A review by drelbszoomer
Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty

5.0

Okay. This took me a year to finish. People are right that Piketty's other books are smaller, more scoped, and more digestible.

But man this is great. It's probably more valuable to read than Marx, or at least Das Kapital. The amount of data here (historical and current) that clearly illustrates how justifications for inequality regimes change over time, how wealth distributions have shifted (and by what means) throughout history, and what this has caused is incredible.

Piketty is a French author and so he does focus more on French/Euro data and examples than he would like, but he makes a successful effort to pull in data and political history from India, China and Russia to examine patterns of wealth distribution and educational access there and point out parallels and differences - this does not lead to exhaustive analysis of those countries and their economic history, but it does paint a much more full picture of global economic trends which is critical to the points Piketty makes.

Monumental, valuable, incredibly dense, very hard to argue with.