![]() ![]() ![]() The overturning of regressive ideologies is therefore the main condition of economic progress. Published last year, the new book widens its scope to focus on inequality in places like India. As societies distribute income, wealth and education more widely, so they become more prosperous. Piketty’s audacious follow-up, Capital and Ideology, is getting a much frostier reception. “All history shows that the search for a distribution of wealth acceptable to the majority of people is a recurrent theme in all periods and all cultures,” he reports boldly. His premise in Capital and Ideology is a moral one: inequality is illegitimate, and therefore requires ideologies in order to be justified and moderated. There is nothing Marxist about Piketty’s politics, which are those of a liberal reformer, while his concept of capital is closer to an accounting category (a proxy for “wealth”) than the exploitative force that Marx saw it as. ![]() It is a journalistic convention that any author who writes a doorstopper of a book with the word “capital” in the title must be the heir to Karl Marx, while any economist whose books sell in the hundreds of thousands is a “rock star.” Thomas Piketty’s 600-page, multi-million selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century won him both accolades, but both were wide of the mark. ![]() The conversation will probe his views on race and slavery, the nature of capitalism, the impact of political divides, and the contours of long-term social change. The Guardian, February 19, 2020: Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty review – if inequality is illegitimate, why not reduce it? This event will debate Thomas Piketty’s urgent new book, Capital and Ideology, and will feature an interdisciplinary panel of experts. ![]()
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