Easy to read, but the content is not convincing

Easy to read, but the content is not convincing

Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)

Customer Review

A well-written book, pleasant to read and full of interesting observations that stimulate reflection. His key message: Under capitalism, the returns on capital are usually significantly higher than the economic growth, which leads without government intervention to an ever increasing wealth concentration. The prosperity of the middle class of the 20th century was based on special factors such as strong economic growth and wartime capital destruction, for the future but had no significant property taxes a return to rentier society of the 18th century to be expected.

Despite these seemingly catchy arguments, the conclusions are not convincing. Too often takes Piketty mental shorts, too little into account studies with different results. In order here to mention only the most important points of criticism:

The global inequality has not increased during the last three decades: Piketty used from S. 304 plenty of room for the repetition of the well-known fact that inequalities within the most poor and rich countries over the past more than 30 years has increased significantly. Contrary to a widespread misconception but global inequality has declined even more: The more rapid income growth in populous emerging markets like China and India has led to a convergence between the poorer and the wealthy countries, the national developments has more than compensated.

Slower growth is not related to more inequality together: key element of the book is the assertion that a high difference between return on investment and economic growth lead to inequality: It is indisputable that high capital gains mainly help the already well-off, so Pikettys true argument, but would also low growth with more inequality go hand in hand. To prove the latter, the author relies narrative mainly on two episodes: The pre-industrial era of Jane Austen & Co (low growth, a lot of social injustice) and the 20th century (high growth in conjunction with a prosperous middle class). But countless other examples show that high growth such as currently in China even more accompanied by an increasing affluence spread.

Pikettys predicting a divergence of returns on investment and economic growth is doubtful whether the world economic growth in the long term actually slow to be seen, at least new all-time records for global economic growth have indeed set up only in the recent past and observers as Matt Ridley indicate that integration the emerging markets included in the global economy that additional millions of engineers and managers working on productivity improvements. But far more questionable is Pikettys assuming a relatively stable long-term, structural factors, return on assets of 4-5%. The landowners of earlier centuries achieved (in a far gehendend inflationary environment) returns compares the author here to document with the average growth of large investment portfolios in the present. The latter are, however, mainly due to one-off effects such as the rising ratings of almost all assets and properties just these higher prices make it unlikely that investors can count on 5% return after inflation in the future. Scientists such as Homer and Sylla impressively show how the interest in the course of human history by annualized rates around 100% higher than the double-digit amounts of Mesopotamian time fell to the present level. The associated with increasing affluence changes the rate of time preference and availability of capital mean in the long term downward trend in interest rates and thus the opposite of an opening gap between returns on capital and economic growth as Piketty predicted it.

quite decent Rank: 4/5
May 6
Contains biocides !!! Rank: 1/5
April 21
perfect! 1131 Rank: 5/5
December 15
Precise, small and efficient Rank: 5/5
November 30

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