I read every page of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A friend and colleague wanted to write a review, so I read the book. Then he bailed. He owes me.

In any event, now I’m hooked. I’ve read all the reviews I’m aware of. Most are quite technical, focusing on balanced growth paths, the size of the elasticity of substitution, net versus gross production, the proper theory of optimal saving, and other issues of technical economics. Some are more basic exercises of statistics. Did Dr. Piketty support his point? Did he use his data correctly? Some are more conversational, like former Treasury secretary and prominent economist Larry Summers’s powerful critique.

But the best review I’ve read — while touching a bit on these issues — doesn’t ask whether Dr. Piketty is wrong, but asks whether he is wrong.

You can read economist Deirdre McCloskey’s entire review — forthcoming in the Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics — here. I finished it today, and it’s outstanding. Also, economist John Cochrane kindly provides excerpts here.

NR readers will particularly like this section:

Reading the book is a good opportunity to understand the latest of the leftish worries about “capitalism,” and to test its economic and philosophical strength. Piketty’s worry about the rich getting richer is indeed merely “the latest” of a long series back to Malthus and Ricardo and Marx. Since those founding geniuses of Classical economics, a trade-tested betterment (a locution to be preferred to “capitalism,” with its erroneous implication that capital accumulation, not innovation, is what made us better off) has enormously enriched large parts of a humanity now seven times larger in population than in 1800, and bids fair in the next fifty years or so to enrich everyone on the planet. Look at China and India (and stop saying, “But not everyone there has become rich”; they will, as the European history shows, at any rate by the ethically relevant standard of basic comforts denied to most people in England and France before 1800, or in China before its new beginning in 1978 and India’s before 1991). And yet the left in its worrying routinely forgets this most important secular event since the invention of agriculture — the Great Enrichment of the last two centuries — and goes on worrying and worrying, like the little dog worrying about his bone in the Traveler’s insurance company advertisement on TV, in a new version every half generation or so.
Here is a partial list of the worrying pessimisms, which each has had its day of fashion since the time, as the historian of economic thought Anthony Waterman put it, “Malthus’ first [1798] Essay made land scarcity central. And so began a century-long mutation of ‘political economy,’ the optimistic science of wealth, to ‘economics,’ the pessimistic science of scarcity.” Malthus worried that workers would proliferate and Ricardo worried that the owners of land would engorge the national product. Marx worried, or celebrated, depending on how one views historical materialism, that owners of capital would at least make a brave attempt to engorge it. (The Classical economists are Piketty’s masters, and his theory is self-described — before page 26 — as the sum of Ricardo and Marx.) Mill worried, or celebrated, depending on how one views the sick hurry of modern life, that the stationary state was around the corner. Then the economists, many on the left but some on the right, in quick succession 1880 to the present — at the same time that trade-tested betterment was driving real wages up and up and up — commenced worrying about, to name a few of the grounds for pessimisms they discerned concerning ”capitalism”: greed, alienation, racial impurity, workers’ lack of bargaining strength, women working, workers’ bad taste in consumption, immigration of lesser breeds, monopoly, unemployment, business cycles, increasing returns, externalities, under-consumption, monopolistic competition, separation of ownership from control, lack of planning, post-War stagnation, investment spillovers, unbalanced growth, dual labor markets, capital insufficiency (William Easterly calls it “capital fundamentalism”), peasant irrationality, capital-market imperfections, public choice, missing markets, informational asymmetry, third-world exploitation, advertising, regulatory capture, free riding, low-level traps, middle-level traps, path dependency, lack of competitiveness, consumerism, consumption externalities, irrationality, hyperbolic discounting, too big to fail, environmental degradation, underpaying of care, overpayment of CEOs, slower growth, and more.

— Michael R. Strain is deputy director of economic policy studies and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/MichaelRStrain.