I simply learn Thomas Piketty’s newest guide, A Brief History of Equality. It’s the greatest window into Piketty’s pondering to this point partly as a result of it’s, not like his earlier books, mercifully brief (244 pages, not counting the appendix).
After all, Piketty’s pondering could be very totally different from mine. Phrases like provide, demand, comparative benefit, and the mutual good points from commerce are nearly completely absent from his guide. As an alternative, we hear quite a bit about political energy and exploitation of the weak by the robust. In Piketty’s worldview, the usual undergraduate textbook in economics is essentially a non sequitur. So is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
This new guide purports to summarize the important thing factors of the large volumes that Piketty has beforehand written. What I discovered most attention-grabbing, subsequently, was what was not included. Piketty doesn’t point out “the central contradiction of capitalism,” to make use of the phrase from his guide Capital within the twenty first Century. In that earlier guide, we had been informed that r>g results in an “countless inegalitarian spiral.” For causes I defined here, I all the time thought that this declare was absurd.
Why is that this main theme from the sooner guide omitted on this new one? Has Piketty tacitly recanted? It’s exhausting to say.