Capital In the 21st Century. (12A.)
Directed by Justin Pemberton.
Featuring Thomas Piketty, Kate Williams, Paul Mason, Francis Fukuyama, Joseph Stiglitz and Gillian Tett. 103 mins.
Capital in the 21st century – you got any? No, me neither, and here's the reason why. Based on his best selling book, French economist Piketty and some of his friends from academia explain how it came to be that 21st century levels of inequality mirror those between aristocracy and peasantry in the 18th century.
Viewers are now accustomed to having their oppression packaged up and beamed back to them in slick montages of archive news, movie and TV clips, interspersed with talking heads. This is a well put together example of the genre, though nothing we haven't seen done better by Adam Curtis or Michael Moore. More than that, it mostly covers old, or at least obvious, ground. I used to follow politics and current affairs but about a decade ago they changed the cast, and the quality of the writing deteriorated to such a degree that it became too demeaning to watch. So I'm now pig-ignorant and uninformed, and even I didn't learn nothing from it.
Only two things stuck with me. Firstly, women's fashion and Christmas were engines for fuelling consumerism during the Industrial Revolution. Secondly, in a psychological experiment using an openly rigged game of Monopoly – by a toss of a coin one player started with twice as much money as the opponent, and got twice as much when he passed Go – the winner felt he deserved victory and didn't acknowledge the part luck had played. I think that says a lot about the entitlement of the super rich and why trickle down economics always fails – though I wonder if the researchers factored in the degree to which people inevitably become tossers playing Monopoly.
The film's chief asset is the clarity of its explanations and storytelling. No one is left behind, but nobody is talked down to. But for a film filled with academics, it isn't very academically rigourous. It doesn't state any aims at the beginning: after a brief overview, it just kicks off in the 18th century and works its way chronologically to the present day (or 2018 actually.) Crucially, there's no conclusion. Our little Piketty just says that there are historical reasons to be optimistic about the future. Which is nice, but on the screen we are shown archive footage of happy, smiling young people - celebrating VE day. So equality is just another world war away.
Directed by Justin Pemberton.
Featuring Thomas Piketty, Kate Williams, Paul Mason, Francis Fukuyama, Joseph Stiglitz and Gillian Tett. 103 mins.
Capital in the 21st century – you got any? No, me neither, and here's the reason why. Based on his best selling book, French economist Piketty and some of his friends from academia explain how it came to be that 21st century levels of inequality mirror those between aristocracy and peasantry in the 18th century.
Viewers are now accustomed to having their oppression packaged up and beamed back to them in slick montages of archive news, movie and TV clips, interspersed with talking heads. This is a well put together example of the genre, though nothing we haven't seen done better by Adam Curtis or Michael Moore. More than that, it mostly covers old, or at least obvious, ground. I used to follow politics and current affairs but about a decade ago they changed the cast, and the quality of the writing deteriorated to such a degree that it became too demeaning to watch. So I'm now pig-ignorant and uninformed, and even I didn't learn nothing from it.
Only two things stuck with me. Firstly, women's fashion and Christmas were engines for fuelling consumerism during the Industrial Revolution. Secondly, in a psychological experiment using an openly rigged game of Monopoly – by a toss of a coin one player started with twice as much money as the opponent, and got twice as much when he passed Go – the winner felt he deserved victory and didn't acknowledge the part luck had played. I think that says a lot about the entitlement of the super rich and why trickle down economics always fails – though I wonder if the researchers factored in the degree to which people inevitably become tossers playing Monopoly.
The film's chief asset is the clarity of its explanations and storytelling. No one is left behind, but nobody is talked down to. But for a film filled with academics, it isn't very academically rigourous. It doesn't state any aims at the beginning: after a brief overview, it just kicks off in the 18th century and works its way chronologically to the present day (or 2018 actually.) Crucially, there's no conclusion. Our little Piketty just says that there are historical reasons to be optimistic about the future. Which is nice, but on the screen we are shown archive footage of happy, smiling young people - celebrating VE day. So equality is just another world war away.
