Read Thomas Piketty Turns Marx on His Head by Paul Krugman (nytimes.com)
Piketty’s latest book, “Capital and Ideology,” takes a global overview to inequality and other pressing economic issues of our time.

To have, but maybe not to read. Like Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” seems to have been an “event” book that many buyers didn’t stick with; an analysis of Kindle highlights suggested that the typical reader got through only around 26 of its 700 pages. Still, Piketty was undaunted. 

Interesting use of digital highlights–determining how “read” a particular book is.
Annotated on March 08, 2020 at 06:02PM


Piketty, however, sees inequality as a social phenomenon, driven by human institutions. Institutional change, in turn, reflects the ideology that dominates society: “Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.” 

Annotated on March 08, 2020 at 06:06PM


I was struck, for example, by his extensive discussion of the evolution of slavery and serfdom, which made no mention of the classic work of Evsey Domar of M.I.T., who argued that the more or less simultaneous rise of serfdom in Russia and slavery in the New World were driven by the opening of new land, which made labor scarce and would have led to rising wages in the absence of coercion. 

Annotated on March 08, 2020 at 06:10PM


For Piketty, rising inequality is at root a political phenomenon. The social-democratic framework that made Western societies relatively equal for a couple of generations after World War II, he argues, was dismantled, not out of necessity, but because of the rise of a “neo-proprietarian” ideology. Indeed, this is a view shared by many, though not all, economists. These days, attributing inequality mainly to the ineluctable forces of technology and globalization is out of fashion, and there is much more emphasis on factors like the decline of unions, which has a lot to do with political decisions. 

Annotated on March 08, 2020 at 06:11PM

Watched Thomas Piketty: The long-run economics of wealth inequality from YouTube

Thomas Piketty, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and bestselling author of Capital in the 21st Century, tells The CORE Project (http://core-econ.org) how he "tries to be useful" by collecting long-run data into the distribution of wealth - and what it tells us about the effects of wealth inequality on society.

📑 ‘The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism | John Naughton | The Guardian

Annotated 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism by John NaughtonJohn Naughton (the Guardian)
The Age of Surveillance Capital is a striking and illuminating book. A fellow reader remarked to me that it reminded him of Thomas Piketty’s magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in that it opens one’s eyes to things we ought to have noticed, but hadn’t.  
Of course it doesn’t hurt that both its size and the cover art are both reminiscent of the book as well.