thomas piketty capital in the 21st century

While no one remembers this, even the Communist Manifesto in 1848 acknowledged the accomplishments of the business class. And while the old and new elites disagreed on who should be in charge, they both agreed that regular people shouldn’t be. Both the American and French revolutions were in part fights between old feudal elites and a new business elite struggling to be born. Until then Europe was feudal, with a swarm of kings, dukes, earls, and marquessates holding most of the wealth in the form of land.īut factories generated new, insurgent wealth. The movie starts by going back to the period 250 years ago when capitalism first gained momentum via the Industrial Revolution. This makes the business section much more exciting. But understanding the story of capitalism is like understanding all of that about baseball, plus having a team to root for, and realizing that, if your team loses, you’re going to die.

They’re like baseball scores when you don’t know anything about baseball’s rules or teams or history. “Capital in the 21 st Century” understands that the daily facts about capitalism seem boring, irrelevant, etc., to most people because they’re not part of a story. As Tett puts it, what matters most “is not discussed because those topics are considered boring, irrelevant, taboo, or just unthinkable.” All societies maintain what anthropologists call “social silence” about the society’s most significant subjects. That’s truly bizarre if you think about it, yet, as Tett has explained elsewhere, it’s unlikely that you will. The story of capitalism is the central reality of everyone’s life. That makes it unique in popular culture, particularly since it does so not in a dry monotone but often via clips from movies. Instead it just tells a story, the centurieslong story of capitalism. They’re mostly a barrage of graphs and numbers that make you feel like you drank three Heinekens at lunch and want to take a nap. There are many other documentaries about the same subject as “Capital in the 21 st Century” - i.e., the rise of the 0.1 percent and the fall of everyone else. The film, directed by Justin Pemberton, undermines that core power of the world’s elites - shaping how we think - in a particularly wise, sneaky way. “Capital in the 21 st Century” is based on the bestselling 2013 book by Thomas Piketty, a French economist. (Every month FT publishes a magazine called “How to Spend It.”)

editorial board of the Financial Times, the salmon-colored international business newspaper read by Deutsche Bank vice presidents from London to Dubai to Singapore. But it sounds different coming from Gillian Tett at the beginning of a new documentary, “ Capital in the 21 st Century,” just released online. You may have heard this from a million rose emoji Twitter accounts. “The way the elite stays in power, and passes on their privilege to the next generation, is by shaping the way that we think.”

Thomas piketty capital in the 21st century