Titre : | Capital in the Twenty-First Century |
Auteurs : | Thomas Piketty ; Arthur Goldhammer, Traducteur |
Type de document : | Books |
Editeur : | Cambridge : Belknap Press, 2014 |
Article en page(s) : | VIII, 685 p. |
ISBN/ISSN/EAN : | 978-0-674-43000-6 |
Langues: | Anglais |
Index. décimale : | 332/.041 |
Tags : | Capital (E) ; Income distribution ; Wealth ; Labor economics |
Résumé : |
This is a VIB – very important book. Nearly everyone agrees about that. But the reasons for its importance have changed in the months since it was published. At first it was important because it was a big book on a big subject: a book of grand ambition about inequality, written not by the latest "thinker" but a respected academic economist with real numbers to go with his theory. We hadn't had anything like that in ages. This was the "Piketty as rockstar" phase, when the book was an "improbable hit" and people wrote breathless articles about the modern successor to Marx who could crunch the numbers but also quote Balzac, The Simpsons and The West Wing. Writing a bestselling economics book is usually a good way to make other economists hate you. But at first even they heaped praise on Thomas Piketty for casting fresh light on inequality – an area where the official statistics are notoriously weak. Say what you like about the theory, the argument went, you had to thank him for the numbers. At this point you didn't need to read it to have an opinion about it. Indeed for some, not having read it was a badge of pride. Ed Miliband unashamedly told people he hadn't got beyond the first chapter – and kept on saying that for several weeks. Maybe he has now. Or maybe he's just decided that the debate about the book is more important than the book itself. That's certainly the conclusion I have come to, and not just because several of its central arguments have now been questioned. There are many claims in the 700-odd pages, but let me highlight some of the important ones, before moving on to whether – and why – any of this matters. Claim one is that income inequality has increased sharply since the late 1970s, with a particularly dramatic rise in the share of total income going to the very highest earners. The most quoted Piketty statistic here is one that no one, to my knowledge, has questioned: that 60% of the increase in US national income in the 30 years after 1977 went to just the top 1% of earners. The only section of the US population that has done better than the top 1% is the top 10th of that 1%. The top 100th of the 1% have done best of all. |
Exemplaires (1)
Code-barres | Cote | Support | Localisation | Section | Disponibilité |
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302943 | 332/.041 PIK C | Book | Royal Military Academy | Bibliothèque ERM | Disponible |