stuartw2112
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Or at any rate, do absolutely anything but actually red the damn thing. And after all, why should you? It's not as if it contains anything you don't already know.
Ha ha ha, very good Alan. If on the run, throw some sand in the face of your pursuers by making some sectarian point or other. Most amusing!
King's review wasn't actually as bad as I was expecting and he makes some fair points – eg, silly to call an accounting identity a fundamental law. But as YMS says, mostly ideological props, taking Piketty to task for not considering things which he actually considers in some detail.
LBird: of course Piketty does open by explaining carefully what his ideological assumptions are. Read the book and see! His growing authority comes from the power of his argument. Electing him instead would just be ridiculous.Furthermore: what our young master Smeet said.
Alan, confirmation bias isn't a criticism or a moral failing – we all suffer from it even if we're aware of what it is. All you have to do to is, say, read some Hayek. You put your finger on something when you speak of my reverence for books. It's precisely why your irreverence and that of other party members can sometimes lash me into such anger. And I agree that your brand of cynical scepticism has a role – to make us rightly sceptical of the claims of authority. But there are two kinds of authority – that which is usurped, and that which is earned. Your attitude helps take down the former but also poisons the latter, like students giggling and messing about in a lecture they don't understand. There comes a time when we must put aside childish things.
Put it this way – are facts relevant to your concerns or not? In my experience, ordinary working class people at the sharp end of austerity policies are far more interested in the facts than middle-class dinner parties are. If the facts are relevant to your concerns, then go to Piketty and you will come away well armed.As Adam said, it's not actually so much a book of theoretical speculation, scientific or otherwise, but rather a marshalling of the facts. The reason it's so long is because Piketty very carefully explains what the facts are, how accurate a reflection of reality the numbers are, and what we can reasonably deduce from them. This makes it far more powerful than a casual, moral denunciation. And as Adam, Kunkel, Paul Mason and others have pointed out, his arguments support a socialist conclusion rather more strongly than they do his own.If on the other hand the facts are not your concern, that's fair enough but it puzzles me why you've come into a thread called "Piketty's data" to tell us so!
"Doubt everything" is only useful if you are engaged, as Marx was, in scientific or spiritual endeavour of some kind. If not, it's just a clever-sounding cover for confirmation bias.
I agree with SocialistPunk that religious preaching may have a more positive effect on the ignorant unwashed than scientific argument. It's a departure from Marx's own way of doing things, but maybe that's a good thing.I think Piketty ignored the Forbes question because he didn't regard it as serious. He deals with "churn", people moving into and out of the rich, in his book, though people who haven't read it no doubt consider it a killer point.
Alan, it really all depends on whether or not you are interested in intellectual and scientific issues. If you are, then I don't see how any such person living in our culture could not be interested enough in Piketty's book either to read it or to read a few reviews. If you're not an intellectually curious person, well, that's no crime, and fair enough, but what on earth is such a person doing on discussion forums? What are they hoping to impart, or to get out of it?Modern day capitalism gets its legitimacy from the idea that great wealth is built on the talent and energy of those who have earned it, and that there is no problem with inequality that couldn't be solved by more market-led growth. Piketty shows, not just by asserting it, or indulging in ideological or theoretical dispute, but by ten years of hard work in the library and social-scientific laboratory, that these ideas are mistaken. The culture-wide peer review currently going on has not been able to find significant fault with his findings. Is this not interesting? Not even to Marxists who knew it all already?
I scanned it and saved it up for reading after the book, but it does look very good, yes. Kunkel always good value. As here, on David Harvey:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n03/benjamin-kunkel/how-much-is-too-much
Well, you may think of it often, but I never considered it again after first posting it – what? Ten years ago?! But I'm glad you've solved the mystery. All the best
Alan, don't let the symbols put you off! Piketty always explains very clearly and simply what it all means – and when you think about it it's never much more than common sense really. It's a great book!
