if you want a detailed understanding of income inequality from an esteemed economist, this is for you. ( )

This book is required reading for anyone interested in the underlying structure of monetary policy. Piketty was unabashedly conservative, favoring tax structures that inhibit the natural tendency of capital to breed more capital thus concentrating wealth. Even if your economic ideals are different, this book's hard look at historical records is instructive. ( )

Surprisingly easy read. Tax the rich! ( )

You don't have to agree with all of Piketty's ultimate conclusions and recommendations (and I am still processing them) to be blown away by the breadth of research and clarity of this important book. I'd recommend this work anyone interested in history, taxes, politics, and/or economics and finance. This book will forever change the way I look at the (past, present, and future) world. ( )

This book was a major disappointment for me. After many years of intrigue in the title, I finally sat down to read it, and am unable to accept the author's portrayal of the data as reliable. As a matter of fact, I feel scammed after reading this book, and it makes me angry to get scammed, so I'm going to vent a little bit here because of it.

I couldn't get past the graphs. The graphs in this book are deceptive, and I don't just mean slightly; they are highly misleading!

If it wasn't already enough of a joke for the author to attempt to rationalize why it is that what appear as equal distances of time on a grid may range anywhere from ten to two hundred and fifty years, then surely presenting them in such fashion was done with comedic intent, and surely, the author knows much better than to habitually reference the same deceptive graphs, and draw conclusions for future hypotheses from them, especially since we've established that they are a joke in the first place! (You see, I'm being a bit sarcastic here - because that's what Pickory did!)

To read this book, you need to be able to accept the author's rationale for the seemingly skewed data, and look past the deception, i.e. ignore it, never notice it, etc., which I'd like to have been able to do because many of the author's conclusions surrounded my initial intrigue in the title, but I could not; given the title's popularity, I seem to be one of the very few unable to suspend disbelief in order to allow for a deceptive presentation of data to inform my conception of political economy, which is surprising...

Although I'm not entirely sure how complete or helpful much of the data the author draws from actually is, the real trouble isn't the data itself; it is how the researcher chose to present the data. It's not inaccurate or wrong; it's illusory and deceptive, sneaky-like, and the only reason I hesitate to call it all bollocks is because I'm not a British citizen, resident, or national; I feel sure, however, that the representations of data in this book are bollocks enough for anyone in the world to be able to call them out as such!

The imbalance of the graphs alone undermines any argument based upon them, and the red flag of statistical error confirming a sampler's bias is so flagrant and egregious that I wonder if it was done intentionally in order to undermine public intelligence, just to go ahead and nip a reasonable argument for a revolutionary mindset that could upset the status quo in the bud, so to speak; i.e. Plinkett's argument is simply too easily debunked and/or exploited; if I can point out the error, then anyone should be able...

So why was this book so esteemed? I don't know... I'd guess the ideas presented and drawn from the 'conclusions' must have already been devised, with the 'conclusions' themselves already reached, well before any data was examined; the book's popularity was likely ordained before any ink went onto paper, or any key was pressed to appear as a letter on a screen in contribution to the book. I wouldn't be surprised if the documentary film deal was already inked before a word was absorbed in alleged 'research,' much less put into print... and I'm really stretching it there... Honestly, I'm probably wrong about the latter, at very least, but possibly 'right enough' for it to behoove me to go ahead and throw it out there... Could it be? Yes! Was it? Who knows?

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking something along the lines of me belonging in the same sentence as a lexical item representing all that I am not, idiot, and be that as it may, I'm not saying that it's an overall awful book, simply one that bases many of its conclusions on faulty premises based on shoddy, conveniently manipulated, and often skewed presentations of data, i.e. one that should not have been published and/or should not have been taken seriously; there's a glass ceiling to the bogeyman in this book, and it's crystal clear!

It may be a rather good book. The author's conclusions, which I like, may hold on their own, and certainly aren't wrong; there's simply no fairly presented and reliable data to back most of them up; that's the troubling part... The author inundates us with data, and claims it is this trove of data that gives his work the edge over previous works in political economy; my reading of it tells me that the data itself hurts his argument more than it helps; he would have been better off not using any than so flagrantly manipulating what he had, and in turn, he gives us a textbook on how to manipulate data, so much so that I'd bet this book sells better as an example of what not to do in statistics classes than as a manual for what to do in political economy as we inch nearer to the close of the twenty first century. That is not to say that the gutless statistician won't find this an extremely useful manual.

Pickery, or whomever it is, tells us in the prologue, or introduction, somewhere, that the first chapters are for dummies, essentially, and writes that expert economists may skip these chapters; they are there to lay the groundwork for later chapters, and would be redundant for an economist. Despite many a credo to the contrary, I fashioned myself just shy of the professionalism required to skip the chapters (a dummy,) and after dropping my jaw in disbelief that so many pages could follow so many unreliable models presented to readers, I put the book down; if that stuff is redundant to an economist, then I'd bet the whole damned field is a scam! So, here's my confession: I get it.

Yay for me! When I say I get it, I mean that I know why Pikennen decided to manipulate the data like that, and it has nothing to do with all of that stuff he rationalizes to readers, i.e. censuses, historical events, etc.; he did it so that the data would form a bell curve, and to add insult to undermine the injury to the reader, he did it AFTER criticizing Malthusian economics, which should be more than criticized, and AFTER pointing to the bell curve as a blunder of sorts, a cash out, proper, to appease those with wealth, and perhaps, lacking understanding. Then, Plinko proceeds to grossly manipulate his data so that it forms a bell curve... Ironic? I'd guess not. Maybe since all of modern economic theory in the West is based on some unrealistic notion of self-regulating bell curves it was necessary, and is frequently so, for economists to manipulate their data to form one? Beats me... I don't know! The bottom line is that the data exploited to form many of the bell curves referenced in this work, doesn't form a bell curve at all! (If presented fairly) Maybe that's just the point...

Honest review: this book gave me a headache, was dry, and made me angry, yet I initially had trouble putting it down until after I kept seeing the same misleading graphs, and finally had enough. Thanks for letting me review! I feel much better now!

Public plea to defend my criticism of the author: Piccolo saw enough success on this book that my review won't hurt a thing, and he'll probably never read this, so he shouldn't get his feelings hurt by it... and not to make excuses for gaining relief by critique at the expense of his work, bear in mind that his work also contributed to causing the condition for which it is necessary to vent. Whew! Decent book! Not well argued. Good ideas! Nothing revolutionary. Deal with it! ( )