Comment by skrebbel
1 year ago
Offtopic but I'm still sad that "On Bullshit" didn't go for that highest form of book titles, the single noun like "Capital", "Sapiens", etc
1 year ago
Offtopic but I'm still sad that "On Bullshit" didn't go for that highest form of book titles, the single noun like "Capital", "Sapiens", etc
Starting with "On" is cooler in philosophical tradition, though, starting in classical and medieval times, e.g. On Interpretation, On the Heavens, etc by Aristotle, De Veritate, De Malo, etc. by Aquinas. Capital is actually "Das Kapital", too
It's very hipster, Das Kapital. (with the dot/period, check the cover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital#/media/File:Zentra... )
But in English it would be just "Capital", right? (The uncountable nouns are rarely used with articles, it's "happiness" not "the happiness". See also https://old.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/12hf5wd/comment/jf... )
Yeah so I meant the Piketty book, not Marx. But I googled it and turns out it's actually named "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", which disappoints me even more than "On Bullshit"
And, for the full picture it's probably important to consider that the main claim of the book is based on very unreliable data/methodology. (Though note that it does not necessarily make the claim false! See [1])
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/10/pi...
And then later similar claims about inequality were similarly made using bad methodology (data).
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/th...
[1] "Indeed, in some cases, Sutch argues that it has risen more than Piketty claims. Sutch is rather a journeyman of economic history upset not about Piketty’s conclusions but about the methods Piketty used to reach those conclusions."
1 reply →