I’m continuing this week with Capital in the 21st Century.

Last week was reading Parts One and Two of the argument. Part One defined the methodology and gave some results about how Piketty measures Income (mainly national income, derived from income-tax government sources) and Wealth or Capital (mainly derived from intelligent-observer estimates over a long period at least in the cases of England and France). Piketty devotes a fair amount of air time to discussing the merits of his sources.

Part Two deals with the changes in the capital/income ratio over time, showing among other things, that the 20th century was not kind of capital anywhere in Europe, including some estimates of where the destruction of capital came from (SPOILER: not mainly from physical destruction).

This week we are looking at Part Three which deals with the nature and structure of inequality in both labor income and capital ownership. And, with any luck, we’ll get to Part Four dealing with Piketty’s prescriptions for regulating capital going forward.