The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century: The Piketty Opportunity

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction Pat Hudson and Keith Tribe Part I: Concepts and Models 2. Capital and Wealth G. C. Harcourt, University of New South Wales and Keith Tribe 3. Inequality Keith Tribe 4. Models, Money and Housing Avner Offer, University of Oxford Part II: Piketty in Western National Contexts 5. French Idiosyncracies Gauthier Lanot, Umeå University 6. Fact or Fiction? Complexities of Economic Inequality in Twentieth-Century Germany Jan-Otmar Hesse, University of Bayreuth 7. Collective Wealth Formation: Conflict and Compromise in Sweden, 1950-2000 Ylva Hasselberg and Henry Ohlsson, Uppsala University 8. A Confusion of Capital in the United States Mary A. O'Sullivan, University of Geneva 9. Distributional Politics: The Search for Equality in Britain since the First World War Jim Tomlinson, University of Glasgow Part III: Piketty: Global Commentaries 10. Looking at Piketty from the Periphery Luis Bértola, Universidad de la República, Uruguay 11. The Differences of Inequality in Africa Patrick Manning and Matt Drwenski, University of Pittsburgh 12. Income Distribution in Pre-War Japan Tetsuji Okazaki, University of Tokyo 13. Piketty and India Prasannan Parthasarathi, Boston College Part IV: Prospect 14. Goals and Measures of Development: The Piketty Opportunity Pat Hudson 15. Wealth and Income Distribution: New Theories for a New Era Ravi Kanbur,Cornell University and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Columbia University

About the Author :
Pat Hudson is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at Cardiff University. Her books include The Industrial Revolution (1992), History by Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches (second edition 2016) and The Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History (co-editor, 2016). Keith Tribe taught economics at Keele University in the 1980s and 1990s before taking early retirement in 2002. Since then he has continued to write, translate and teach. He is currently teaching the history of economics at the University of Birmingham. His books include Governing Economy (1988), Strategies of Economic Order (1995/2007) and The Economy of the Word (2015).

Review :
This excellent volume effectively exploits and builds on ‘the Piketty opportunity’: the contested new terrain created by Thomas Piketty’s challenge to mainstream economics and economic history. With their deep knowledge of the history of the study of inequality in various regions of the world and in the discipline of economics, the contributors engage critically with Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to provide a plethora of new insights and important alternative policy proposals. This volume demonstrates why public policy-makers need to pay full attention to historians in grappling with the political trilemma of our age posed by Piketty: democracy, capitalism and inequality. This splendid book validates Thomas Piketty's Capital precisely through its lucid, comprehensive and in places devastating critique of his capital theory and empirical methods, with rich detail on France, Germany, Sweden, the UK and the US, as well as Japan, Africa and India. As companion reading or on its own, Contradictions is a landmark, a model of scholarly engagement at the highest level. Drawing in a critical and reasoned manner on the work of Thomas Piketty, this clear and rigorous book assembles leading specialists in the field to propose a global analysis of inequality. In remarkably illuminating fashion, it evokes the tragedy of inequalities in the dynamic of capitalist systems in the long term and places into stark relief the urgency for well informed action. Hudson and Tribe have, with their selection of authors, and their outstanding contributions, substantively re-launched the enquiry into inequalities. The essays have provided further opportunities to explore the potential links between economic history and economics, theoretical and empirical; to ask questions in a different way, rethink concepts and the nature of information; to go beyond what each discipline on its own can give, to tell another story. Their book could be a landmark collection. A welcome contribution . . . The chapters produced by Patrick Manning, Matt Drwenski, Tetsuji Okazaki and Prasannan Parthasarathi are particularly valuable as they consider regions often ignored and about which little is known. Each on their own present relevant empirical contributions linking certain key regions to what we can refer to as the ‘Piketty narrative.’ For these chapters alone, the book should be considered a valuable addition to one’s library. It offers rich and variegated comment on Capital in the Twenty-First Century that is sometimes critical, sometimes complementary, and is surely valuable for anyone who wants to delve deeper into the many historical processes, settings, and incidences that Piketty has interwoven in his long history of rising inequality. The main sections of the book aim to particularise the analysis of inequality by looking at the trends, institutions and politics of different countries – one section on western economies, one on major economies elsewhere. As Luis Bértola points out here, Piketty is very Eurocentric. Having these different national perspectives is a useful contribution to what is turning out to be quite an extensive new literature on inequality.