Review by C.J. Bunce
“Are you here to help narrow the gap between the rich and the poor or to narrow it?” It was the first question I was asked when I walked into my first day of law school. The answer to the question begins to create a picture of who you are.
If you were lucky enough to take senior Economics in the 1980s, you might have been taught by Gordon Blenderman, who brought in a library of supplemental source materials in teaching the finer points of the subject, its history, theories, and implications for the future. Along with a copy of Paul Samuelson’s seminal book Economics, you can imagine Blenderman approving adding a copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital & Ideology to his syllabus were he alive and teaching today. For those who fall asleep at the very notion of a book on economics, writer Claire Alet and cartoonist Benjamin Adam have adapted Piketty’s celebrated work into graphic novel form, Capital & Ideology: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, and it’s just hit bookstores (available here at Amazon), from publisher Abrams ComicArts. Comics about economics? Relax, it’s an interesting read and you’ll learn a lot from it.
If you’ve read borg over the past 15 years, you know I am a fan of nontraditional uses of comics media. I loved how my college had an economics professor who incorporated Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns into its required curriculum. Capital & Ideology is more on the nose. It takes eight generations of a fictional family and uses it to illustrate the changing ideologies of wealth ownership over time, and how politicians have used methodologies to garner favor with their constituencies while pushing off their opposition across the years.
Of course the very idea of books like this from the beginning of economics theory is progressive–landed aristocracies and the cornering of wealth went hand-in-hand with keeping these theories secret, keeping education in the realm of the wealthy, and land ownership and voting went together similarly in this regard until people changed it. Of interest to U.S. readers of Capital & Ideology is the European vantage by which this book takes on the subject. Readers will get a wider understanding of the implications of political movements seen from the outside, and this may even alter your own opinion of society and its framework.
If your understanding of a progressive tax is something you read on the Internet, stop, drop, and grab this book to get yourself up to speed on the subject, and how the U.S. tax code serves to influence social policy. Are you against or in favor of a wealth transfer tax? Regardless of your answer, you should be able to explain why.
What is equality, and what is equality in the context of ownership of property? What was the historical justification for slavery, for example, and how did U.S. abolition put money in the pockets of the losers of the Civil War?
How has the transfer of property changed over the past two centuries, and how did a tax on the transfer of property in the 1800s compare to ramifications of such taxes today?
Do these questions bring you PTSD from economics tests early on in your life? They shouldn’t, because the knowledge you learned then (or should have learned) is integral to your decision-making today, and who you choose as your representatives in whatever country you live in.
Colonization, inflation, corporate governance, the European Union, subprime lending, public debt, inflation, the pay gap between men and women, return on capital, the disparity between growth in wealth of the rich and the poor–the book covers a lot of territory. The final chapter shares Piketty’s own suggestions for society, which you can compare to–or help form–your own notions of governance.
Serious topics explained so you can understand, and a good supplement to any economics education, pick up a copy of Capital & Ideology: A Graphic Novel Adaptation here at Amazon, just published by Abrams ComicArts in a sturdy, jacketed, full-color paperback format.
