No one is investigating inequality like this guy. For two reasons:
✨ his work is extremely data driven
✨ he includes all the factors that my little feminist, Marxist, anti-colonial, environmentalist heart could ever want

I think his method is just: if R2 is greater than 0.6, it gets included. The result is tons of graphs and investigations into tax policy, electoral laws, constitutional history, and wealth distribution… but also unpaid domestic labour, the gender pay gap, climate change, global inequality, and imperialism.

…. makes his books hella long, tho. “Brief History” is a bit of a misnomer. The audiobook is still 9 hours. Which is brief-er than his other 1,100 pages / 49 hour audiobook book. But yeah.

This one got four stars from me because I’m still a bit weirded out by his optimistic tone. On the one hand, he’s right—he so thoroughly demystifies inequality that I get why he thinks we can easily tackle it (on a theoretical level). But on the other hand, equality isn’t just going to fall from the sky and I wish his political analysis was a bit sharper.

But if you want a book that bypasses the pessimism and gets straight to solutions (and you like graphs)—Piketty is your guy.