Capital in the twenty first century

摘要

Capital in the twenty first century has renewed the debate on wealth, capital, and inequality and evidenced the importance of using large data-sets for identifying and interpreting fundamental economic developments. The book falls down, however, in the thinness of the economic concepts on which that interpretation is based, and its deterministic vision -seeing the future as a continuation of the past - that fails to grasp the complexity of a dynamic world which constantly creates and accumulates, but also destroys. In France, the real-life equivalents of Proust's grand Duchess of Guermantes have long since been supplanted by upstart types like Madame Verdurin - just as in the USA, as Cowen (2014) notes, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford are now called Gates or Buffett.