IC: Can you talk a little bit about the effect of Marx on your

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IC: Can you talk a little bit about the effect of Marx on your thinking and how you came to start reading him?

Thomas Piketty: Marx?

IC: Yeah.

TP: I never managed really to read it. I mean I don’t know if you’ve tried to read it. Have you tried?

IC: Some of his essays, but not the economics work.

TP: The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is a short and strong piece. Das Kapital, I think, is very difficult to read and for me it was not very influential.

IC: Because your book, obviously with the title, it seemed like you were tipping your hat to him in some ways.

TP: No not at all, not at all! The big difference is that my book is a book about the history of capital. In the books of Marx there’s no data.

Piketty got his PhD at 22 and worked at MIT straight after.

Is this "smart people read for 5 hours a day" (reading as an end in itself, not reading bus stop directions or academic papers) shit pushed by /lit/ a bad joke? You guys say glorify reading as an end in itself but give zero justification for it.