Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
Published by USC Bedrosian Center on
Featuring Raphael Bostic, Richard Green, Anthony Bertelli, and Lisa Schweitzer
In this inaugural edition of the Bedrosian Book Club podcast, four of our faculty discuss Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, the French economics book on inequality that is taking the world by storm. Already 9 weeks on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller list, the book looks at the history of wealth distribution and predicts worsening inequality. The faculty discuss this 600 page behemoth in two parts.
In part 1, they take a look at Piketty’s grand scholarly undertaking, why a data driven economics book is a sudden “summer” bestseller, and some of the economic theory behind Piketty’s now famous equation R > G. They take a deeper look at the concept of Mobility. In part 2, the discussion turns to Piketty’s prediction of greater inequality.
Listen through the player above, or subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, or Google Play.
Links to some of the things we discussed:
- Paul Krugman on Piketty: Why We’re in a New Gilded Age in The New York Review of Books
- Martin Feldstein on Piketty: Piketty’s Numbers Don’t Add Up in The Wall Street Journal
- Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen
- Karl Marx – Dr. Schweitzer suggests Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey as a primer
- David Ricardo
- Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal Polarized America
- John Rawls A Theory of Justice
- GINI Coefficient
- Pareto Efficiency
- Michael Walzer Spheres of Justice
- Paul Woodruff’s The Ajax Dilemma
- Tobin Tax
- F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom
This podcast was produced by Jonathan Schwartz, Ryan Hedden, and Aubrey Hicks.
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