Sunday, April 27, 2014

Sean McElwee — Welcome to the Piketty revolution: “Capital in the 21st Century” is a game-changer (even if you never read it)

Piketty supplies us with the basis for a new narrative. In this narrative, the postwar period — in which rapid growth produced broad-based, equally shared growth — is unique, not an inevitable product of capitalism. Piketty believes this postwar lull in violent inequality to be an inevitable coalescence of population and war. I believe it was brought about by a powerful labor movement and an epochal crisis of capitalism, coupled with wartime solidarity. Either way, such equality will not come again without action (and it’s unlikely we could grow our way to equality). Money will not remove itself from politics. Power cedes nothing without demand.
Salon
Welcome to the Piketty revolution: “Capital in the 21st Century” is a game-changer (even if you never read it)
Sean McElwee

The real significance of Piketty lies in changing the dominant narrative and shifting the Overton window to the left.

2 comments:

Peter Pan said...

The guillotine was a game-changer. No revolution can come from a book that advocates reforms to the status quo.
There was Occupy, and now Piketty - lets wait for the next baby step. Hopefully the economy will deteriorate by then.

Roger Erickson said...

800 pages to prove the obvious? Again?

It's a stack of graphs to drive home common sense.

People are impressed by big stacks of graphs. (Maybe Occupy should have produced big stacks of graphs proving how many people were disgruntled?)

Yet if that's what it takes ....