Showing posts with label commute. Show all posts
Showing posts with label commute. Show all posts

7 May 2014

Thomas Piketty's Capital: Live Blog IIII


Back to the beginning. That was slightly embarrassing. But like the idea behind this says:

We live tweet events so why don't we live blog our books? They may last longer than a Premier League match or election night special, but we read them continuously and their covers bound a discrete event. During their course our support veers between characters or new facts prompt us to change intellectual direction. They ebb and flow like all tweet worthy events.

Turns out this is not a subway book. The physical heft was obviously a challenge. But reading in snippets, nodding off in the early morning, and stopping mid-page at my station wasn't working out. I didn't remember much of the previous foray and so Piketty's patient explanation of ideas never found root in the sand of my mind.

So it's home reading for this. Where I can control my environment (to some degree) and regulate properly the cadence of reading. Because it's too good a book to leave publicly displayed on my shelf as an unread vanity book.

I mean, I have my pride.

3 May 2014

Thomas Piketty's Capital: Live Blog III


We live tweet events so why don't we live blog our books? They may last longer than a Premier League match or election night special, but we read them continuously and their covers bound a discrete event. During their course our support veers between characters or new facts prompt us to change intellectual direction. They ebb and flow like all tweet worthy events.

Past the introduction now after the Friday evening commute. And the Annales influence is plain to see. Piketty's strength - and claim - is his data set stretching back into the late eighteenth century. Everything is la longue durée. Change is tectonic: imperceptible to a generation, but profound over time. I've always found this approach fascinating but becomes more striking when coupled with compounding numbers.

Sorry, where were we? Yes. We're beginning to define our terms and explain foundational concepts like α = r x ß. Which is all very interesting. But still not as exciting as encountering the Annales school living, breathing, and in a book about the economy.