Why is Thomas Piketty’s 700-Page Book a Bestseller?: (Early) Monday Focus for September 22, 2014

Over at the Grauniad Guardian: Why is Thomas Piketty’s 700-page book a bestseller? I like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century a lot. It follows Larry Summers’s advice – which I have always thought wise–that the further ahead in time we want to forecast, the further back in time we should look. It deals with very big and important questions. It takes a broad moral-philosophical view, rather than a narrow technical-economist view. It combines history, quantitative estimation, social science theory, and a deep concern with societal welfare in a way that is too rare these days.

But I thought it would be a book for a narrow audience: me and a few others. I expected people who did not have the souls of accountants to start to snore at Piketty’s numbers, numbers, numbers and more numbers.

What we can think about is why the soil was fertile: why was there the potential for a mass-audience viral explosion of interest in Capital in the Twenty-First Century rather than our standard set of viral propagation memes – cat videos and Buzzfeed’s Twenty-Seven Things You Won’t Regret When You Are Older?

I confess that I do not know. I do have a guess. My guess is that the book-buying upper-middle class of America today is greatly distressed when it looks at the world around it, specifically at two things.

The first is that our society today is largely failing its non-migrant non-college-completing majority, in that for all of our cheap electronic toys, life is no easier than it was a generation ago in spite of an enormous explosion of technology and productivity.

The second is that they now know of a plutocracy that did not use to exist and makes us very uneasy. Last generation’s Michigan governor and American Motors president George Romney lived in a large-but-not-abnormal house and bossed a company that created lots of good jobs at good wages. This generation’s Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital CEO Mitt Romney has seven houses worth perhaps $25m in total, and bossed a company whose core business model appears to have been exploiting legal anomalies like the fact that pension funds have little control over their money after it’s invested.

And because the book-buying upper-middle class does not trust the entrenched positions of America’s ideologues, they are looking for fresh thinking – which a foreigner like Piketty, whose positions are not those of any large American political faction, provides.

Now Piketty’s grand argument may be wrong. It could be that in the future, capital will turn out to complement rather than substitute for labor, and the wealth accumulation of plutocrats will generate their self-euthanasia as a social class by pushing down the rate of profit.

It could turn out that growing fortunes will be a lot harder in the future than Piketty thinks it will. It could turn out that our plutocrats as a social class will decide to play the status game of spend-their-money-and-change-the-world rather than enrich great-grandchildren that they will never see.

My guess is that the grimmer elements of Piketty’s forecast have only a 50-50 chance of coming true even if plutocrats achieve and maintain a lock on politics for the next three generations. But that is much more than enough to worry about the scenario he paints, and figure out how to guard against it.