Global Comment

Where the world thinks out loud

Tumblr of the Day: Cats Contemplating Capital

For the Leftie in your life, a tumblr that pairs cats contemplating French economist Thomas Piketty’s recent intellectual blockbuster Capital in the Twenty First Century, which has influentially argued that capitalism is failing us–distributing ever more wealth to the already wealthy–and he has the hard data to back it up.

rsz_1catipal

Piketty told the Guardian:

I began to wonder a few years ago where was the hard data behind all the theories about inequality, from Marx to David Ricardo (the 19th-century English economist and advocate of free trade) and more contemporary thinkers. I started with Britain and America and I discovered that there wasn’t much at all. And then I discovered that the data that did exist contradicted nearly all of the theories including Marx and Ricardo. And then I started to look at other countries and I saw a pattern beginning to emerge, which is that capital, and the money that it produces, accumulates faster than growth in capital societies. And this pattern, which we last saw in the 19th century, has become even more predominant since the 1980s when controls on capital were lifted in many rich countries.

No wonder cats are reading it.  Catch it all here.