I found a handy-dandy online guide so that I could sound smart about it without having to wade through the whole thing.
But I have always had a severe allergy to economic theory. Back when I was in college, I had to enroll in Econ 101 three times before making it through the first lecture. Which meant I had to purchase Samuelson three times. (Samuelson was probably way before your time, Taz. He was contemporary of Adam Smith's. I think I was too.)
The French are amused that Piketty has become such a rock star here--[pretty much the way we're amused that Jerry Lewis is respected over there, except Piketty never says "Heyyyyyy, La-deeee!" in his book. The French call him "l'etoile Americaine," which makes him sound cute, like Meryl Streep.
But questions of income inequality have been part of the French discourse since the First Peasant Revolt of 1313. (Or was it 1414?) Here, in America, we have our Horatio Alger mythology, which says that any income inequality will always be equalized in the next generation by hard work and a positive attitude.
Picketty is important here because that myth is probably no longer true, if indeed it really ever was.
At any rate, here is a very clever article from the conservative British journal, The Spectator, with Ten handy phrases for bluffing on Thomas Piketty’s "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." (I think I just bluffed with a version of #3.)
Ten handy phrases for bluffing on Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’
Updated On: 5/2/14 at 06:42 AM
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