JULY - AUGUST 2020 ISSUE Member Comments
JULY-AUGUST 2020 COMMONWEAL
COLUMNS
Connected
by coronavirus (Cathleen Kaveny)
The debate about lockdown measures (Matt Mazewski)
SHORT TAKES
What
the experts can’t tell us (David Cloutier)
Moving
toward racial justice (M. Shawn Copeland)
ARTICLES
Bad traditionalism(Tara Isabella Burton)
Drinking
alone (Jonathan Malesic)
How to write about depression (Matthew Sitman)
INTERVIEW
FICTION
BOOKS
The
Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick (Reviewed by Hannah Gold)
Capital
and Ideology by Thomas Piketty (reviewed by Frank Pasquale)
Escalante’s
Dream by David Roberts (Reviewed by
Jeremy Beer)
The
Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Reviewed
by Iain Bernhoft)
Faith
and Science at Notre Dame by John P. Slattery (Reviewed by John Farrell)
My Mother’s House by Francesca Momplaisir (Reviewed by Nicole-Ann Lobo)
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Randy Boyagoda
POETRY
“The
Time That’s In It” (Micheal O’Siadhail)
“Face
to Face” (Nate Klug)
“Family”
(Nikia Leopold)
LAST
WORD The legacy of peaceful protests (Ann Killian)
CLOSING
SHOT Lamont Roberson
Please make a separate comment for each article to which you wish to respond. If someone has already responded to an article use the REPLY option to place your comment underneath that comment so that all the comments about an article will be together.
INCIDENTALLY, you cannot edit your comments after you publish them. You can however delete the comment (but it leaves a notice that you have deleted it) and make a new comment.
THE BOTTOM LINE IS THAT unless you are a very good editor you will find some errors. It is just something that you will have to learn to live with.
It is also possible to use HTML to put italics, bold, and links in your comments.
Piketty’s CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (2014) impressed me as a social scientist trained in both psychology, which focuses laboratory studies, and sociology, which focuses on survey research and archival data. Economics had always seemed much like psychology with narrow studies focusing upon theoretical questions.
ReplyDeletePiketty had done traditional economic research using statistical models and became respected by mainstream economists. But he questioned the usefulness of what he had done. The availability much more archival data and the computers to process it offered an opportunity to study complex issues such as the distribution of wealth in society.
CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY was frightening as well as impressive. It is a book about the history of wealth, and the political and economic conflicts generated by its unequal distribution.
That book covers the efforts of several dozen scholars using a large historical database on the structure of national income and national wealth and the evolution of income and wealth distributions covering three centuries and over twenty countries
It begins with the great and greater accumulation of wealth by a small number of people at the beginning of 20th century which is followed by is destruction in the two World Wars, and Depression. In that destruction, the rich people lost much of their money, (and perhaps their influence).
The rebuilding of the economy after the war was done under progressive tax structures until 1980. These resulted in the wealth for the working class and middle class though not necessarily for the very poorest.
After 1980, when taxes were reduced on the wealthy, economic growth mainly has benefited the wealthiest people. The resumption of concentration of wealth looks as frightening as that at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Piketty maintains that politics (decisions based upon ideology, i.e. beliefs and values), not invisible laws of economics, determines how wealth is distributed. “It is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result. How this history plays out depends on how societies view inequalities and what kinds of policies and institutions they adopt to measure and transform them.”
CAPITAL AND IDEOLOGY (2020) is Piketty’s attempt to cover in more than a thousand pages how ideology has shaped the distribution of wealth from the Middle Age (with its tripartite structure of clergy, warriors, and workers) through colonialism to our current global economy. It challenges modern ideologies showing how reasonable the ideologies of the Middle Ages and colonialism appeared to it members. The book is more pages than THE ENCHANTMENT OF MAMMON: HOW CAPITALISM BECAME THE RELIGION OF MODERNITY. In more than six hundred pages, Eugene McCarraher studies ideologies of capitalism from the viewpoint of theology. My plan is to read both at the same time..