I am reading A. Turf History of Equality by Thomas Piketty. It is a condensed version of his work and I vibe with it, but I need to read about half of the sentences twice and some of them three times to grasp what they are saying. I haven’t made it through a chapter in one sitting yet.
This book opened with a node to readings who said “I love your work, but can you make it shorter. “. After giving up on Capital in the Twenty First Century twice I am starting to suspect that the economics tomes are long AND complicated. Hopefully I make it through this one and continue to hone my reading comprehension and can try the bigger books again.
I found the early chapters of Capital in the Twenty-First Century to be a rat's nest of inconsistencies and partially articulated logic chains that rested on assumptions that I suspect to be incorrect - except for the places I could not understand at all. End of experience.
By contrast, when I first learned econ, it seemed so easy and clear that it felt like cheating, even though a couple of spots seemed to be based on assumptions that were likely false. Turned out my econ prof wrote the book and clarity was one of his strengths. People who challenged the "assumptions that were likely false" went on to win Nobel Prizes. Don't give up on econ, skip Piketty.
One person's opinion. :)
By contrast, I found Piketty a slog to read, but
deeply illuminating and rewarding for pushing my way through. In our terms, he's really just talking about the implications of something like the 4% rule, and the implications of self-sustaining wealth when capital is passed down through intergenerational wealth, and multiplied across the upper class of entire societies.
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I'm currently reading
1)
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I read
The Corrections last year and loved it, and so far he's going two for two. It may be a dour take, but I think the kinds of selfish characters and dysfunctional families that Franzen writes about come only from a deep understanding of the American upper-middle class.
2)
The Triumph of the City by Ed Glaeser, which is an incredibly wide-ranging discussion about why cities are essential for economic and cultural development, and how to make them thrive. The "how" is rather redundant with many other urbanism books I've read, but the typical urbanist take on the "why" usually neglects economics, so that piece is quite interesting. An interesting tid-bit that I hadn't seen articulated this particular way before is where he compares city incomes vs cost of housing. Of course, incomes and housing costs are highly correlated, and then considerations like climate and zoning/building code constraints can push things one way or the other out-of-whack with that trend line.
I had always conceived of NYC as being an outlier on both metrics, but incomes in NYC are lower than I thought relative to cost of housing. So proportionately, much more of the demand to live in NYC is not driven by incomes, but driven by high demand for that kind of high-intensity urban living that no other city in North America can offer. Just another piece of evidence that there is a lot of demand to live at Manhattan-style densities, and we should be developing more cities to that level of intensity in the US in order to defray demand away from this "NYC or bust" attitude towards big city life. More residential skyscrapers!
3) Re-reading
Performance Success by Don Greene, which is irrelevant for most people, but probably the best book ever written on orchestral auditions. I read it before auditioning for grad school, and it's been out of print for a while, but I just snagged a used copy a little while back and am working my way through it again.
