Review by Choice Review
With a title evoking Marx, this book is a serious, comprehensive, readable, meticulously researched and argued tome on income and wealth inequality. Translated into English from the original French publication, the book has garnered rave reviews for Piketty (Paris School of Economics). Piketty's thesis is that in modern, dynamic market economies the returns to tightly held capital exceed those for wages or in the economy (GDP) as a whole, thus inevitably increasing inequality. The author argues that the respite--approximately 1914 to the 1970s, when inequality declined as wage gains outstripped rewards to capital--was an aberration, not a trend. The author's solution is steep global taxes on investment income and wealth. Worldwide concerns about inequality have taken center stage in recent years, and this volume will feed left-right scholarly and populist debates about the inherent contributions and contradictions in capitalism. With its 600 pages of prose and 100 pages of bibliographic aids, including endnotes and tables, this book cannot--and should not--be ignored. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. A. R. Sanderson University of Chicago
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The rich get richer, through no fault-or virtue-of their own, according to this sweeping study of wealth in the modern world. Economist Piketty's formula "r > g" expresses the simple but profound insight that because the returns on capital-interest on savings, stock dividends and appreciation, rent from a farm or apartment building-usually exceed the economy's growth rate, wealth (especially inherited wealth) tends to grow faster than wages and become more concentrated at the top of the income scale, and the economy increasingly caters to rich elites instead of ordinary workers. (The best antidote to this inexorable tendency, he argues, is a direct progressive tax on wealth.) Piketty makes his case with three centuries' worth of economic data from around the world organized in a trove of detailed but lucid tables and graphs. This is a serious, meaty economic treatise, but Piketty's prose (in Goldhammer's deft translation) is wonderfully readable and engaging, and illuminates the human reality behind the econometric stats-especially in his explorations of the role of capital in the novels of Jane Austen and Balzac. Full of insights but free of dogma, this is a seminal examination of how entrenched wealth and intractable inequality continue to shape the economy. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
If you listen to many modern economists, you get the feeling they think that our global financial system can be explained by pristine numbers: math equals money and vice versa. Piketty, a French economist, isn't satisfied with how many angelic equations can be balanced on a transactional pin. He, along with his fellow researchers, burrowed into the deep loam of European family inheritances, financial records, and other reports accumulated over the course of many decades. Using this historical approach, Piketty argues that the economic divide between haves and have-nots is increasing at a potentially calamitous rate, and he offers constructive solutions for this global state of affairs. Narrator L.J. Ganser is a solid match with the material, authoritative without being overbearing. VERDICT Recommended for most libraries, as the print version has been a surprise hit.-Kelly Sinclair, Temple P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A French academic serves up a long, rigorous critique, dense with historical data, of American-style predatory capitalismand offers remedies that Karl Marx might applaud.Economist Piketty considers capital, in the monetary sense, from the vantage of what he considers the capital of the world, namely Paris; at times, his discussions of how capital works, and especially public capital, befit Locke-ian France and not Hobbesian America, a source of some controversy in the wide discussion surrounding his book. At heart, though, his argument turns on well-founded economic principles, notably r g, meaning that the "rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy," in Piketty's gloss. It logically follows that when such conditions prevail, then wealth will accumulate in a few hands faster than it can be broadly distributed. By the author's reckoning, the United States is one of the leading nations in the "high inequality" camp, though it was not always so. In the colonial era, Piketty likens the inequality quotient in New England to be about that of Scandinavia today, with few abject poor and few mega-rich. The difference is that the rich nowwho are mostly the "supermanagers" of business rather than the "superstars" of sports and entertainmenthave surrounded themselves with political shields that keep them safe from the specter of paying more in taxes and adding to the fund of public wealth. The author's data is unassailable. His policy recommendations are considerably more controversial, including his call for a global tax on wealth. From start to finish, the discussion is written in plainspoken prose that, though punctuated by formulas, also draws on a wide range of cultural references.Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time highand is only bound to grow worse. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
