Thomas Piketty gets it with his book Capital

Alex Mousoloplous

  Thomas Piketty has a seven hundred page book criticizing capitalism and this has many it he business press humiliated and angry as it became a best seller and was the talk of educated masses for the past year. His meticulous examination of the evidence and how it takes capital to create capital leaving power concentrated in the same families and hands through generations. The book is covered with graphs and charts illustrating the dips and rates of income throughout societies and how the wealthy always seem to preserve their wealth through generations regardless of the sudden impact of depressions and major wars. Piketty also looks at how colonial powers were able to offshore capital ownership for years building capital as land and resources became scarce at home and other land was available with weak natives to exploit and build an tear national portfolio of more capital for European powers. Piketty basically says the only reason the European states from England to the Dutch to Portugal became powerful was because of this resource extraction from other peoples lands. As control of this capital became more expensive and costly to maintain armies to subdue the effective profits and benefits were exorbitantly reduced. This inherited wealth and current unequal distribution of income and wealth reverbs to this day throughout the world and this book by Piketty ants to explore this phenomena of continued inequality among nations. Thomas goes through technological advances and the narrow flow of income and asset valuation into urban areas while at the same time creating a devaluization  of agricultural lands and rural wealth as an elaborate plan of this new swing towards increased inequality in the world. This theme I wished was a bit more explored by this great French economist and maybe his future work will Analyze  this  fact that the world elites and oligarchs have helped contribute and pro one with their venture capital. These capitalist  vultures want the power to control what areas receive I vestment and what projects these investments will park their money and they want this to be in areas where most will be crowded out and not be allowed to drive thru. The result is more cheap corn syrup for obese people in automobile and truck areas on the periphery of elite cities while the rich get their Manhattan, Paris and London's free of the middle class outside of tourist spending consumption idiots. Piketty points out the importance of central banks to the crisis of 2008 avoided a worse depression than 1929 but failed to address the structural problems of financial transparency of globalization and the rise of inequality with targeted job destruction and creation in America. Thomas correctly reminds the reader that as awful as the Great Depression was it did enact serious reform and radical changes of tax structures and necessary government spending toad the masses. The great Piketty also demonstrates the possibility that elite educational institutions do their best to keep massive inequality as the high cost of attending Ivy League and other institutions is a barrier to many and the legacy advantage to children of graduates from school give an unfair advantage to children of the advantaged. Admission decisions are often made from the dependency of these u universities  to the donations of rich donors and graduates of these schools who often use their obscene financial domination to help get unqualified family members in these "prestigious" palaces of higher education. What really makes these places prestigious is just that any of the past graduates have established higher incomes through generations through this process of selection for membership to upper echelon of government and business. There is absolutely no transparency to these selection process to places like Harvard and Yale.