The core message of this enormous and enormously important book can be delivered in a few lines: Left to its own devices, wealth inevitably tends to concentrate in capitalist economies. There is no “natural” mechanism inherent in the structure of such economies for inhibiting, much less reversing, that tendency. Only crises like war and depression, or political interventions like taxation (which, to the upper classes, would be a crisis), can do the trick. And Thomas Piketty has two centuries of data to prove his point.
“The Top of the World,” Doug Henwood
Here’s a breath of fresh air, to wash that bourgeois economics right out of your hair. I mean Doug Henwood’s review, not the book, which I haven’t read yet. After centuries of capitalism and several rounds of redistribution you’d think that this simple idea would be a part of our collective common sense. Maybe it soon will be, at least for a time, before the great obfuscation forces work their magic once again.
