100% of people have a view on Thomas Piketty's "Capital In The 21st Century" - for better or worse - confidently spewing supportive anecdotes of what they think he said and what they believe he means... But, as WSJ reports [2], people who spent hard-earned (or government-subsidized) money to buy his socialist tome have only read 2.4%. It appears few - if any - made it past page 26... Perhaps they would all be better off reading this [3].
As WSJ reports [2] - based on the so-called Hawking Index (which correlates to pages read) mockingly named after Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time which held the record for most-bought-least-read book for a long time...
"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty : 2.4% read
Yes, it came out just three months ago. But the contest isn't even close. Mr. Piketty's book is almost 700 pages long, and the last of the top five popular highlights appears on page 26.
Stephen Hawking is off the hook; from now on, this measure should be known as the Piketty Index.
(Methodology: Take the page numbers of a book's five top highlights, average them, and divide by the number of pages in the whole book. The higher the number, the more of the book we're guessing most people are likely to have read.)
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Of course - there are plenty of taking heads willing to explain it to you but we offered an alternative economics textbook here that we suspect offers more accurate and useful insight [3]...
[4]
