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Comment by VodkaHaze | Hacker News Reader

The fact that the book is a best seller when its intended audience is really people with a graduate education in economics tells me that most people bought is as a signal of smartness (or as an honest effort to inform oneself, but without actually slogging through the book)

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I read the book. You'd be surprised at how readable it is.

Piketty says in the opening that his purpose is as much "contributing to the historical record", as it is making an economics argument. Probably half the book is history, with lots of data on things like "what percent of US wealth has been held as farmland vs. business equity over time", or "what did world war 2 do to savings rates"?

> The five most-highlighted passages in the Kindle edition of the text occur before page 26, just over two-thirds of the way through the introduction, according to Amazon's 'Popular Highlights' data

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10951407/Has-an...

For most of the books I read on Kindle it was the case. This statistic will make sense only compared to other books, and not by itself.

Don't be too elitist. How many who posted a comment on HN right now actually have the education to comprehend the book? I'm pretty sure it's no higher percentage than that of the general population and yet here you all are commenting on it as if you know what you're talking about.

I didn't say it requires such an education; I said it was intended for those people.

Anyone can read it, really, it's just going to be a slog for most people. Like reading some famous philosophy books (Sartre or the big name German philosophers comes to mind); it's not that anyone lacks requisites to read those book,s just that they're a slog without.

Sartre sits on my shelf unread for that reason; I imagine C21 sits on a lot of shelves for the same reason.

it's super easy to read. all of the figures are well explained, and the core concepts are hammered to death over the course of the book...

I feel like there must have been some string pulling that made this book so popular.

It just came out at an appropriate time; a year after Occupy Wall Street, etc. Inequality and inter-generational mobility is clearly on people's minds these days.

Similar story happened with Nassim Taleb's Black Swan book. It's not a particularly good book -- it's rambling, hand wavy, and only ever presents anecdotal evidence as support for its claims. But the book came out at an appropriate time (right before the financial crisis) so it was embraced.

We need a complete top-to-bottom restructuring of our Federal Government--end welfare, end the giant socialist military system hiding within our economy. We need to audit the Fed and then probably close it down or somehow come up with sound money. We need to prosecute every banker and every entity involved in the 2008 financial crisis.

That would solve 90% of what ails us. Getting the EPA off people's backs and back to some level of sanity would help a ton, too.

> (...some rant...) That would solve 90% of what ails us.

Somehow this reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1217/

Given that it was published in the US by a university press that had never had such a bestseller before, that's very unlikely.

How many pages have equations on them? I'm inclined to view your comment as cynical, but if it's more than 10 I'd admit that you've got a point.

Very few. Plenty of graphs and tables, but there are no obvious equations. What equations there are are inlined in the text, so that people wouldn't notice them while cursorily skimming the book, and they're very simple ratios of two properties.

I might come across as a uneducated plebeian (because I am), but I've recently had some similar thoughts about Shakespeare. This is not related to Capital in the 21st Century, it's just a tangent on the topic of "most people bought it as a signal of smartness."

When I was in high school, our English class slogged through The Merchant of Venice without any references or plain English translations. We just took turns reading it aloud from front to back. I understood the general plotline, but so much of it just went straight over my head. I've seen a few Shakespeare productions, but I always struggle to understand what they're talking about. I think I wasn't alone in feeling a little bit stupid and uncivilized, but I just tried to fit in anyway and pretended to enjoy it.

Then a few days ago I discovered "No Fear Shakespeare" on SparkNotes. [1] I read through the modern English version, and I am just so sad that this wasn't available to me in high school.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has commissioned 36 playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English [2], and I presume they will be performing those versions on stage. If you read that article on the New York Times (and the comments), the pretension and snobbery is off the charts.

I think people assume that you have to be smart to understand Shakespearean English, and therefore people who don't enjoy slogging through Shakespeare are stupid and ignorant. That's completely false, Elizabethan English is a foreign language. You can't just "pick it up" by being smart.

I'm not saying that we should forget the original Shakespeare. I understand the purists and academics who love the original language and pore over all the idioms and witticisms. But if I'm going to the theater to see an entertaining performance, I would much rather hear some lines of dialogue that I can actually understand. So I hope I can see some of those Oregon Shakespeare productions.

[1] http://nfs.sparknotes.com/merchant/page_2.html

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/opinion/shakespeare-in-mod...

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