Capital and Ideology

Starred review from January 13, 2020
Rather than an economic law of nature, capitalism’s remorseless promotion of inequality is a political choice that can be undone with redistributive polices, argues economist Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century) in this wide-ranging historical survey of “inequality regimes”—dogmas that justify hierarchies of wealth and power. He focuses on modern capitalist “ownership societies” in Europe and America that made property rights the “quasi-sacred” basis of political order. (Britain and France, Piketty notes, compensated slave owners for lost human “property” after abolition.) The extremes of wealth and poverty such economic systems generated subsided with the 20th-century rise of high-tax social-democratic welfare states, he argues—then returned in today’s “hypercapitalist” global economy, bringing social disaffection and nativist politics with them. Piketty’s scholarship, encompassing everything from Ottoman tax receipts to Jane Austen novels, is formidable but ponderous; fortunately, readers can easily follow his arguments just by browsing the fascinating data charts and tables. The statistical blizzard supports Piketty’s case for a “participatory socialism” that would make Bernie Sanders blush, featuring income and wealth taxes of 90% on the rich, worker comanagement of corporations, universal access to college, open borders, and global governance via “transnational assemblies.” This ambitious manifesto will stir controversy, but also cement Piketty’s position as the Left’s leading economic theorist.

March 6, 2020

Piketty's (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, The Economics of Inequality) latest book is an ambitious attempt to analyze inequality and offer ways to reduce it. He presents a history of inegalitarianism from preindustrial times to the present in various parts of the world, discussing the forms this unfairness has taken and the defenses of it that have been made. Piketty believes it is impossible to understand and correctly analyze inequality if it's considered in the abstract, ignoring the various particular economic, political, and social circumstances in which it occurs. While he believes there is no one ideal form of society, he is also insistent that inequalities can and should be reduced. In order to accomplish this, he argues that business organizations should be set up in a way that calls for the participation in decision making of both the workers and representatives of communities in which the businesses are embedded, along with the owners of capital. Additionally, international organizations should provide the means and context for making at least some economic decisions since many issues transcend national boundaries. VERDICT This meticulous analysis will interest those with a serious concern for economic public policy.--Shmuel Ben-Gad, Gelman Lib., George Washington Univ., Washington, DC

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 15, 2020
A massive investigation of economic history in the service of proposing a political order to overcome inequality. Readers who like their political manifestoes in manageable sizes, � la Common Sense or The Communist Manifesto, may be overwhelmed by the latest from famed French economist Piketty (Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century: Inequality and Redistribution, 1901-1998, 2014, etc.), but it's a significant work. The author interrogates the principal forms of economic organization over time, from slavery to "non-European trifunctional societies," Chinese-style communism, and "hypercapitalist" orders, in order to examine relative levels of inequality and its evolution. Each system is founded on an ideology, and "every ideology, no matter how extreme it may seem in its defense of inequality, expresses a certain idea of social justice." In the present era, at least in the U.S., that idea of social justice would seem to be only that the big ones eat the little ones, the principal justification being that the wealthiest people became rich because they are "the most enterprising, deserving, and useful." In fact, as Piketty demonstrates, there's more to inequality than the mere "size of the income gap." Contrary to hypercapitalist ideology and its defenders, the playing field is not level, the market is not self-regulating, and access is not evenly distributed. Against this, Piketty arrives at a proposed system that, among other things, would redistribute wealth across societies by heavy taxation, especially of inheritances, to create a "participatory socialism" in which power is widely shared and trade across nations is truly free. The word "socialism," he allows, is a kind of Pandora's box that can scare people off--and, he further acknowledges, "the Russian and Czech oligarchs who buy athletic teams and newspapers may not be the most savory characters, but the Soviet system was a nightmare and had to go." Yet so, too, writes the author, is a capitalism that rewards so few at the expense of so many. A deftly argued case for a new kind of socialism that, while sure to inspire controversy, bears widespread discussion.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.