Chronicles: On Our Troubled Times

Published by Penguin Viking, 2016, softcover, index, 181 pages, condition: new.

The return of the best-selling, award-winning economist extraordinaire With the same powerful evidence, and range of reference, as his global bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century - and in columns of 700 words, rather than 700 pages - Chronicles sets out Thomas Piketty's analysis of the financial crisis, what has happened since and where we should go from here. Tackling a wider range of subjects than in Capital, from productivity in Britain to Barack Obama, it comprises the very best of his writing for Liberation from the past ten years. Now, translated into English for the first time, it will further cement Piketty's reputation as the world's leading thinker today.

Any rational person sees the world's injustice. Few come up with commonsensical, tried-and-true solutions as does Thomas Piketty, week by week, in his newspaper column for Libération, a Socialist-aligned daily.

You'll remember Piketty's name from his monster bestselling tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which The Belknap Press brought out in 2014. It's sat unread on many a poseur's coffee table. (I've owned it since 2015, and have reached p310: Wage Scales and the Minimum Wage, which begins: "There is no doubt that the minimum wage plays an essential role on the formation and evolution of wage inequalities, as the French and US experiences show." Out of 577 pages of text plus a hundred or so more of back-matter, I can't claim to be whipping through this one...not least because OWWW my hands!)

And still, I say with his, among other reasonable voices (I'm looking at you, Yanis Varoufakis), pointing and waving their arms to drag the world's attention to these solutions, what's the problem with fixing the seriously, badly broken economic stuff the 99.9% endure?! Here's the problem. Piketty wants to tame greed and mitigate inequality. That does not suit the Economic Royalists in control of the modern world.