Here is another review of Piketty's book. It is long, but astute and entertaining. The following are excerpts. True, the book is probably doomed to be one of those more purchased than read. Readers of a certain age will remember Douglas Hofstadter’s massive Gödel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid (1979),which sat admired but unread on many a coffee table in the 1980s, and rather younger readers will remember Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988). The Kindle company from Amazon keeps track of the last page of your highlighting in a downloaded book (you didn’t know that, did you?). Using the fact, the mathematician Jordan Ellenberg reckons that the average reader of the 655 pages of text and footnotes of Capital in the Twenty-First Century stops somewhere a little past page 26, where the highlighting stops, about the end of the Introduction. He proposes that the Kindle-measured percentage of a book apparently read, once called the Hawking Index (most readers of A Brief History of Time stopped annotating it at 6.6 percent of the book), be renamed the Piketty Index (2.4 percent).
To be fair to Piketty, a buyer of the hardback rather than the Kindle edition is probably a more serious reader, and would go further. Still, holding the attention of the average New York Times reader for a little over 26 pages of dense economic argument, after which the book takes an honored place on the coffee table, testifies to Piketty’s rhetorical skill, which I do admire.
Then the economists, many on the left but some on the right, in quick succession 1880 to the present — at the same time that trade-tested betterment was driving real wages up and up and up — commenced worrying about, to name a few of the grounds for pessimisms they discerned concerning ”capitalism”: greed, alienation, racial impurity, workers’ lack of bargaining strength, women working, workers’ bad taste in consumption, immigration of lesser breeds, monopoly, unemployment, business cycles, increasing returns, externalities, under-consumption, monopolistic competition, separation of ownership from control, lack of planning, post-War stagnation, investment spillovers, unbalanced growth, dual labor markets, capital insufficiency (William Easterly calls it “capital fundamentalism”), peasant irrationality, capital-market imperfections, public choice, missing markets, informational asymmetry, third-world exploitation, advertising, regulatory capture, free riding, low-level traps, middle-level traps, path dependency,lack of competitiveness, consumerism, consumption externalities, irrationality, hyperbolic discounting, too big to fail, environmental degradation, underpaying of care, overpayment of CEOs, slower growth, and more.
One can line up the later items in the list, and some of the earlier ones revived à la Piketty or Krugman, with particular Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Science.
|
