A fact from Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the 21st Century:

In 2012, the total budget of the Egyptian ministry of education for all primary, middle, and secondary schools and universities in a country of 85 million was less than $5 billion. A few hundred kilometers to the east, Saudi Arabia and its 20 million citizens enjoyed oil revenues of $300 billion...
Like so many of things I have read in the great and long work, this fact struck me forcefully. It's a fact that you can expect will not make an appearance in the papers ("What has that got to do with anything?") or be considered by TV commentators of the source and nature of social unrest in that part of the world. But it says so much if you think about it—think about Saudi Arabia, about the outcomes of the Arab Spring, about what was at stake in the first war in Iraq. For Piketty, this terrific unevenness represents one of the many obstacles to the kind of global democratic tax system he thinks has any realistic chance of dealing with the growing inequalities that the capitalist system endogenously generates when there are no massive and exogenous social and natural disruptions.

But let's think about this in another way: $300 billion in oil revenues for what? It appears for nothing. The world gets nothing of any cultural value from Saudi Arabia. Indeed, when I watched the documentary Electro Chaabi, which screens this Saturday and Sunday at SIFF, I wrote, with Piketty in my mind:

Here is what you must consider when watching this excellent documentary about a new musical genre, mahraganat, that was formed in the streets of Cairo: Egypt has a population of 85 million and a gross domestic product (GDP) of $260 billion; Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has a population of 20 million but a GDP that’s more than double ($560 billion) Egypt’s. And yet the world has not seen one interesting cultural innovation come out of the richer country, and lots have emerged from Egypt.
Money has simply made Saudi Arabia dead to the world. Nothing but capital goes into it and oil and some sad stories come out of it. Egypt suffers economically, true, but it also shows that money is not everything...

I bring all of this up because I think it's time to meet and talk Piketty's new book. It has had a huge impact on my current thinking, and it is hugely popular ("The book is number one in the non-fiction book category of The New York Times and sold out in its first week on Amazon"). He is even now regularly called a rock star, and he will probably send many men and women who call themselves economists (as if their faith in VaR models constituted anything remotely related to economics, which is always political economy) to the graveyard of bad ideas that only die when their tenured believers die.

So on June 10, at the Vermillion Gallery at 6:30 pm, I will attempt to moderate an open conversation about this work. The conversation will not be clean or neat but simply be a way to share things we have found in this book that make sense or don't make sense...

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If you have the time and have read the book, or are reading the book (or planning to do so), join me and hopefully an economist (he has yet to be confirmed) for a drinking discussion of what will certainly be regarded as the book of the year.