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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Piketty Impact
On the economic-inequality discussion, profound. On capitalism per se,
not so much

While reading Brooke Jarvis's fascinating New Yorker essay

about issues associated with the ending-rather than the extending-of
life, I came across this passage:
"Of all the forms of inequality," Martin Luther King, Jr., said in
1966, by which time the divide was entrenched, "injustice in health is
the most shocking and the most inhuman." Even in modern American
cities, people born into poor neighborhoods can expect to live as many
as thirty years fewer than people who are born in affluent ones across
town. And that was before the covid-19 pandemic further widened our
existing gaps.

The same day I read this, I got a notice about the upcoming paperback
publication of the sequel to Thomas Piketty's incredible 696-page
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
. The
first book, you may recall, had an enormous impact on defining economic
inequality as central to the nation's problems and helped to lay the
groundwork for the issue to become a hallmark of Democratic campaigns
ever since. It led me to wonder why Piketty's second book, Capital and
Ideology, had not appeared to have a remotely similar role in at least
inspiring debate. One obvious reason was its length: more than a
thousand pages (I admit to not finishing it). A second was the unlucky
timing of its publication tied to the beginning of the pandemic. (I am
far more personally familiar with this phenomenon

than I would like to be, alas.) But there's more to the story and, in
light of the book's upcoming paperback publication, I thought I would
turn to its translator, Art Goldhammer
, to ask
him his thoughts about what happened. Art was good enough to contribute
to the below.

Translating Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(C21c) back in 2013 put me at the center of a publishing phenomenon. The
book became an overnight best-seller. I had previously translated
something like 125 books in my career, including Tocqueville's
Democracy in America and Pierre Nora's Realms of Memory, but
Piketty's outsold all the others put together, with sales of more than
2.5 million to date.

When, in 2018, Harvard University Press asked me to translate the
sequel, Capital and Ideology, I was of mixed minds. I had decided to
retire and hoped to devote myself to a novel. But like Vito Corleone,
the Press made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

When the manuscript arrived, two things were immediately clear: The
second book, at 1,085 pages, was more than 25 percent longer than the
first, and at first blush it looked even less likely to become a
best-seller. Piketty had spent the six years since completing C21c
studying history, and the new book contained extensive material on
medieval property relations, the French Revolution, slavery in the
Caribbean and the United States, India, Russia, China, Sweden, and a
good deal more.

It was quite breathtaking to watch a world-famous author reinventing
himself and his project. Some of the material was familiar to me. In
fact, many of the French sources cited in the footnotes were books I had
previously translated. But much was new, so I would be learning on the
job-a challenge that helped keep me motivated.

The work went more quickly than anticipated. I was familiar with
Piketty's style, and his sentences went smoothly into English. Still,
it was a summer of no respite as I put in eight-to-ten-hour days, day
after day, translating more than a thousand pages as well as the
captions to hundreds of graphs and tables, a tedious but essential part
of the work. Just under six months after starting work, I was done.

The book is really four books in one: The first part lays out a bold
historical thesis; the second extends Piketty's work on wealth and
income distributions to a new set of countries; the third shifts to
political science and an examination of changing voting patterns in the
wealthy democracies over the past 75 years; and the fourth is a set of
policy proposals aimed at democratizing the European Union and
redistributing not just wealth and income but life chances throughout
the world.

With the manuscript complete, my thoughts turned to the book's
reception. Would it do as well as its predecessor? It seemed unlikely.
The phenomenal success of C21c caught everyone by surprise. That book
had come out at a propitious moment. The Occupy Wall Street movement had
put the matter of growing inequality front and center, and its framing
of the issue as "the one percent vs. the 99 percent" was drawn
directly from the work of Piketty and his collaborator Emmanuel Saez.
President Obama had declared inequality to be the paramount challenge of
our times.

Paul Krugman mentioned the book in several New York Times columns and
gave it a glowing review in The New York Review of Books. Another Nobel
laureate, Robert Solow, touted the work in The New Republic. Krugman and
yet another Nobel prizewinner, Joseph Stiglitz, appeared with Piketty at
a public discussion of the work in New York, which drew national
attention. The author triumphally toured the U.S., figured on a magazine
cover as "the rock star of economics," and met with the secretary of
the Treasury. For once, the stars had lined up just right.

For Capital and Ideology, the alignment proved less favorable. For one
thing, Paul Krugman did not like the book. I confess that, as I was
translating, I often asked myself, because of Krugman's role in the
success of the first book, what he would make of the argument. My hunch
was that he was unlikely to appreciate Piketty's perspective. For all
his shrewdness as a political commentator, Krugman remains a
mathematical economist at heart: What he admires most are models that
clarify the way the world works, and in Piketty's first book he
thought he had found an important one.

At the end of that book, however, Piketty had alluded to his wish to
escape the straitjacket of mathematical economics and stated his
admiration for the Annales school of French historians, pioneers in the
study of social history over the longue durée. The new book is in part
the story of Piketty's re-education as a historian. For Piketty, the
point was that history needn't have turned out as it did. From the
wrong turns taken in the past he sought to derive correctives applicable
to the present. This was lost on Krugman, who did not follow Piketty in
his "historical turn."

If Krugman's cool response was predictable, the second strike against
a repeat of the earlier success came as a bolt out of the blue: The
book's launch coincided with the onset of the COVID lockdown.
Harvard's Center for European Studies, where I am an affiliate,
invited Piketty to give the first annual Stanley Hoffmann Memorial
Lecture on March 6, 2020, just as Capital and Ideology was appearing in
bookstores. As it happened, that was also the day that bottles of Purell
first began to appear in Harvard buildings as news of the COVID threat
spread. I recall a conversation with Thomas about whether COVID would
turn out to be as serious as some people were saying. Of course, it
proved to be far worse than either of us could have imagined.

After the lecture, Piketty flew home to France, but he was scheduled to
return to the U.S. a few weeks later to begin a promotional tour. I was
to appear with him at an event at Stanford and had already bought my
plane ticket. But everything came to a sudden halt, and the tour was
abruptly canceled. Although sales to date have been quite respectable
for a book of this kind, there would be no repeat of the miracle of
C21c.

Odds and Ends

I really enjoyed the first season of Tyler Mahan Coe's podcast Cocaine
& Rhinestones , in which he told
long, deeply researched, and deeply discursive stories about country
music artists the Louvin Brothers, Bobbie Gentry, Jeannie C. Reilly, and
Merle Haggard, among many others. This season
is an incredibly
detailed and even more discursive chronological history of the Nashville
Sound as told through the life and career of George Jones. There have
only been two episodes put up so far, but it's really well done: fun,
fascinating, and deeply informative.

Last week in my Mets obsession, I forgot to link to this fun and silly
ten-minute video: "The Best Last Best Plane Ride Ever
."

Also last week, I put up that, um, difficult-to-understand argument
about the state of Jewish studies. If the topic really interests you,
then I'd strongly recommend this essay by the estimable Shaul Magid
,
which tells the story of the discipline from inside and out (but which I
think could have used more emphasis on the role of its funders).

I really love the "Playing for Change" videos. They are guaranteed
to put you in a good mood, even if the state of the world (or of
"change") does not really justify it. Among my favorites:

"Iko Iko "

"Ripple "

"Biko "

"War/No More Trouble
"

But you can fool around with the site and find your own, and maybe send
them some dough when you do.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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