On page 572 of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century....

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Our Favorite Books of 2014 - Book review

On page 572 of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century ...

Kidding. We dutifully bought Capital as if it were summer's War and Peace. He should have called it Fifty Shades of Green. I never read it. At least I admit it.

Truthfully, I had not fully recovered from reading John Cassidy's How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) with my dear book group. Published in 2009, it's still a page-turner despite the great manic swings of economic fortune and fashion since then. For MBA-less people like me, Cassidy writes clearly about economic history within the frame of four basic utopian and flawed illusions: harmony (the free market generates good outcomes), stability (free market economy is sturdy), predictability (distribution of returns can be foreseen), and Homo Economicus (individuals are rational and act on perfect information). The index looks like the membership roster of the White Men's Club.

In Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Haymarket Books), Arundhati Roy vividly describes what market theory end games look like in her native India. It is calamitous: deforested lands, poisoned water, India-on-two-dollars-a-day poverty, debt-ridden suicidal farmers in a country where 100 people own...