we've gone through a "tenfold increase in purchasing power." Of course there's room for improvement, but we're doing Rawls proud here.
So I remain to be convinced we need to tax capital. By all means, tax income that comes from capital, and a nice first step would be to tax it at the same marginal rate as income from labor. But to tax capital in a world that is already rather reluctant to deploy capital does not sound to me like an automatic choice. And Piketty does not offer a single word to explain what the non-bureaucratic benefits would be, beyond the re-distribution of wealth, which to me cannot be an end in itself.
Regardless, this is an UNBELIEVABLY important book. If I had not read it I would not know where to start in terms of disagreeing with its author, let's put it that way.
What we have here is as impressive a compendium of research as has ever been published by an economist. Call it Friedman and Schwartz for wealth / capital, except much better researched. The value is not in the narrative, but more than anything else in the years and years of research that went into collecting, comparing, cleaning, tabulating and interpreting data. This book is now the inevitable starting point for any discussion on the topic of wealth / capital. It is, pardon my French, a tour de force.
Finally, I thought the style of the book was totally disarming. Piketty has his views, for sure, but he never dares comingle fact and opinion, not once in 577 pages. Oh, and he sounds like a bit of a player. Never seen so many women in the acknowledgments of an Economics book.
Six stars are not enough for this book, five are downright miserly, but that's all I'm allowed to give!
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, he has isolated what he believes to be key economic rules affecting wealth and income and trends that hold true across multiple societies and extrapolate forward for a century or more.
The work is separated into three distinct parts; a review of existing economic theory, an analysis of the new data sets and proposals for economic policy in the twenty-first century.
Piketty's analysis is undeniably astute. Adopting the longue durée approach created by Marc Bloch, the author looks for trends across centuries rather than years. In doing so, he casts aside the surface fluctuations of individual asset classes or economic shocks and looks at the totality of economic growth, inflation, capital rate of return and wages. This turns up some interesting trends (e.g. capital return consistently out-performing growth) and a strongly supported hypothesis that political economic management has relatively little impact on the long-term maturation of an economy. It also suggests that twentieth century growth and the reduction of inequality was an aberration caused by the destruction of the World Wars rather than a new norm; consequently, he sees the challenge of the twenty-first century as being one of managing inequality returning to nineteenth-century norms.
It is this conclusion in particular, which taps into very present concerns regarding the super rich, executive returns and inequality in an era of universal suffrage, that have brought Piketty so much attention. Naturally, the book has been particularly adopted to the left, not least due to the echoes of Marx's Das Capital, but also because Piketty responses to these challenges provide a degree of academic rigor for policy responses popular with the left (notably wealth taxes).
There are, however, problems with the study. Piketty was clearly writing for a French audience and he allows political biases, which are common currency in French public discourse but considered outré elsewhere, to infect his discourse - a snobbish dismissal of `Anglo-Saxon' models, the free association of economic equality with democracy etc. This partiality is rarely more than an irritant and doesn't impact his historic analysis. (If anything, he has demonstrated that French protectionism and Anglo-Saxon free markets, despite their differences, have created almost identical economic conditions).
Once he moves on to proposed policy responses, Piketty's lazy bias does begin to grate. He espouses a tax on capital as a means of restricting the expansionary nature of capital but fails to address its potential as an inflationary factor - the kind of oversight that he would have astutely identified when looking at historic policy measures. Furthermore, Piketty has clearly isolated innovation and post-destruction catch up as the principle factors that affect capital value, return on capital and wages, yet his model can make no account for them in the future. Furthermore, his logic becomes less consistent - insisting both that some extent of inequality is necessary but fails to define what level and even occasionally suggests in ideal of no inequality. Having espoused the democratic ideal throughout, he even goes so far as to suggest technocratic government being the only way to effectively manage the economies of the twenty-first century. For Piketty, it seems, democracy is an economic rather than political function.
Undoubtedly, this is a classic piece of economic writing. There has been some criticism of Piketty's use of data but that is an academic question and beyond my reading of the book. Based on the information provided, Piketty's analysis of historic trends will prove to be hugely influential. It shares, however, the same problem with most other economic works; economics is not a science and therefore does not work in an environment of physical laws. Methodical analysis of the past can provide rules and equations that can help unpick the current economic condition but they give no real a posteriori ability to predict the future. As soon as Piketty begins to consider the state of the current economy and future policy measures, the scientific method becomes redundant and instead we are exposed to (informed) guess work and the biases of the author. This is a real shame, as the book will appeal to those of the left who find their own prejudices confirmed but the historic analysis is equally relevant to those of the right who may find the policy proposals rather thin.











