Capital by Thomas Piketty

I read this for my newly formed non fiction discussion group. Or at least I read the first half of it! The theme of the book is that inherited wealth is the foundation of inequality. It’s a Marxist viewpoint. So, when a person inherits wealth, then they can invest those additional assets into further wealth producing assets. And thus wealth inequality not only continues but increases. It’s not a new story. His solution is taxation, specifically death taxes I think, but as I said I didn’t get to the end. Friends who know these things are quite critical of the book and his theories, but I am not well enough educated in the area of economics to do much more than observe the arguments. The group stopped halfway through because we all felt overwhelmed by the content, including all the formulae etc, but then we are all from a humanities background and chose this book to challenge ourselves. It sure did!