OK, I ADMIT IT. I haven’t read Thomas Piketty’s 700-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the most talked about economics book of recent decades. There are too many novels in the world, and economics is hard. But not to worry, even for numerophobes like me, documentary filmmaker Justin Pemberton has come to the rescue with a quick and clever 103-minute movie of the same name that lots of people who claim to have read Piketty’s book say is, if a not a sufficient replacement, at least an effective companion.
Despite the title, the bulk of the film covers the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries: A rotating cast of talking heads (including Piketty’s own) narrate the story of wealth in Europe and North America—from the palace of Versailles (“Royals” by Lorde on the soundtrack) to the slave markets of New Orleans and the happy suburbs of mid-20th century America. All this is illustrated by a montage of clips from movies, including Les Misérables (the old black-and-white version and the musical), Pride and Prejudice, The Grapes of Wrath, and many more, and Depression-era newsreel footage of striking workers battling police and seizing factories.
What we learn is that when capital existed almost entirely in the form of land, life was miserable for almost everyone and the top 1 percent owned almost everything, but the growth of their wealth was slow. With the Industrial Revolution, capital took the form of machines, the potential for growth was virtually infinite, and life was miserable for almost everyone. Along the way, we are told, the owning class developed ideas and marketing strategies that effectively controlled the way we think, so we didn’t complain so much.
Finally we arrive in our current century, in which capital exists mostly in the form of financial abstractions (derivatives, futures, etc.), the top 1 percent own almost everything, and life is, if not always entirely miserable for everyone else, certainly pretty hopeless. Two-thirds of us, we learn, should expect to be poorer than our parents.
However, Capital in the Twenty-First Century doesn’t leave us hopeless. Piketty says that we can start turning things around simply by implementing serious taxes on accumulated wealth, accompanied by international cooperation to end the use of tax havens. According to him and other economists interviewed in the film, the right tax rate will punish the amassing of unproductive wealth, while still allowing profit from productive investment.
Of course, actually enacting such policies will require a political revolution, but as the New Deal sequence of the film shows, it has happened before.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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