{"id":14297,"date":"2014-04-13T11:52:52","date_gmt":"2014-04-13T10:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=14297"},"modified":"2014-04-13T11:56:22","modified_gmt":"2014-04-13T10:56:22","slug":"is-this-the-most-important-book-that-you-and-i-will-never-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=14297","title":{"rendered":"Is this the most important book that you (and I) will never read?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty\/dp\/067443000X\"><em>&#8220;Capital In The Twenty-First Century&#8221;<\/em><\/a> and it is authored by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Politicians and economists around the world are calling it a stunning critique of the capitalist system. But you and I will never read it because it is more than 700 pages long with footnotes, graphs and mathematical formulae.<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2014\/apr\/13\/occupy-right-capitalism-failed-world-french-economist-thomas-piketty\">an interview<\/a> for today&#8217;s &#8220;Observer&#8221; newspaper, Piketty states:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I began with a straightforward research problematic. I began to wonder a few years ago where was the hard data behind all the theories about inequality, from Marx to David Ricardo (the 19th-century English economist and advocate of free trade) and more contemporary thinkers. I started with Britain and America and I discovered that there wasn&#8217;t much at all. And then I discovered that the data that did exist contradicted nearly all of the theories including Marx and Ricardo. And then I started to look at other countries and I saw a pattern beginning to emerge, which is that capital, and the money that it produces, accumulates faster than growth in capital societies. And this pattern, which we last saw in the 19th century, has become even more predominant since the 1980s when controls on capital were lifted in many rich countries.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He goes on to explain:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;When I began, simply collecting data, I was genuinely surprised by what I found, which was that inequality is growing so fast and that capitalism cannot apparently solve it. Many economists begin the other way around, by asking questions about poverty, but I wanted to understand how wealth, or super-wealth, is working to increase the inequality gap. And what I found, as I said before, is that the speed at which the inequality gap is growing is getting faster and faster. You have to ask what does this mean for ordinary people, who are not billionaires and who will never will be billionaires.<\/p>\n<p>Well, I think it means a deterioration in the first instance of the economic wellbeing of the collective, in other words the degradation of the public sector. You only have to look at what Obama&#8217;s administration wants to do \u2013 which is to erode inequality in healthcare and so on \u2013 and how difficult it is to achieve that, to understand how important this is. There is a fundamentalist belief by capitalists that capital will save the world, and it just isn&#8217;t so. Not because of what Marx said about the contradictions of capitalism, because, as I discovered, capital is an end in itself and no more.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So what&#8217;s the answer? As a solution to inequality, Piketty proposed an annual global\u00a0wealth tax\u00a0of up 2%, combined with highly progressive income tax\u00a0reaching as high as 80%.<\/p>\n<p>His advocacy of a wealth tax reminds me of a short story I wrote five years ago called <em>&#8220;The PM And The MP&#8221;<\/em>. \u00a0I know you won&#8217;t read Piketty&#8217;s book but you might like my short story which you can access <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/Story9.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s called &#8220;Capital In The Twenty-First Century&#8221; and it is authored by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Politicians and economists around the world are calling it a stunning critique of the capitalist system. But you and I will never read it because it is more than 700 pages long with footnotes, graphs and mathematical formulae. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14297"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14306,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14297\/revisions\/14306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}