As surely as “follow the money” became a mantra, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” turns “follow the capital” into a cultural-financial detective story about the evolution of the contemporary world. How it waxes and wanes and shifts around over time. Material wealth and value (money, land, property). Piketty, born in 1971, looks at everything that has led to the current moment through one defining lens: capital. That may sound dry as dust, but trust me this is a movie that provokes a consistent sense of “Whoa!” By the end, you’ll know with greater clarity than you did before why we’re in the mess we’re in.īut to invoke James Brown: Please, please, please don’t be put off by the title of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” It is taken, of course, from the title of the best-selling book by Thomas Piketty, the French economist who became the new rock star of wonks after the book was published in France in 2013 (it arrived in the U.S. That stark reality is the taking-off point for “ Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” a nimble and eye-opening documentary that puts you in the revelatory position of looking back over the last 300 years - where we’ve been and where we’re going - from a God’s-eye economic view. Their lives, in effect, were a death sentence. (Not that being a landed servant was any picnic.) They existed in poverty, without health care or schooling or much of anything else. In Europe, the majority of people were hand-to-mouth laborers who drifted from place to place, lacking the benefits of being landed servants.

It was about the staggering inequality that society was built on. (You read that right.) No, this wasn’t just about the fact that human beings back then tended to live less long. Do you know what the average life expectancy was in the 18th century? It was 17.

Capital in the twenty first century