This is an attempt to read Thomas Piketty's Capital & Ideology!
Rather Hefty tome running into 1050 pages.
Being a Math whiz, I am going to argue that it will take me about 4 months including skipped days to finish it at the rate of 10 pages per day. Today is July 18, 2020. Incredibly I am coming back to this space after the last blog entry on July 21, 2012 when the blog for June 20 was entered. A eight year hiatus!!!
The blogging is for the social commitment element of the reading habit formation...
A handful of friends will be made aware. They can frown when I slack!
Getting into some quick calculations: 10 pages probably needs around 20-25 minutes to read on an average. Followed by notes consolidation, thoughts and blogging of another 15 minutes...so should be keeping aside 45 minutes a day.
Aiming to finish by November...let's get started! An interesting time to start as it is the Malayalam month of Karkidakam on which daily reading of the Ramayana is undertaken.
Day 1
Tough start. My time estimates were utterly wrong. The ideas are complex and the style is not easily flowing, so it took me around 40 minutes to complete 10 pages. It will get faster during pages with graphs and tables...But I guess one hour is a more realistic time estimate for the daily 10 pages.
Will take a break now and return to the page to consolidate the notes!
From the first 10 pages:
Every society invents a discourse to justify its inequality.
Inequality persists in the property regime and political regime.
Current narrative of property ownership, free market, meritocracy and entrepreneurship is weak. Identity politics is rising in response.
Revolutionary mass movements have only illusory internal coherence.
Equality and education alone have helped in the development and progress.
I wonder why he doesn't country universal schooling as an exploitative institution as Ivan Illich correctly pointed out in Deschooling Society.
"The subject of this book is the history and evolution of the inequality regimes."
A new participatory socialism for 21st century is outlines.
Ideology is defined in a positive sense as a set of a priori ideas and discourses describing how society should be structured.
"The reason for this failure (easy ethno-religious and national cleavages of the disadvantaged) is the lack of an ideology capable of persuading them that what unites them is more important than what divides them"
"Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological & political."
In contrast to Marxism that seeks to give primacy to economic superstructure to society based on productivity, "it is the realm of ideas, the political-ideological sphere, that is truly autonomous."
Facts are largely products of institutions. Societies create social, fiscal, and legal categories to describe, measure and transform themselves. To appreciate facts properly we must understand their context, which consists of complex, overlapping, self interested intersections between the observational apparatus and the society under study.
Rather Hefty tome running into 1050 pages.
Being a Math whiz, I am going to argue that it will take me about 4 months including skipped days to finish it at the rate of 10 pages per day. Today is July 18, 2020. Incredibly I am coming back to this space after the last blog entry on July 21, 2012 when the blog for June 20 was entered. A eight year hiatus!!!
The blogging is for the social commitment element of the reading habit formation...
A handful of friends will be made aware. They can frown when I slack!
Getting into some quick calculations: 10 pages probably needs around 20-25 minutes to read on an average. Followed by notes consolidation, thoughts and blogging of another 15 minutes...so should be keeping aside 45 minutes a day.
Aiming to finish by November...let's get started! An interesting time to start as it is the Malayalam month of Karkidakam on which daily reading of the Ramayana is undertaken.
Day 1
Tough start. My time estimates were utterly wrong. The ideas are complex and the style is not easily flowing, so it took me around 40 minutes to complete 10 pages. It will get faster during pages with graphs and tables...But I guess one hour is a more realistic time estimate for the daily 10 pages.
Will take a break now and return to the page to consolidate the notes!
From the first 10 pages:
Every society invents a discourse to justify its inequality.
Inequality persists in the property regime and political regime.
Current narrative of property ownership, free market, meritocracy and entrepreneurship is weak. Identity politics is rising in response.
Revolutionary mass movements have only illusory internal coherence.
Equality and education alone have helped in the development and progress.
I wonder why he doesn't country universal schooling as an exploitative institution as Ivan Illich correctly pointed out in Deschooling Society.
"The subject of this book is the history and evolution of the inequality regimes."
A new participatory socialism for 21st century is outlines.
Ideology is defined in a positive sense as a set of a priori ideas and discourses describing how society should be structured.
"The reason for this failure (easy ethno-religious and national cleavages of the disadvantaged) is the lack of an ideology capable of persuading them that what unites them is more important than what divides them"
"Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological & political."
In contrast to Marxism that seeks to give primacy to economic superstructure to society based on productivity, "it is the realm of ideas, the political-ideological sphere, that is truly autonomous."
Facts are largely products of institutions. Societies create social, fiscal, and legal categories to describe, measure and transform themselves. To appreciate facts properly we must understand their context, which consists of complex, overlapping, self interested intersections between the observational apparatus and the society under study.
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