# Capital in the Twenty First Century **Author:** Thomas Piketty **Date Read:** 2019/11/24 **Rating:** 4/5 **Bookshelves:** political-economy ## My Review Lengthy but lovey read. Enjoyed the various tangents into the life and times of characters from French and English classics. There are too many well-written reviews out there that are quite comprehensive, so will restrict this to an unstructured, unordered bulleted list of things that I take away. <br/>- Need for a global governance that accounts for the particular macro-structures that today determine a lot of wealth and income distributions inter-linked with history and of course the colonial enterprise, the latter being a major force for particular distribution patterns and the two world wars that are important determinants of patterns seen especially in Amero-Euro world. <br/>- Global governance structures need important socio-political foundations. Trans-national wealth and capital flows cannot be understood and regulated by countries (China perhaps is an important exception, and perhaps the somewhat "fragile" European region. <br/>- There is no way to reconcile free markets with any kind of equitable distribution of wealth and/or incomes. <br/>- Favour political economy over "economic science"; the moral and political views of the economist are not a "bias" but a lens through which s/he views their data/narratives. History and political economy approaches could "partner" with data-driven inequality patterns to give us powerful explanations for the how/why questions in global economic inequality research. <br/>- Data-heavy sections exist; beware. Rather limited descriptions of what was done with the data. Take that on trust...much like most peer-reviewed science anyways.