In the broadest terms, what this graph means is that, except for a brief period between the first World War and the 1970s, the rate of return on investments has tended to be greater than the rate of economic growth. At the core of the book is a simple formula derived from one of the largest data sets ever compiled-two hundred years of income and wealth data from more than twenty countries-distilled into a single graph: It will change how we feel about the personal and political choices of our lives. I'm not an economist, but then, I think Capital in the Twenty-First Century will change much more than an academic discipline. Paul Krugman, in his review for The New York Review of Books, offered a trained economist's take on it that could not have been more complimentary. The Economist has devoted a discussion group to the book. At a recent economics conference in Toronto every single session contained at least one reference to Piketty. It is the kind of game-changing text that revolutionizes whole academic fields.
I cannot think of a more important book published in my lifetime.Įconomists have already, in their own quiet way, gone absolutely batshit crazy for this book. But it's a must-read in another, deeper, truer sense: If you want to understand the world, if you want to comprehend the mechanics of the forces shaping our time, if you want to know the political choices we face, you must read it. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a must-read in that sense: It's at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and everyone with an interest in politics or policy or economics is at least pretending to read it right now. When you see it in a review today, you assume it simply means the reviewer enjoyed the book, or that everybody else will be reading it and therefore you must, too.
The term must-readhas lost most of its urgency by this point-if indeed it had any urgency to begin with.
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