Just what it says on the tin

[bloodygranuaile]

Sometimes, one has to admit defeat. For example, despite my intention to read every book ever written, I am definitely not going to ever actually read Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I'm possibly never going to finish reading the Capital that was about the nineteenth century either, and that one's mostly written in prose rather than in math. 

Instead, on Adam's suggestion, the politics book club decided we could probably survive reading Piketty's The Economics of Inequality, which at a little over a hundred pages is a more plausible goal for laypeople. It's still a little on the dense side if you're not an economist--Piketty is an academic, not a financial reporter like Michael Lewis or Matt Taibbi--but it's manageable, and there are even some comments that could pass for humor in it. 

Piketty seems to be writing from a leftist perspective as Americans understand it, in that he takes goals of social justice to be valid goals and appears to be generally anti-immiserating-the-working-classes-for-fun-and-profit, but the focus of the book is really less of a how-to or polemic and more an attempt to examine the empirical data, such as it can be determined, about how inequality functions. He talks a bit about the differences between political timescales and historical timescales, in addition to examining a number of factors that influence inequality both along the capital/labor split and within wage scales. A lay reader who hates charts (like me) may get a bit lost when looking at the charts, but will still learn important concepts, the different kinds of distribution (efficient vs. pure, direct vs. fiscal transfer). He briefly covers some of the successes and failures of different kinds of redistributive efforts over the past century or so, although this portion of the book, near the end, is very brief indeed. The country Piketty writes about the most is France, which made me very aware of how US-centric my own understanding of How Nonfiction Works is--everything is about the US unless it's about the UK, right? The countries Piketty talks about most after France are the US and the UK and something still felt fundamentally weird to me, like "France, that's pretty random!" even though Piketty is French and I know this. 

I didn't take notes while reading (because I never take notes on anything) but I think it might be worth it to give the book at least another skim before book club (even though I never reread anything anymore either), if only because I have to come up with questions.  Anyway, it's not as salacious as reading about the Koch brothers' Nazi babysitter, but it's probably more important if you're interested in workable leftist policy.