Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of Nature, Culture, and Inequality by Thomas Piketty

Nature, Culture, and Inequality by Thomas Piketty

Nature, Culture, and Inequality

A Comparative and Historical Perspective

by Thomas Piketty

  • Published:
  • Sep 2024, 96 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

A bestselling economist's history of inequality and guide to a more just, sustainable world, distilled into an engaging and accessible pocket-sized text.

In this unique work, Thomas Piketty presents a synthesis of his historical and comparative research on inequality. He challenges the idea that there could be natural inequalities and shows that the march toward equality has always depended on political and social struggles, addressing diverse topics such as:

education,
inheritance,
the climate crisis,
the taxation of wealth, and
gender disparities.

Adapted from Piketty's 2022 lecture at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Nature, Culture, and Inequality makes his important argument available to a wider audience for the first time. With a clear, conversational tone, he provides a strong foundation of data and concrete examples of how we can continue to level the playing field.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"A readable introduction to Piketty's worldview." —Kirkus Reviews

"Through his seminal works, Piketty has become a beacon for those seeking to comprehend and combat economic inequity. He's not just an economist, he's also a visionary whose ideas inspire a new generation to debate and shape a (much) more equitable future." —Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind and Utopia For Realists

"In a hundred engaging and easy-to-read pages, Thomas Piketty paints a vivid portrait of economic inequality's many faces—as it relates to income, wealth, gender, education, taxation, inheritance, debt, and climate change. Throughout, Piketty documents the collective choices that have charted inequality's past path in order to challenge democratic politics to build a more equal future. If you have one hour to devote to thinking about economic inequality today, spend it with this book." —Daniel Markovits, author of The Meritocracy Trap

"Nature, Culture, and Inequality is a clear, incisive examination of one of the world's major economic problems—extreme income and wealth inequality. In this short, readable volume, Thomas Piketty explains how extreme inequality hurts millions of people worldwide and why some nations have far worse inequality than others. Piketty also makes the case that the high levels of inequality in countries like the United States are not part of the natural order and can—and should—be greatly reduced to create fairer economies for all." —Steven Greenhouse, author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor

This information about Nature, Culture, and Inequality was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty is a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Paris School of Economics, and codirector of the World Inequality Lab. He is the author of the landmark New York Times bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), as well as Capital and Ideology (2020) and A Brief History of Equality (2022).

Willard Wood grew up in France and has translated more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction from the French. He has won the Lewis Galantière Award for Literary Translation and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation. His recent translations include Camille de Toledo's Theseus, His New Life (Other Press 2023) and Patrick Boucheron's Trace and Aura (Other Press 2022). He lives in Norfolk, Connecticut.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more history, current affairs and religion...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

When I get a little money I buy books...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.