When French economist Thomas Piketty published his 2014 doorstopper, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, I doubt even he thought it would cause a stir. But the 696-page book sold like mad, eventually shifting 2.5 million copies. Since its publication, Capital has been top of my list of books I want to have read, but can’t be bothered to actually read. I’ve tried to atone by hoovering up everything around the book instead: articles about Piketty, essays by Piketty, interviews with Piketty (he seems pretty twinkly, for an economist).
Now a film has come along to further disseminate Piketty’s message. It’s a documentary that seems to have been made to breach the defences of slobs like me, who have proven so far incapable of expending dwindling muscle power on opening Piketty’s book. The film covers similar ground to the book (apparently) and is essentially a potted history of inequality in the West. It starts with a romp through the injustices of the feudal era, when the work-shy gentry lorded it over the poor, and gradually moves through the decades to our glorious present, in which we’re materially better off than our peasant antecedents, but a layer of glassy Zuckerbergian rich kids float miles over the rest of us, avoiding taxes, manipulating politics and hoarding treasure.
Director Justin Pemberton has put every effort into making the economics as edible as possible. Interviews with charismatic dorks (Piketty, the FT's Gillian Tett; Columbia's Suresh Naidu) are sweetened with sparkly stuff: skits from The Simpsons, blasts of Madonna and Lorde, enjoyable clips from films like Pride and Prejudice. The historian Kate Williams pitches up a lot, bedecked in necklaces and vamp makeup, to drill into the idiots at home what Piketty’s banging on about.
While things have got better since the 18th century - when life expectancy was apparently a shocking 17 - the film uncovers concerning clues that the West could be going backwards again. As Piketty points out, in Britain today just 1 per cent of the population owns 70 per cent of the land, and income for the middle and working classes has barely budged in decades, though the wealth of the top earners has exploded. While capitalism in its present iteration isn’t as dire for the masses as it was when slavery was thriving and British workers had to get their employers' permission to leave their jobs, it’s still not working for very many. Piketty believes that unless we keep an eye on the hob, reorganising our societies to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, devastating assaults on western democratic systems could soon be afoot.
The film isn't so much depressing as quietly radicalising. Piketty is wise not to just mindlessly bash elites - he exposes instead how ordinary human beings can be and have been corrupted by wealth and the desire for its accumulation. Yet the film closes on tentative notes of optimism: attitudes can change and have radically shifted in the past. While poverty in Germany in the 1920s warmed the teapot for Hitler, the Great Depression in the States helped usher in the boldly redistributive politics of Roosevelt. The film doesn't get into pandemic economics, but it's hard not to watch it and hope that this bonkers year could bring forth a fairer way of dividing the pie, if not in Britain than in countries with a less entrenched suspicion of the state.
*FOUR STARS
Capital in the Twenty-first Century is released in UK cinemas on 25th September 2020 and available on digital platforms on 19th October 2020*
