As Bill Moyers points out, "even in this age of hyperlinks and cyberspace, nearly six centuries after Gutenberg devised his printing press, it's still possible for a single book to shake the foundations, rattle cliches, upend dogma, unnerve ideologues, and arm everyday people with the knowledge they need to fight back against the predatory powers that are continuing to rob them of their birthright as citizens."
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by the French economist Thomas Piketty is such a book. Reviewers have called it "a bulldozer of a book," "magisterial," "seminal," "definitive," "a watershed." At 700 pages it quickly became a best seller. Graph after graph, fact on fact, drawn from two centuries of data all of which are imbedded in prose that can suddenly explode like a supernova in your brain.
The gist of it: We are heading into a future dominated by inherited wealth, as capital concentrates in ever fewer hands, thereby giving the very rich ever greater power over politics, government, and society. For those who work for a living, the level of inequality in the US is "probably higher than in any other society, at any time in the past, anywhere in the world," says Piketty. Over three decades, between 1977 and 2007, an unprecedented 60% of our national income went to the richest 1% of Americans.
No wonder this is the one book the 1% doesn't want the other 99% to read.
A lot of what we know about inequality actually comes from Piketty because he's been an invisible presence behind so much of the research and data collection having to do with this subject. So when economists talk or write about the 1%, they're actually, to a large extent using and referring to his prior research. According to Piketty, "Even among those who talk about the 1%, many still don't really yet see the most important aspect of what's now going on, and so they're living in the past. They're still living in the '80s with Gordon Gekko."
Yes of course, Gordon Gekko is a bad guy, he's a predator. But he's a self-made predator. And right now, what's important in this new story are the sons or daughters of our country's Gordon Gekkos -- and their sons and daughters. Why? Because we're talking about the way inherited wealth is playing an ever-growing role in our society and economy. Remember: Piketty is telling us that we are on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society that is owned by oligarchy in a way that is virtually unprecedented -- and entrenched. And he tells this story with an enormous amount of documentation, so it becomes a revelation even for professional economists.
We knew that in the Gilded Age here in the US, and in the Belle Ã"degreespoque in Europe (both of which Picketty talks a lot about), high incomes were mostly a result of having lots and lots of income-earning assets. But we sort of said, "Well, that's not the way things work anymore." And Picketty replies, "Oh yeah? Well it turns out you're mistaken." How so? "Because we're rapidly moving towards becoming a country where inherited wealth once again dominates all."
Most economists didn't know that, and they should've known it. They should've thought about it, but didn't. So, quite suddenly, with this book, there has been an epiphany in the minds of its readers. You suddenly say, "Oh, the world is not, after all, the way I saw it and believed it to be."
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