There’s a gag t-shirt that reads “There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.” The gag being that if you understand binary numbering you immediately realize that “10” is written in binary numbering and therefore reads as “two” not “ten”. I feel a little that way talking about Piketty’s Capital. Since I work in finance, it sometimes seems like “everybody” will immediately recognize it as the most influential book on economics since Smith or Marx. But I’ve been spending time with folks outside of that community lately and running into more people who say “Eh?” Which stops me a little short.
SO, Le Capital au XXIe siècle, by French economist Thomas Piketty was published in August 2013 in France. The English translation by Arthur Goldhammer, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, came out in April of 2014. According to Wikipedia it’s the best selling book ever from Harvard University Press. It’s been #1 on both the New York Times nonfiction best seller list and the Wall Street Journal best seller list. I was gifted with my copy last year by Matt Talbot of Bristlecone Advisors. Seattle University just started a 6 week (spread out over 12) special seminar with talks from 6-9 on weekdays and it sold out, I couldn’t get in.
It’s a tome for sure – 577 pages, footnotes round it up to 655. In July of 2013 a math professor from the University of Wisconsin did an amusing analysis (published as a WSJ essay) of the distribution of reader highlights in Kindle editions of best-selling books. He used it as a metric for guesstimating whether or not people are finishing the books. If everyone is finishing the books, presumably there will be popular highlights throughout the book. At the time, all top 5 “popular highlights” of Kindle readers were in the first 26 pages of Piketty, earning it the label of the least-read best selling book. But hey, it had only been out 3 months and it’s over 600 pages! I don’t have it on Kindle so I can’t check but I bet it’s better now. There are also no end of derivative analytical summaries out there.
I’ve been listening to the audiobook, actually, and it’s great! Piketty refers to lots of charts and graphs so one might think I’d miss a lot, but actually I think I’m getting a much better “read” this way. For starters, I’m a fast reader so audiobooks really make me slow down and get everything. Piketty is also a good writer – he’s really good about telling you what he’s going to tell you, telling you, and then summarizing in conclusion. He explains all the charts and graphs so while I’m missing some, it’s not much. And this really is pretty interesting stuff to me so I’m good about skipping back and re-listening. The first couple chapters laying groundwork were a little dull but it’s been fascinating stuff since! The narration is excellent, L. J. Ganser- I’m your fan! The audiobook is 24 hours long and I’ve been getting in in 1 hour doses on a commute, so I end up really thinking about small sections at a time.
I want to blog about it, I’ve been daunted. But it’s time and it’s what will really help me process what I’ve been hearing. This book blows my mind – it really seems to me that the Occupy movement is based on it. Then the push to blow up individual political contribution limits in the US from like 30K to 300K is a countermove that Piketty practically suggests! As someone who has been a philanthropist working on issues of social and economic inequality for the last decade, Piketty is revolutionizing my thinking about how to measure it and how to address it. I need to process and I need to write. You can help by bugging me to do it!
Shaulablog 