Capital in the 21st Centruty by French economist Thomas Picketty @ Freebies

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Capital in the 21st Centruty by French economist Thomas Picketty

Freebies17 Jul 17

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splender

16 Jul 17

Kindle of this is £14+, it is still a "#1 best seller" on Amazon under "Personal Development".
I don't know why this is downloadable from Centre de Langues in Lyon. It is a remarkable book (for personal development in economics) to learn about capitalism and inequality and charts the failure of trickle-down (from the rich) economics and economy.
Published in 2014 in the English language from French original. 455 pages for this ebook version (hardbook version is 700 pages).
.

WINNER OF THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2014

SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2014

Chosen as a book of 2014 in Observer, Financial Times, The Economist, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times

Latest comments (19)

Omgitswaldo

18 Jul 17 #18

Something for the labour voters

splender to Omgitswaldo

6 Aug 17 #19

Maybe, its intended first audience was France, then USA, neither has Labour voters.

coathanger

17 Jul 17 #17

As someone pointed out in a previous thread, the solution for a depression will always be war.

There are enough powderkegs created around the globe for the solution to be quickly implemented if necessary.

The collapse of the world's financial institutions would never be permitted by those who have the riches, and ultimately also weald power.

splender

17 Jul 17 #15

In economics, the biggest, bad ass elephant, ever, depends on which country, politics and personal gain or loss from the biggest elephant.

beastman to splender

17 Jul 17 #16

? Please feel free to expand on this elephant! I would add that pretty much all countries have the same debt based money system. Also isn't Picketty, not pernickety enough about land taxes, which is very much part of the answer?

splender

17 Jul 17 #12

As you know the book does not deal with endogenous money in post-Keynesian economics which is what you are saying, his book deal mainly with distribution economics ending by recommending that governments step in now, by adopting a global tax on wealth, to prevent soaring inequality contributing to economic or political instability.

beastman to splender

17 Jul 17 #14

Yes but its ignoring the elephant in the room. The biggest, bad ass elephant, ever.

splender

17 Jul 17 #13

Possibly, I have not read this, as it may be a different version licensed for academic studies for students at universitities in France, in this case University of Lyon.

rabbitmoon

17 Jul 17 #11

Whats the original source for this book? As its downloading a PDF directly, it could easily be an illegal copy?

beastman

17 Jul 17 #10

Has anyone fully read this book? I confess I haven't and I will not. I have scanned through it to see it is appears to cover some key issues. My conclusion is that it doesn't and here are my initial thoughts, perhaps if someone does go to the trouble of reading it they can comment if I'm am correct or not.

This book appears to only serves only to bewilder and continue to hide most insidious, most important issue of our generation. What might that be? Well look at some quotes from this book:

Indeed, it would be astonishing if central banks could simply by the stroke of a pen increase the capital of their

nation or the world.

and then

If necessary, a central bank can create as many billions as it wants in seconds and credit all that cash to the account of a company or government in need.

Totally contradictory statements and then this:

Make no mistake. Given the power of central banks to create money in unlimited amounts, it is

perfectly legitimate to subject them to rigid constraints and clear restrictions. No one wants to

empower a head of state to replace university presidents and professors at will, much less to define the

content of their teaching. By the same token, there is nothing shocking about imposing tight

restrictions on the relations between governments and monetary authorities. But the limits of central

bank independence should also be precise. In the current crisis, no one, to my knowledge, has

proposed that central banks be returned to the private status they enjoyed in many countries prior to

World War I (and in some places as recently as 1945

But the Federal Reserve IS a private institution. It is NOT Federal! The Bank of England is officially a government controlled institution but it operates essentially for the private UK banks and is the banker for them not for the people. And this is where Picketty appears (again I have not read the book, merely scanned it for key text) to have missed the key point, these private banks create virtually all OUR money out of thin air. He implies above that there are "restrictions". That is a total lie as private banks can "lend" (that word is in itself the greatest of all lies) as much as they wish. There isn't enough money in the system to pay all these "loans" back. The ludicrous need for ever expanding growth is because we need an ever expanding money supply and more "loans". Why? Without these "loans" and more money pumped into the system, the system collapses. Why?

Because when almost all our money is created from nothing, where does the additional money come to pay the interest on those loans? It doesn't exist hence the need for an expanding money supply. This unsustainable growth is mathematically destined to collapse, hopefully before we destroy the planet.It is a Ponzi scheme. Our countries have to borrow our OWN money. The costs to service these debts are beginning to become too big. The high cost of housing, the inequality between the have nots and the have yachts. The multi trillion pound and dollar national debts, austerity, the lack of money to pay for the NHS, schools, hospitals etc.

Its all down to this and Picketty doesn't address any of this.

The greatest power a sovereign nation has is to coin its own money, yet we have privatised this out out to private banks.

For a book that is seen as great piece of work, it isn't it amazing that a book of several hundred pages, supposedly about Capital, appears to fail to address where capital actually comes from? And who is in charge of it, where it goes first and who really benefits. This is utter nonsense. This is like writing a book about cars and and how cars work and yet not discussing the engine or its fuel. This is why mainstream economics is a joke and why the average person on the street and most politicians for that matter haven't a clue about what it really going on and why the 99% are fighting amongst themselves and are feeding off the scraps from the 1%.

captainbeaky

17 Jul 17 #9