The history of black and brown communities being systemically shut out of these gains amounts to a throwaway line or two in the documentary. The part of the film that deals with the post-World War II era, in which the middle class made the greatest gains in terms of economic equality, is another example. The way the section explaining how vast wealth was built on the backs of black slaves in America barely scratches the surface. They introduced the slave trade and began building empires that rivaled and expanded those in Europe.Ĭapital’s one shortcoming is how it peripherally deals with race and inequality. Then the elites got wise to what they were missing. The discovery and colonization of the new world led to a brief period of hope for the lower classes to escape the heavily stratified class system of the old world. It also made being born into poverty a death sentence that could never be escaped.
That made a person’s station in life dependent on the accident of birth and inheritance. Marriage had nothing to do with love, but served as a way to consolidate and build more wealth. Darcy would never have married someone like the penniless Elizabeth Bennet. One interviewee, using Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as an example, explains that the wealthy Mr. Piketty and others specializing in economic history explain the rigid class system in Europe at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The first half of the film acts as history lesson. Using Piketty’s book as the source material, the documentary Capital in the Twenty-First Century draws a straight line from the eighteenth-century European aristocracy’s stranglehold on wealth to our current situation where one percent of the population controls 70% or more of the world’s monetary resources.
New Zealander filmmaker Justin Pemberton has turned the tome into an eye-opening, and at times a rather eye-popping, new documentary. It was published in the original French in 2013, and the English translation released in 2014 reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list a month after publication. Obviously, that’s an oversimplification, and Piketty’s nearly 700-page examination of wealth and income inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, goes into exhaustive detail on the subject. “The problem is concentration of ownership…” The entirety of French economist Thomas Piketty’s argument about what’s wrong with our society and how to fix it can be boiled down to those six words.
0 kommentar(er)
