Capital in the Twenty-first Century - Thomas Piketty

This is the most important book I have read on economics, politics and social structure.
A fascinating project.  Piketty decides he want to look at capitalism's workings and how it affects wealth distribution.  He notices that pretty much all economists discuss this issue from a theoretical point of view based entirely on models, which are often highly political at the base.  So he sets out to accumulate some facts and figures around the distribution of capital going back to the Middle Ages.  He works with probates for much of the period to develop some fairly reliable figures.  In France, he works with extensive tax records going back to the revolution.  In England, he uses the same date but from the mid-1800s to develop reliable data around capital accumulation and the ratio between wages/labour and capital.  He looks at some other countries also where records exist that are useful.  A monumental task - he and small team spend about 10 years on this.
Then he writes his tome.  The facts and figures he has accumulated show that most modern theoretical models of how capitalism works are wrong in major ways.
Some important points he makes:
1) Laissez-fiare economics is a fantasy.  The workings of capitalism are always highly political.  Even laissez-faire capitalism requires a structure of laws and regulations to make it happen.
2) Left unchecked, the tendency of capital is to always accumulate at the top.   This is because historically the return on capital averages 5 to 6 percent,  and the return tends to grow the larger the fortune.  Labour's return fluctuates much more and tends to average a 1 to 2 percent growth rate.
3) Economically, the period after WW 2 was an historical anomaly.  The rapid growth rate of labour returns was the result of several decades of catch-up after the destruction of capital engendered by the two world wars.  We are now in a period of returning to historical norms  ie.  slow economic growth of 1 to 2 percent.  Coupled with slow population growth, especially in Europe, this situation makes established capital increasingly significant as a source of income as it passes from one generation to the next.
4) This modern slow growth era, coupled with the historical tendency of capital, will lead to a progressive accumulation of wealth at the top, which has already exceeded 50% in many advanced western economies.  Unless political action is taken to curb this trend, it is possible for the top 10% to end up owning 80% or 90% of the wealth in a society.
5)  He looks at the american tendency of outrageous salaries for CEOs and finds no correlation between their work and the increase in company value.  Company value tends to rise and fall with the flow of the economy at large.  He sees the growth of this tendency as the result of american low tax rates on very high incomes - in countries with higher tax rates for this bracket, the same tendency has not developed.
6)  He proposes a progressive tax on wealth, not income, as the solution to this tendency of capital to accumulate at the top.  In our current period, labour income plays a less and less important role, and capital return's importance grows.  His solution will be criticized as utopian for many reasons, but he points out that we do now have the capability of tracking individual wealth and ownership around the world, at least in the advanced countries, and there is no technical reason why this could not be done to create an accurate picture of an individual's wealth.  Of course the top 10%, and especially the top 1%, are dead against this, and as they more and more control the political process (as well as the media), the likelihood of seeing this solutions in place is low for now.
Before the French Revolution, the 1% owned 90% of the wealth.  The revolution was the solution to this issue...
7)  He also looks at the issue of public debt, which is increasing in Western countries at the same time as wealth accumulation in private hands is increasing at an even greater rate.  Most western governments has close to a balance of $0 in assets/debts in that government owned equity roughly equals its debt  ie.  about the equivalent of 1year's total economic production within the country.  Private wealth, especially in Europe, is now equivalent to 5 or 6 times the total economic production, and is growing.  An odd situation - the government is broke while the citizens, especially in the upper levels, see an accumulation of wealth close to the levels of the Belle Epoque at the turn of the 20th century.  This is another reason to consider the tax on total wealth.  A low rate of taxation, 1% or 2% even, could eliminate most of the public debt within a short time.  (However, paying interest on public debt is another way for society's wealth to migrate up to to the top....)

A Time to Keep Silence - Patrick Leigh Fermor

A book about stays in several monasteries.  Reveals his fascination with things medieval.  There is one section about a visit to the rock monasteries of Cappadocia.

I found this book a bit thick and self-indulgent; not so much about the purported subject as about Fermor's image of the subject.  Loaded with charged adjectives, you really learn more about him and his view of life than you do about the monasteries.  For someone who had so much trouble with authority and structure in his schooling, he is remarkably respectful of, even infatuated with, authority in other realms.  This is equally true when you look at who he praises in this travel books too, though less evident.  As if he can have a romanticized view of authority and a life of rules, but only so long as it doesn't apply to him.

A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor

The first of the three books about Fermor's walk from Holland to Istanbul in the mid 30's, covering the walk through Holland and Germany.  It shows the same fascination with the intersection of Roman and Medieval history with the modern world.  I think in this book he has a bit more contact with everyday folk compared with the second volume where he seems to spend most of his time with the landed aristocracy that has come down in the world.  There is also more of an awareness of politics, social movements and recent history (WW 1) than in the subsequent book, which makes it more grounded and less fanciful.

I have recently also been reading Picketty's huge tome, Capital in the 21st Century, and interestingly, there is a certain intersection of the two books.  As he traces the history of capital, Piketty's charts show the huge drop in capital in Europe between the two wars, which wiped out many family fortunes and essentially destroyed what remained of the historical aristocracy.  This very class is the one with which he spends so much time, especially in the book dealing with Hungary and Romania.  You see this in the character's stories of their youth in Paris and London (pre WW 1, at the height of capital accumulation by the 10%/1%) and their current life at their country estate, much reduced but surrounded by decades, even centuries of accumulated trappings.

House of Jasmine - Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

Like Al Aswany, Meguid creates a portrait of life in modern Egypt, a life of frustration and stagnation.  Meguid though, tends to create an impressionistic portrait of this life, mostly because it is more an interior portrait of a particular character and his life.  He doesn't have the social and political breadth of Al Aswany.  It is a very personal portrait where many of Aswany's themes and ideas are present, but as a background against which the character's life plays out.  Not as engaging as Al Aswany's writing.

The State of Egypt - Alaa Al Aswany

A collection of what are probably newspaper editorials written in the years preceding the 2012 Egyptian revolution.
It covers the same social criticism as his novels but in non-fiction form.  An interesting companion to his novels, but his novels are richer.

Between the Woods and the Water - Patrick Leigh Fermor

An account of a journey by foot undertaken by Fermor in 1935/1936.  The whole journey extends from Holland to Istanbul, but this book covers the section through Hungary and Romania.  It is well written, and fun to imagine travelling like this, but the most interesting part is the portrait he draws of a world that was on the edge of disappearing in 1936.   Eastern Europe was at least 50 years behind it seems at that time.  It was still a land of landed aristocratic families and village tenant farmers, something which had disappeared from France, England and Germany by then.  It is as if this corner of the world had remained untouched by the cataclysm of the First World War, and the social and traditional norms that had been swept away elsewhere hung on for a few last decades in the world Fermor is travelling through.  Of course, you have to realize also that he is of that world, and a young romantic, so his portrait is highly coloured.
But it is still an interesting oddity to read this book that would have been produced at the same time that the Surrealist, Dadaists and other modern art movements were raging elsewhere.