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https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/thomas-piketty-capital-and-ideology-coronavirus-inequality.html>
"If Bernie Sanders is the politician Occupy Wall Street dreamed of,
Thomas Piketty is the closest thing we’ve gotten to the great
theoretician of our era of inequality (and the populism and political
dysfunction it has produced).
Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
which came out in France in 2013 and in the U.S. six months later, was
the biggest best seller Harvard University Press had ever published
(despite being nearly 700 dense pages long); it managed to smuggle an
abstract equation into quasi-pop discourse (r>g, Piketty’s shorthand for
the fact that the returns to capital have been greater than the growth
of the economy as a whole) and is now the subject of a surprisingly
light documentary of the same name (in which Piketty stars). It’s not
every day an academic economist gets a turn like this. Back in 2014,
former Treasury secretary Larry Summers called Piketty a “rock star,”
then spent most of the rest of the decade arguing with him.
If Capital was diagnostic, Piketty’s follow-up,
Capital and Ideology,
mixes history and polemic — case studies from modern Sweden and Soviet
Russia alongside a genuine political program to help mitigate, at least,
the cruelest inequities highlighted in his first book. It was published
on March 10, just as the coronavirus crisis was reaching a full blaze,
offering all its own lessons, all over the world, in pandemic inequality."
Excellent interview. Via Kevin O'Brien.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
