Belknap Press
Capital and Ideology
Key Metrics
- Thomas Piketty
- Belknap Press
- Hardcover
- 9780674980822
- 9.3 X 6.5 X 2.2 inches
- 3.25 pounds
- Business & Economics > Economic History
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
A New York Times Best Seller
An NPR Best Book of the Year
The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system.
Thomas Piketty's bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.
Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity.
Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new participatory socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.
Author Bio
Thomas Piketty is Professor at EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics. He is the author of research articles published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, Explorations in Economic History, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales.
He has done historical and theoretical work on the interplay between economic development, the distribution of income and wealth, and political conflict.These works have led to emphasize the role of political, social and fiscal institutions in the historical evolution of income and wealth distribution.
Thomas Piketty is also co-director of the World Inequality Lab and the World Inequality Database, and one of initiators of the Manifesto for the democratization of Europe. He is the author of the international best-sellers Capital in the 21st century (2014) and Capital and ideology (2020).
Source: Paris School of Economics
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