Piketty Misreads Austen
Thomas Piketty’s best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) uses literary references to reinforce its main theme, and from the outset he says that nineteenth-century novels are helpful in understanding relative wealth in those times and ours. Together with Balzac’s work, he claims, “the novels of Jane Austen . . . paint striking portraits of the distribution of wealth in Britain . . . between 1790 and 1830,” “grasp[] the hidden contours of wealth and its inevitable implications for the lives of men and women, including their marital strategies and personal hopes and disappointments,” and “depict[] the effects of inequality with a verisimilitude and evocative power that no statistical or theoretical analysis can match”.
This article argues, however, that, despite how interesting such a use of Austen’s works might be, Piketty disappointingly presents a distorted picture of them. Austen, in fact, recognized that the society of her time was much more dynamic and mobile than Piketty suggests. Piketty also ignores Adam Smith, who is present in Jane Austen’s works through a key principle of his theory of conduct and economic growth: human beings do not strive to be equal but to be better.
Carlos Rodríguez Braun (Buenos Aires, 1948) is a retired academic of History of Economic Thought in the Complutense University of Madrid, and corresponding academic of the National Academy of Economic Sciences of Argentina. He has a doctorate in Economic Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid and is a Bachelor in Economics from the UCA. He has published articles in specialized journals, and is author of more than twenty books. Member ov various academic associations, he is evaluator and forms part of the advisory boards of scientific publications in Spain and other countries. He is a reference and creator of opinion on social, political and economic reality, as well as a defender of globalization and liberalism. In his journalistic facet, positions that stand out are that of director of España Económica and subdirector of Cambio 16 and of the television broadcast program El Valor del Dinero de La2. He is currently a columnist for La Razón, Expansión, Libertad Digital and he is a daily participant in Onda Cero Radio. He has published articles in prestigious journals such as History of Political Economy, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought or the Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines. He is also author of about twenty books and translator of figures o economic science like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich A. von Hayek. With forty years of academic and professional career, he has received various awards for his work, like the Honor Award from the Centro Diego de Covarrubias (2018), the Juan de Mariana (2013), the Labor Divulgativa Ejemplar award (Red Know Square, 2013), Libre Empresa (Fundación Rafael del Pino, 2010) , the 1.812 (Club Liberal 1812, 2009) and the Award School of Salamanca (El Club de los Viernes, 2020)
Edgardo Zablotsky holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He is President and full Professor of the University of CEMA, member of the National Academy of Education, the Mont Pelerin Society, and of the Academic Boards of Fundación Libertad y Progreso, Fundación Atlas (Argentina), and Fundación Acton (Argentina). He is the Executive Director of the UCEMA Friedman Hayek Center for the Study of a Free Society. Zablotsky is a distinguished consultant and lecturer in public policy in the educational area; he focuses his interest in two fields of research: non-welfare philanthropy and school choice.