Thomas Piketty's Capital & ideology: a graphic novel adaptation

Book Cover
Average Rating
Publisher
Abrams ComicArts
Publication Date
2024.
Language
English

Description

Thomas Piketty’s powerful and bestselling Capital and Ideology is now available in this accessible and richly illustrated full-color graphic novel format. Praised by Piketty himself as a “magnificent adaptation” of his original book, this graphic novel adaptation is perfect for anyone looking to understand the wealth gap and why society is the way it is today. Claire Alet and Benjamin Adam make the original work’s ideas more accessible through the addition of a family saga. Jules, the main character, is born at the end of the 19th century. He is a person of private means, a privileged figure representative of a profoundly unequal society obsessed with property. He, his family circle, and his descendants will experience the evolution of wealth and society. Eight generations of his family serve as a connecting thread running through the book, all the way up to Léa, a young woman today, who discovers the family secret at the root of their inheritance. The book concludes with six compelling proposals for participatory socialism in the 21st century. Friendly and approachable illustrations by cartoonist and children’s book author Benjamin Adam are easy to understand without diluting the subject matter. The material is adapted expertly by Claire Alet, a former journalist at Alternatives Economiques.

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Published Reviews

Booklist Review

In the spirit of comics like Economix, by Goodwin and Burr, and Hyper-capitalism, by Gonick and Kasser, Alet and Adam breathe vital narrative structure into Piketty's Capital & Ideology, creating a work of economics that won't require a dictionary for the typical reader to enjoy. Beginning with Jules in France in 1901, this story traces his family and his family's changes in wealth over time under numerous taxation systems, backward to 1789 and forward to his descendants' lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Along the way, readers learn about the various political, social, cultural, and economic systems at play in shaping the inequality burdening the globe. While most of the focus is on Europe, and France in particular, the realities of capital and colonialism mean the book is necessarily global in its view, with the final generation (Léa) bouncing between the U.S. and several European Union countries. Whimsical visual metaphors, such as references to a certain fabric-softener bear to represent quantitative easing, alongside surprisingly few charts and graphs create a striking use of the medium, avoiding the talking-head problem common in nonfiction comics. For readers who enjoy a little sarcasm and amusement as they learn, footnotes aplenty provide. Concluding with series of proposals for change, built on the ideas of participatory socialism, Capital & Ideology is an election cycle must-read.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
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Kirkus Book Review

A graphic treatment, with attendant simplifications, of French economist Piketty's difficult study of capitalism and its failings. Piketty's opus would seem an unlikely candidate for translation into what used to be called a comic book. Complete with a fictional family to humanize the dismal-science edge (whence the "novel" part of "graphic novel"), it opens with Piketty's account of France's ancien régime and its three estates (the clergy, the nobility, and all the rest), an economy based on deep inequalities. That gulf is reinforced by a proportional or flat tax, which, as one panel puts it, "since the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor,…thus favors the wealthiest group." Contrast this with progressive taxation, where the "highest incomes are more heavily taxed, for the good of all society," and you begin to build a bridge. Anathema to free-marketers and libertarians, that system worked in France, the U.S., and other advanced countries until the 1980s and '90s, when, once those taxes were rolled back, "multiple elites" began to contend on left and right, each in turn building a base that reflects "the return of the educational cleavage," the left representing educated globalists and the right building on the less educated nationalists. At present the latter seems to be ascendant, and, as a character representing Piketty at the lectern asserts, 1% of the population owns 27% of global wealth, more than twice as much as the poorest half. What's to be done? Piketty has never been short of policy recommendations, and the graphic treatment captures some of the key ones, including cracking down on taxes evaded (which, if paid, "would pay the annual salary of 34 million nurses"), taxing carbon emissions, instituting "genuine social ownership of capital" by giving employees meaningful shares in their employers' businesses, and more. It doesn't quite add up to a novel--it's really more likePiketty for Dummies. A relatively accessible approach to a subject that may still--beg pardon--tax readers without training in economics. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* In the spirit of comics like Economix, by Goodwin and Burr, and Hyper-capitalism, by Gonick and Kasser, Alet and Adam breathe vital narrative structure into Piketty's Capital & Ideology, creating a work of economics that won't require a dictionary for the typical reader to enjoy. Beginning with Jules in France in 1901, this story traces his family and his family's changes in wealth over time under numerous taxation systems, backward to 1789 and forward to his descendants' lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Along the way, readers learn about the various political, social, cultural, and economic systems at play in shaping the inequality burdening the globe. While most of the focus is on Europe, and France in particular, the realities of capital and colonialism mean the book is necessarily global in its view, with the final generation (Léa) bouncing between the U.S. and several European Union countries. Whimsical visual metaphors, such as references to a certain fabric-softener bear to represent quantitative easing, alongside surprisingly few charts and graphs create a striking use of the medium, avoiding the talking-head problem common in nonfiction comics. For readers who enjoy a little sarcasm and amusement as they learn, footnotes aplenty provide. Concluding with series of proposals for change, built on the ideas of participatory socialism, Capital & Ideology is an election cycle must-read. Copyright 2024 Booklist Reviews.

Copyright 2024 Booklist Reviews.
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