As far as I can tell skimming through these comments, no one else here has actually read the thing.<p>I'm not finished with it yet, so I won't offer a final opinion, but to the page I'm on it's been an impressive work. He's very apt at weaving together a narrative spanning far, far, longer than nearly all economics research, which is backed up with real data they (him and collaborators) spent quite a long time digging up and parsing. The book uses this sweeping dataset to color the major research/writings of prominent economists from several eras. Up to this point I had not read anything that had stepped back to this extent in terms of considering a history of economic thought, but which also backed up the history with data.<p>Personally, I find the basic tenets of his thesis pretty convincing, although, again, I have not yet finished the book. I think this was published at a very opportune time as people begin to read more about the similarities between the wealth structure of the early 20th century and today. Considering the middle of the 20th century as something of an aberration is difficult to wrap my head around, because (like most of us I assume) I've had so little exposure to people and their experiences from before 1940.<p>EDIT: To be clear, the foundation of this book began with research in the 1990s, so it's not as if I was trying to imply it was a completely opportunistic publishing. Rather, I consider it to be somewhat fortuitous to be able to gain a historical appreciation of these trends as they reach new peaks.