Quick Review: Capital and Ideology
The first three parts of the book consist of rather dry history mainly focused on economic inequality and some related aspects and implications, generally showing that, while the specifics differed, things were always awful. The exception were some elements that reached levels that could justify some hope between 1950 and 1980, but those have started to gradually decline since then. The different trajectories may make the parts about India and China, and possibly also the brief ones about other parts of Asia, somewhat interesting, but not by that much. And I was unpleasantly surprised to see the author defend the private property of businesses in the part about Communism. On the other hand, it was nice to see him recognizing the merits of the criticism of electoral democracy coming from China.
Things started changing in the last chapter of part three, which also mentions a little about the environment, though it otherwise mostly consists of complaints about the lack of public or even gathered information and mixes data with speculation. And then you have part four, which is presented as containing the proposed solutions but which rambles for a long time about elections, mainly focusing on the social differences between voters and current political debates, with a first section that details a proposed plan to change some aspects of the European Union jarringly shoved in between. Still, more proposed solutions are finally presented towards the end, and they’re not without merit, though plenty are overly technical and may be rather hard to follow, the overreliance on notes, which on quite a number of pages exceed the “normal” text in size, only making it worse. But the main issue is that all of the proposals are reforms within the current system, and while the author claims that some may seem radical, they’re really not, stopping way too short. In the brief section about carbon taxes there is a mention that actual limits and bans might be better, but otherwise no such limits are suggested and the proposals tend to be confined to changes to taxation, plus some more “democratic” control.
Rating: 3/5
