Review
Lengthy but lovey read. Enjoyed the various tangents into the life and times of characters from French and English classics. There are too many well-written reviews out there that are quite comprehensive, so will restrict this to an unstructured, unordered bulleted list of things that I take away.
- Need for a global governance that accounts for the particular macro-structures that today determine a lot of wealth and income distributions inter-linked with history and of course the colonial enterprise, the latter being a major force for particular distribution patterns and the two world wars that are important determinants of patterns seen especially in Amero-Euro world.
- Global governance structures need important socio-political foundations. Trans-national wealth and capital flows cannot be understood and regulated by countries (China perhaps is an important exception, and perhaps the somewhat “fragile” European region.
- There is no way to reconcile free markets with any kind of equitable distribution of wealth and/or incomes.
- Favour political economy over “economic science”; the moral and political views of the economist are not a “bias” but a lens through which s/he views their data/narratives. History and political economy approaches could “partner” with data-driven inequality patterns to give us powerful explanations for the how/why questions in global economic inequality research.
- Data-heavy sections exist; beware. Rather limited descriptions of what was done with the data. Take that on trust…much like most peer-reviewed science anyways.
Reading status
- Status: Read
- My rating: 4 ⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Date started / added: 2015/03/08
- Date finished: 2019/11/24
Metadata
- Author: Thomas Piketty
- Year: 2013.0
- ISBN13: =“9780674430006”
- Shelves (Goodreads): political-economy
Last updated: 2025-12-30 16:01
Last updated: 2025-12-30 16:02
Last updated: 2025-12-30 16:03