SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW BONUS THANKSGIVING WORDS: America is an oligarchy, with decorative flourishes of plutocracy. Democracy? What's that?

(I'm on vacation, and this is a repeat from November 23, 2017)

Before partaking of today's holidazed extravaganza, wherein engorged American agribusiness output and brain-damaging sportsball games divert our collective attention span, let's consider a very important distinction.

It's the difference between oligarchy and plutocracy.

What is Oligarchy?

As mentioned above, an Oligarchy is a type of political system or government. It is defined as a form of government controlled or ruled by a small and elite group of people. Thus, this small group of people has control of the government and, of course, the entire state. A nation that has this form of government or political system is also called an Oligarchy. The sovereign power of the state is vested in this small group of people comprising of landowners, wealthy people, royalty, noblemen, high-ranking military officers, renowned academics, or philosophers.

What is Plutocracy?

The term Plutocracy derives from the Greek word ‘Ploutokratia.’ ‘Ploutos’ means “wealth” while ‘kratia’ means “rule or power.” Thus, the full translation of this word is the rule or command by the wealthy. Plutocracy is, therefore, defined as a state, society or government controlled and ruled by the wealthy or a wealthy class.

People that exercise control:

• In Oligarchy, the group that controls the system is not limited to wealthy people alone but includes other privileged individuals or groups of people such as royalty, noblemen, landowners, academics or philosophers, and military officers.

• In Plutocracy, the group exercising control derives their authority or power from their wealth.

Oligarchy and plutocracy are not interchangeable, and yet there might come a point when every last oligarch is wealthy. Then what?

As it stands, while wealth is the chief culprit, there may be a handful of fundamentalist preachers who actually aren't rich, and as such, oligarchy remains the best choice to describe our United States of Capital Accumulation.

Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.

This is not news, you say.

Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.

Although "Pitchforks for Plutocrats" has an engaging tone to my ears.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Moving ahead (or in this instance, to a post earlier this year): "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Save this one for your leftover turkey sandwiches. How's that upward mobility working for you?

Myths of the 1 Percent: What Puts People at the Top, by Jonathan Rothwell (New York Times)

Dispelling misconceptions about what’s driving income inequality in the U.S.

 ... The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians; executives, managers, sales supervisors, and analysts working in the financial sectors; and professional and legal service industry executives, managers, lawyers, consultants and sales representatives.

Without changes in these largely domestic services industries — finance, health care, the law — the United States would look like Canada or Germany in terms of its top income shares.

The United States also stands out in terms of how much money its elite professionals earn relative to the median worker. Workers at the 90th percentile of the income distribution for professionals make 3.5 times the earnings of the typical (median) worker in all occupations in the United States. Only Mexico and Israel, which have very high inequality, compensate professionals so disproportionately. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark, the ratio is about 2 to 1.

This ratio, the elite professions premium, is very highly correlated with income inequality across countries.

Finally, for my younger readers.

Wealth check: The rich get richer, and millennials miss out (The Economist)

More than half of global wealth is owned by the top 1%

The report underlines the sharp divide between the wealthy and the rest. If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population.

Feeling better? I hope so.

Enjoy your pumpkin pie, folks.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW BONUS THANKSGIVING WORDS: America is an oligarchy, with decorative flourishes of plutocracy. Democracy? What's that?

Before partaking of today's holidazed extravaganza, wherein engorged American agribusiness output and brain-damaging sportsball games divert our collective attention span, let's consider a very important distinction.

It's the difference between oligarchy and plutocracy.

What is Oligarchy?

As mentioned above, an Oligarchy is a type of political system or government. It is defined as a form of government controlled or ruled by a small and elite group of people. Thus, this small group of people has control of the government and, of course, the entire state. A nation that has this form of government or political system is also called an Oligarchy. The sovereign power of the state is vested in this small group of people comprising of landowners, wealthy people, royalty, noblemen, high-ranking military officers, renowned academics, or philosophers.

What is Plutocracy?

The term Plutocracy derives from the Greek word ‘Ploutokratia.’ ‘Ploutos’ means “wealth” while ‘kratia’ means “rule or power.” Thus, the full translation of this word is the rule or command by the wealthy. Plutocracy is, therefore, defined as a state, society or government controlled and ruled by the wealthy or a wealthy class.

People that exercise control:

• In Oligarchy, the group that controls the system is not limited to wealthy people alone but includes other privileged individuals or groups of people such as royalty, noblemen, landowners, academics or philosophers, and military officers.

• In Plutocracy, the group exercising control derives their authority or power from their wealth.

Oligarchy and plutocracy are not interchangeable, and yet there might come a point when every last oligarch is wealthy. Then what?

As it stands, while wealth is the chief culprit, there may be a handful of fundamentalist preachers who actually aren't rich, and as such, oligarchy remains the best choice to describe our United States of Capital Accumulation.

Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.

This is not news, you say.

Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.

Although "Pitchforks for Plutocrats" has an engaging tone to my ears.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Moving ahead (or in this instance, to a post earlier this year): "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Save this one for your leftover turkey sandwiches. How's that upward mobility working for you?

Myths of the 1 Percent: What Puts People at the Top, by Jonathan Rothwell (New York Times)

Dispelling misconceptions about what’s driving income inequality in the U.S.

 ... The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians; executives, managers, sales supervisors, and analysts working in the financial sectors; and professional and legal service industry executives, managers, lawyers, consultants and sales representatives.

Without changes in these largely domestic services industries — finance, health care, the law — the United States would look like Canada or Germany in terms of its top income shares.

The United States also stands out in terms of how much money its elite professionals earn relative to the median worker. Workers at the 90th percentile of the income distribution for professionals make 3.5 times the earnings of the typical (median) worker in all occupations in the United States. Only Mexico and Israel, which have very high inequality, compensate professionals so disproportionately. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark, the ratio is about 2 to 1.

This ratio, the elite professions premium, is very highly correlated with income inequality across countries.

Finally, for my younger readers.

Wealth check: The rich get richer, and millennials miss out (The Economist)

More than half of global wealth is owned by the top 1%

The report underlines the sharp divide between the wealthy and the rest. If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population.

Feeling better? I hope so.

Enjoy your pumpkin pie, folks.

A return to Piketty: "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

Seven days in April ...

7 Days of Piketty: Thursday, or "Squeezing the rich ... if the world introduces a Piketty Tax."

7 Days of Piketty: Wednesday, or "Piketty's Three Big Mistakes."

7 Days of Piketty: Tuesday, or "Egalitarianism’s Latest Foe: a critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century."

7 Days of Piketty: Monday, or "The Geography of Populist Discontent."

7 Days of Piketty: Sunday, or "Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic."

7 Days of Piketty: Saturday, or "All men are created unequal."

7 Days of Piketty: Friday, or "Capital in the Twenty-first Century' explained."

 ... but I forgot this one, from way back in 2014.

Reaganomics killed America’s middle class, by Thom Hartmann (Alternet via Slate)

This country's fate was sealed when our government slashed taxes on the rich back in 1980

There’s nothing “normal” about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it’s a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation’s middle class.

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, “middle” class of professionals and mercantilists – doctor, lawyers, shop-owners – who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people – typically over 90 percent of the population – who make up the working poor. They have no wealth – in fact they’re typically in debt most of their lives – and can barely survive on what little money they make.

So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in “normal” capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.

You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today’s dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical “raw capitalism,” what we call “Reaganomics,” or “supply side economics,” our nation’s largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.

This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed – this huge change was done in less than 35 years.

The only ways a working-class “middle class” can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval – a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century – or by heavily taxing the rich.

French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century ...

7 Days of Piketty: Thursday, or "Squeezing the rich ... if the world introduces a Piketty Tax."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Piketty has been criticized for having no "solution" to inequality apart from a global wealth tax, deemed impractical by most observers.

Today it's back to The Economist for an examination of the prospects and effects of such a tax. This brings me to the conclusion of the "7 Days of Piketty," and let me tell you -- I'm ready for a nice novel.

Squeezing the rich ... if the world introduces a "Piketty Tax" (The Economist)

Thomas Piketty, a superstar economist, favours the introduction of a global wealth tax. Its impact might be surprisingly small

IN A speech in 2013 Barack Obama labelled inequality “the defining challenge of our time”. A few months later a book on the subject by Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, became an unlikely bestseller. It walked readers through centuries of data and a theory of inequality before leaving them with a bold policy recommendation: to prevent a dangerous rise in the concentration of wealth, the world’s governments ought to co-operate to enact a global wealth tax.

Egalitarian themes remain popular on campaign trails, but the wealth-tax idea has so far failed to gain ground. Yet in the right circumstances, might a “Piketty tax” emerge from the messy world of democratic politics?

7 Days of Piketty: Wednesday, or "Piketty's Three Big Mistakes."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century.

Today, another critic.

Piketty's Three Big Mistakes, by Noah Smith (Bloomberg View)

 ... Rognlie has three observations that cast doubt on Piketty’s big thesis.

The first is that Piketty doesn’t take depreciation into account. As capitalists accumulate more and more machines, buildings and other hard assets they have to pay more and more to maintain that physical capital. Trucks need new tires. Offices need renovation. What Rognlie notices is that this upkeep cost has been increasing over time.

Nowadays, more than in the past capital goods are often in the form of computers, software and other high-tech products that go obsolete very quickly. That means that capitalists have to spend more money replacing these things. A lot of what looks like more money going into owners’ pockets is really just an increased cost of doing business.

Rognlie isn't the first to make this point -- it has been made by James Hamilton of the University of California-San Diego and by Benjamin Bridgman of the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

But Rognlie adds two other important points ...

7 Days of Piketty: Tuesday, or "Egalitarianism’s Latest Foe: a critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Prior to reading the book, my friend Brandon warned me that it wouldn't improve my mood.

It didn't, and reading the book evidently did nothing for Yanis Varoufakis' mood, either. Varoufakis gives a leftist economist's reply to Piketty here. Just know that the fundamental point is the difference between wealth and capital, and the truths flowing from this difference. Pour a stiff drink first. It took me a while to get through it.

I'm still interested in pitchfork acquisition.

Egalitarianism’s Latest Foe: a critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Yanis Varoufakis (Paecon)

The commercial and discursive triumph of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century symbolises this turning point in the public’s mood both in the United States and in Europe. Capitalism is, suddenly, portrayed as the purveyor of intolerable inequality which destabilises liberal democracy and, in the limit, begets chaos. Dissident economists, who spent long years arguing in isolation against the trickle-down fantasy, are naturally tempted to welcome Professor Piketty’s publishing phenomenon.

The sudden resurgence of the fundamental truth that the best predictor of socio-economic success is the success of one’s parents, in contrast to the inanities of human capital models, is undoubtedly uplifting. Similarly with the air of disillusionment with mainstream economics’ toleration of increasing inequality evident throughout Professor Piketty’s book. And yet, despite the soothing effect of Professor Piketty’s anti-inequality narrative, this paper will be arguing that Capital in the 21st Century constitutes a disservice to the cause of pragmatic egalitarianism ...

7 Days of Piketty: Monday, or "The Geography of Populist Discontent."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Prior to reading the book, my friend Brandon warned me that it wouldn't improve my mood.

He was right.

Pitchforks, anyone?

We continue with a consideration of inequality's contribution to populist discontent.

The Geography of Populist Discontent, by Richard Florida (CityLab)

“There are times when rational, well-educated societies lose a sense of perspective,” says urban scholar Josef Konvitz. The global populist backlash represents one of those times.

 ... The current discussion focuses primarily on stagnant or declining real incomes, and hence on widening disparities between most people and the top 1 percent or 5 percent by income. Productivity is increasing at a lower rate. And, as Robert Gordon argues, we seem to be living off innovations that are decades old. Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century and Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape, both published in 2013, emphasized a long historical perspective, the importance of cultural values, and the impact of meta-events, usually overwhelming catastrophes, that separate one phase, often lasting decades, from another. These studies, however, look at large social categories and the unit of the nation-state, ignoring spatial variations within countries or in the distribution of social and cultural groups.

The decline of the middle class and the broken escalator of social mobility are no fiction. Before the 2016 U.S. election, Le Monde published maps about the geography of disparities in the U.S. Did you know that the size of the middle class shrank by more than 7 percent between 2000 and 2013 in New England, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona? Some of these were red states, others blue. But the trend shaped the political narrative.

Another map showed that the chances of a child born into a family at the lowest level of poverty ever reaching the upper level of income were under 6 percent in virtually all parts of the South, as well as much of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.

The spatial perspective comes into sharper focus when we look at indirect measurements such as the higher cost of rental housing, declining real incomes, the burden of debt for home ownership, the cost of commuting by car, pressure on infrastructure capacity—things that matter in daily life and for which people have no elasticity, meaning that they cannot find better or less expensive ways of doing things. Pressures build up. These indirect indicators highlight how the organization of housing and work in particular places can generate problems that accumulate. As Jane Jacobs famously said, when this happens, problem solving has broken down.

7 Days of Piketty: Sunday, or "Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Piketty generally has been praised for the sheer depth of his research, and criticized for failing to offer a solution to the problem of inequality apart from a global tax on wealth, which strikes most observers as unlikely.

Pitchforks, anyone?

We continue with a consideration of another book, this one about inequality's potential threat to our system of government.

It’s Not Just Unfair: Inequality Is a Threat to Our Governance, by Angus Deaton (New York Times)

THE CRISIS OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS CONSTITUTION
Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic
By Ganesh Sitaraman
423 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.

President Obama labeled income inequality “the defining challenge of our time.” But why exactly? And why “our time” especially? In part because we now know just how much goes to the very top of the income distribution, and beyond that, we know that recent economic growth, which has been anemic in any case, has accrued mostly to those who were already well-heeled, leaving stagnation or worse for many Americans. But why is this a problem?

Why am I hurt if Mark Zuckerberg develops Facebook, and gets rich on the proceeds? Some care about the unfairness of income inequality itself, some care about the loss of upward mobility and declining opportunities for our kids and some care about how people get rich — hard work and innovation are O.K., but theft, legal or otherwise, is not. Yet there is one threat of inequality that is widely feared, and that has been debated for thousands of years, which is that inequality can undermine governance. In his fine book, both history and call to arms, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that the contemporary explosion of inequality will destroy the American Constitution, which is and was premised on the existence of a large and thriving middle class. He has done us all a great service, taking an issue of overwhelming public importance, delving into its history, helping understand how our forebears handled it and building a platform to think about it today.

As recognized since ancient times, the coexistence of very rich and very poor leads to two possibilities, neither a happy one. The rich can rule alone, disenfranchising or even enslaving the poor, or the poor can rise up and confiscate the wealth of the rich. The rich tend to see themselves as better than the poor, a proclivity that is enhanced and even socially sanctioned in modern meritocracies. The poor, with little prospect of economic improvement and no access to political power, “might turn to a demagogue who would overthrow the government — only to become a tyrant. Oligarchy or tyranny, economic inequality meant the end of the republic.”

7 Days of Piketty: Saturday, or "All men are created unequal."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Piketty generally has been praised for the sheer depth of his research, and criticized for failing to offer a solution to the problem of inequality apart from a global tax on wealth, which strikes most observers as unlikely.

Pitchforks, anyone?

We continue with The Economist, circa 2014: "Revisiting an old argument about the impact of capitalism."

All men are created unequal (The Economist)

INEQUALITY is one of the most controversial attributes of capitalism. Early in the industrial revolution stagnant wages and concentrated wealth led David Ricardo and Karl Marx to question capitalism’s sustainability. Twentieth-century economists lost interest in distributional issues amid the “Great Compression” that followed the second world war. But a modern surge in inequality has new economists wondering, as Marx and Ricardo did, which forces may be stopping the fruits of capitalism from being more widely distributed.

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, is an authoritative guide to the question. Mr Piketty’s book, which was published in French in 2013 and will be released in English in March 2014, self-consciously builds on the work of 19th-century thinkers; his title is an allusion to Marx’s magnum opus. But he possesses an advantage they lacked: two centuries’ worth of hard data.

7 Days of Piketty: Friday, or "Capital in the Twenty-first Century' explained."

My esteemed friend Kim Andersen has no tolerance for fake news; it's only the real thing for Big Kim, and as such, he forwarded to a group of friends this important link to an article in a British newspaper.

“Going to the pub together keeps male friendships strong, suggests scientist, whereas female friendships are strengthened by communication.”

A fellow recipient quickly replied, “It’s always nice when science confirms the obvious.”

Having finally gotten down to the business of reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, I can concur with this conclusion.

Most of us have long since grasped that since human planetary times began, a relatively small proportion of the planet’s population has acquired and hoarded a disproportionate amount of wealth.

I dimly recall the testimony of one or the other Greek philosopher to the effect that if we evenly distributed wealth among the population, it would be a futile gesture, as quickly the proportion would return to its previous imbalance.

Piketty sets out to prove the persistence of inequality, using statistics from as far back as the French Revolution -- when the top 1% controlled about 98% of the wealth in France. Insofar as inequality has lessened in the world since then, it's because tumultuous wars (I and II) and confiscatory tax rates had the effect of redistributing wealth.

In short, we're back to a widening gap between the haves and have-nots -- something obvious, though it's nice to have academic support.

It would seem that Piketty did his best to write for numbskulls like me, patiently explaining esoteric concepts, and loading the pages with charts and graphs. Still, I made the editorial decision to skim where merited, and concentrated on the summaries and high points -- and these high points are collected in the overview below.

Interestingly, upon the book's release, economists on the “left” criticized Piketty for defining capital as aggregate wealth. Had Yanis Varoufakis not been called to the Greek finance ministry in 2015, he might have embarked on a lucrative career as left-wing debunker of Piketty, accusing the Frenchman of conflating wealth with capital.

And yet even Varoufakis didn't contest the overall conclusion -- a small percentage of humans controls a disproportionate amount of the capital (or the wealth), with disturbing repercussions for the rest of us.

For the next six days, I'll be publishing a link per day to web material related to Thomas Piketty and Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Piketty generally has been praised for the sheer depth of his research, and criticized for failing to offer a solution to the problem apart from a global tax on wealth, which strikes most observers as unlikely.

Pitchforks, anyone? We begin with a cheat sheet.

Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” explained, by Mike Llewellyn (Ideas.Ted)

A Piketty guide for lifelong learners.

When Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” was published, it was something of a sensation. That’s no small feat for a chart-heavy doorstop on “the dismal science” of economics.

A fair portion of the book’s notoriety was due to its subject matter: wealth distribution, an intensely political topic if ever there was one.

What makes this French economist’s conclusions worth global notice? The short answer is that Piketty and his research team amassed a mountain of data, much of it going back centuries, suggesting that the concentration of wealth in ever-fewer hands is not an anomaly or a recent development. Check out the infographic (above) for a longer explanation:

As the data visualization above suggests, this is simply how capitalism works. Without a significant force to counterbalance rising wealth inequality, the research indicates, a capitalist economy will drift predictably toward oligarchy.

BOOKS: "Thomas Piketty's 'Capital' in 3 minutes."

Novel Explosives is finished, and next up on the nightstand is Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

My friend Brandon has been touting Piketty to me ever since Capital was published. With perhaps 30 years elapsing since the last time I delved into Karl Marx's 19-century version, it's time to catch up.

The brief video from BBC provides an overview sufficient for bluffing knowledge. The book's 35-page introduction did the same, and now the tougher sledding has started, but I can do this. I think.

Piketty: "(Blowing up) libertarian fantasies one by one."

Parramore's essay goes into greater detail than my previous posting on the topic of Pinketty's book, leading me to the unprecedented likelihood of my actually reading a book about economics -- which, in turn, probably disqualifies me from holding political office in New Albany until the end of time, or until CeeSaw's Bicentennial Crutchfield paving stones are sold, whichever comes first.

Piketty shrugged: How the French economist dashed libertarians’ Ayn Randian fantasies; "Capital in the 21st Century" reveals once and for all that the invisible hand of the market can't solve inequality, by Lynn Stuart Parramore (Alternet via Salon)

Libertarians have always been flummoxed by inequality, tending either to deny that it’s a problem or pretend that the invisible hand of the market will wave a magic wand to cure it. Then everybody gets properly rewarded for what he or she does with brains and effort, and things are peachy keen.

Except that they aren’t, as exhaustively demonstrated by French economist Thomas Piketty, whose 700-page treatise on the long-term trends in inequality, Capital In the 21st Century, has blown up libertarian fantasies one by one.

"Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons why."

Food for thought on a breezy Sunday, as hangovers from the annual Thunder circus dissipate.

Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons why; Economist Thomas Piketty's message is bleak: the gap between rich and poor threatens to destroy us, by Will Hutton (Guardian/Observer)

Suddenly, there is a new economist making waves – and he is not on the right. At the conference of the Institute of New Economic Thinking in Toronto last week, Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century got at least one mention at every session I attended. You have to go back to the 1970s and Milton Friedman for a single economist to have had such an impact.

Like Friedman, Piketty is a man for the times. For 1970s anxieties about inflation substitute today's concerns about the emergence of the plutocratic rich and their impact on economy and society. Piketty is in no doubt, as he indicates in an interview in today's Observer New Review, that the current level of rising wealth inequality, set to grow still further, now imperils the very future of capitalism. He has proved it.

It is a startling thesis and one extraordinarily unwelcome to those who think capitalism and inequality need each other ...