Morning Must-Read: Heather Boushey: I Like Jane Austen… But I Don’t Want to Live Like That

Heather Boushey: I like Jane Austen’s novels, but I certainly don’t want to live like that: “One thing haunting me throughout the book was a question about what his findings meant for women and…

…so, inspired by Piketty, I picked up my Jane Austen anthology…. I very quickly found myself immersed in the tale of Elizabeth Bennet…. Austen’s heroines… know that a good income is not the only factor in her future happiness, but she also knows that there’s no happiness without it…. Miss Bennet was smart, capable, and someone who I could imagine as my friend. But, the world she lived in was terrifying. She is constrained by the reality that her life will be defined by her choice of spouse. Feminists laud Jane Austen for elevating the interior lives of women and the economics of marriage markets in the 18th century and for making clear these enormous constraints on women’s choices….

The economic inefficiency of an economy where success depends on inheritance not on developing one’s own skills and productivity. This is what Piketty means when he says that the ‘past devours the future’…. The 20th century saw enormous forward momentum towards equality…. As the Piketty mania took hold—it actually hit number one on Amazon.com in the first few weeks after its release–there was only one other woman, besides myself, that I knew of, Kathleen Geier, who published a review of the book. While scores of men debated r, g, and the substitution of labor for capital, women were strangely absent…. I would like to encourage more women, and especially more feminists, to pick up Piketty’s tome…