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Capital and Ideology
- Narrated by: Rick Adamson
- Length: 48 hrs and 57 mins
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Publisher's summary
The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system
Thomas Piketty’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.
Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education, and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity.
Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.
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World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
- A John Hope Franklin Center Book
- By: Immanuel Wallerstein
- Narrated by: Fred Filbrich
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered 30 years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization.
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Uneven, but Ambitious
- By Logical Paradox on 08-27-14
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Ill Fares the Land
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- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
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In Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt, one of our leading historians and thinkers, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment. Judt masterfully crystallizes what we've all been feeling into a way to think our way into, and thus out of, our great collective dis-ease about the current state of things.
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Blah, Blah, Blah.
- By Michael on 07-15-10
By: Tony Judt
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The Conscience of a Liberal
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America emerged from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal with strong democratic values and broadly shared prosperity. But for the past 30 years, American politics has been dominated by a conservative movement determined to undermine the New Deal's achievements. Now, the tide may be turning, and in The Conscience of a Liberal Paul Krugman, the world's most widely read economist and one of its most influential political commentators, charts the way to reform.
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Great Book!!!
- By carl801 on 12-04-07
By: Paul Krugman
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The Decline and Rise of Democracy
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Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer - democratic practices were present in many places at many other times. David Stasavage makes the case that understanding how and where these democracies flourished - and when and why they declined - can provide crucial information not just about the history of governance, but about the ways modern democracies work and where they could manifest in the future.
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Informative
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Radical Markets
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Many blame today's economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability on the free market. The solution is to rein in the market, right? Radical Markets turns this thinking - and pretty much all conventional thinking about markets, both for and against - on its head. The book reveals bold new ways to organize markets for the good of everyone.
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Terrible Reader ruins this book
- By Brian W. Veit on 10-30-18
By: Eric A. Posner, and others
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50 Economics Classics
- Your Shortcut to the Most Important Ideas on Capitalism, Finance, and the Global Economy
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Economics drives the modern world and shapes our lives, but few of us feel we have time to engage with the breadth of ideas in the subject. 50 Economics Classics is the smart person's guide to two centuries of discussion of finance, capitalism, and the global economy. From Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations to Thomas Piketty's best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, here are the great books and seminal ideas, clarified and illuminated for all.
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The Stakes
- America at the Point of No Return
- By: Michael Anton
- Narrated by: Dan Crue
- Length: 16 hrs and 52 mins
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Two months before the 2016 presidential election, an anonymously published essay titled "The Flight 93 Election" rallied conservatives to charge the cockpit by voting for Trump. Michael Anton, the author of that controversial viral essay, now says that the last few years have only served to prove his Flight 93 thesis: The left has become more aggressive, more vindictive, and more dangerous - and the stakes have never been higher.
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America, this is your future
- By Sarah Carnello on 09-28-20
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A Generation of Sociopaths
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What happens when a society is run by people who are antisocial? Welcome to baby boomer America. In A Generation of Sociopaths, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows how America was hijacked by the boomers, a generation whose reckless self-indulgence degraded the foundations of American prosperity.
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Honest introspection required
- By Niki on 03-31-17
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When China Rules the World
- The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order
- By: Martin Jacques
- Narrated by: Scott Peterson
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According to even the most conservative estimates, China will overtake the United States as the world's largest economy by 2027 and will ascend to the position of world economic leader by 2050. But the full repercussions of China's ascendancy-for itself and the rest of the globe-have been surprisingly little explained or understood.
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Lucid explanation of global economic trends
- By David Blake on 01-04-10
By: Martin Jacques
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Forgotten Continent
- The Battle for Latin America’s Soul
- By: Michael Reid
- Narrated by: Gary Dikeos
- Length: 18 hrs and 31 mins
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Latin America has often been condemned to failure. Neither poor enough to evoke Africa’s moral crusade nor as explosively booming as India and China, it has largely been overlooked by the West. Yet this vast continent, home to half a billion people, the world’s largest reserves of arable land, and 8.5 percent of global oil, is busily transforming its political and economic landscape.
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Good Reporting / Disorganized Content
- By Steven Schuster on 02-11-12
By: Michael Reid
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What listeners say about Capital and Ideology
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-20-20
Big thinking at its finest
Data driven, factual analysis with strong understanding of history, politics, economics and the need for global and regional solutions. It impacts my thinking on everything I am passionate about- wealth inequality, gender rights, climate change, global goals and access tools.
Great analysis and information that hopefully will help spur change and progress.
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21 people found this helpful
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- Vincent Barrera
- 07-28-21
very instructive
impressive the history of our inequality trajectory, that got society in general up to now.
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- Mason Dixon
- 10-28-24
Intelligence, supporting evidence, clarity.
A fresh way to look at the need to empower democracy and decrease the extreme inequality which is threatening to eclipse it and enable authoritarian capitalism. Forget Marxism. Look at the world as it is now and the history out of which it has emerged. Piketty blazes an ideological path that others must widen and improve. There is hope.
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- Eugene Gallagher
- 01-16-21
Capital inequality throughout the world & history
Paul Krugman (NYTimes, 3/8/2020) gave 'Capital and Ideology' a tepid review, so I was a bit leery of starting into the nearly 50 hour Audible book, but I enjoyed the book thoroughly, as much or more than the earlier Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Like the earlier book, it is essential to have access to the pdf with over 100 pages of graphs and tables; the pdf is provided with the audible download. Piketty argues that the inequalities in wealth can be traced to the ideologies underlying societies over the last four centuries or so. Ternary societies with 3 distinct classes (Royalty, Clergy & the hoi polloi) dominated most western societies with ternary analogues in Japan, China, and India. Ownership societies followed, often associated with colonialism and slave-owning societies which were the acme of inequality. Other than slave societies, the peak of wealth and income inequality was reached in the belle epoque in France and elsewhere 1880-1914, followed by a relative drop in inequality until about 1980. Piketty attributes this reduction in inequality to the introduction of progressive taxation, needed to pay down the war debts from two world wars. The period of hypercapitalism after 1980, with Reagan and Thatcher leading the way, was a race to the bottom among countries and US States to see which government could tax the wealth of individuals and corporations the least. Post-Soviet Russian became the least egalitarian society of all with a mere 12% flat income tax, no estate tax and more billionaires per capita than any other country. Piketty stresses that educational inequality, especially in the US, is a major driver of income and wealth inequality with strong intergenerational carryover. The rise of Nativist anti-intellectual politicians such as Trump is not unique to the US; there are similar populist leaders in Britain, France, Italy, Poland and Hungary. The GOP in the US, in addition to advocating policies favoring the wealthy has also become the party for those who feel alienated from the increasingly intellectual Democratic party, The Democratic party is the home of highly educated as well as the party of the blacks and other minorities. Piketty argues that it is the dislike of the educationally elite not minorities that has been the major driver of the white blue collar and merchant class to the GOP party. A similar migration to the conservative parties by the relatively uneducated has occured since the 1980s in Britain, Italy, Poland, Hungary and France. Strangely, but perhaps not, the Ivy-based Krugman doesn't mention Piketty's arguments about the inequalities in US higher education (both funding and quality) in his tepid review of Piketty. Piketty's solutions (e.g., more equiable funding and access to high quality education, especially higher education, taxiing elite University endowments, increasing the progressivity of wealth taxes, establishing a basal income for all, and requiring labor to have strong representation on corporate boards) seem inconceivable in today's non-Nordic & Germanic socieites. Piketty's call for clarity in documenting wealth and its inequalities and pleas to reduce the competition among states and countries to provide the least progressive forms of taxation would be a good start.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-06-20
Accessible
More accessible for me than Capital in the 21st Century. Solid arguments against the sacralization of property. Practical roadmap for social democrats.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Pedro
- 05-01-21
Brillian Study on Capital Concentration
Very deep and statistical book about the history of politics and wealth. A must-read to understand how capital is getting more concentrated again today, what caused it and what may happen next
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- Mary K. Bohm
- 10-28-20
Greatest Economist Since Keynes, If Not Adam Smith
Piketty does not dwell on capitalist, socialist, communist, or any other kind of “ists”, he lumps them all into the same broad category of “inequality regimes”.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- ramiro ferreira
- 10-19-22
Excellent
Well written and very informative, a must read to understand the current situation of the world and it's possibles trajectories
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- Haydee M.
- 10-19-22
10/10 would recommend
Anyone who likes learning about society, history, economics, capital, justice, ideologies, statistics, politics, or many other topics will learn something from Piketty’s latest work. The man is an absolute genius on the scale of Chomsky, Einstein, Pinker, and Friston and reading this book is like reading 12 books of new concepts, knowledge, and exposure to different fields and new ways of thinking. I will recommend this book to people for the rest of my life.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Melody
- 11-02-20
Thomas Piketty is astounding!
Though this book is long, it is nevertheless a GREAT analysis. The depth of knowledge on world history and economics reveals probable future outcomes if interventions are not considered. Piketty recognizes the need to secure equality at all levels and asks the tough questions like at what point is there too much tax? At what point is there too little? Should certain structures pay more tax than others? Is the world ready for transnational ideology? This scholarly work highlights the overwhelming number of people on our planet indirectly with abundant studies on inequality in its many forms: gender, social constructs, religious constructs, environmental degradation, power structures, corporate structures, etc. He easily elevates the reader above all the obvious corruption by often reminding us of the alternative - that we can have open/transparent democratic dialogue platforms, especially between labor and shareholders. After he shares with us the World’s socioeconomic history at length, he picks the portions that work. He’s also keen to reason why the other portions do not work. Yet he is as open-ended. It is left for the reader to decide. The entire work is well balanced. Its humorous at times and the audio book Reader was well chosen to deliver such a heavy message. It is textbook quality and essential reading.
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4 people found this helpful