Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’ wins Business Book of the Year
November 11, 2014 10:00 pm
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, an epic analysis of the roots and consequences of inequality, has been named the 2014 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year.
The GBP 30,000 prize was awarded to Thomas Piketty’s controversial economics bestseller following what Lionel Barber, FT editor and chairman of judges, said was a “vigorous debate” about “an incredibly strong field” of six shortlisted titles.
The FT has in the past questioned some of the French economist’s research for Capital, but the book has provoked a fierce debate about growing inequality and the means to tackle it. “While not everyone agreed on the policy prescriptions, we recognised the quality of the scholarship,” Mr Barber said on behalf of the judges. He called it “a challenging, but ultimately important book”.
Weighing the merits of the six finalists during an intense discussion on Tuesday, the seven judges praised Mr Piketty’s book, which runs to nearly 700 pages, for its depth of research, ambition and influence. “The issue of inequality touches everything, from CEO pay to political unrest,” one judge pointed out.
Mr Piketty, who is in China promoting his book, was unable to attend the award ceremony in London on Tuesday night. But in his acceptance video, he said the objective of his work, which spans three centuries and 20 countries, was “to promote the democratisation of economic knowledge”. Thanking the judges for the prize, he added: “Issues about economic wealth and capital and public debt are too important . . . to be left to a small group of economists and statisticians.”
For the first time, the FT and McKinsey also presented the GBP 15,000 Bracken Bower Prize to the best proposal for a business book by an author aged under 35. The winner was Saadia Zahidi, a senior director of the World Economic Forum, for a proposal entitled “Womenomics in the Muslim World”, about the advancement of women in Islamic countries.
The Business Book of the Year Award, in its 10th edition, is given to the book that provides “the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance and economics”.
Each of the other shortlisted authors will receive GBP 10,000. They are: Nick Davies’s Hack Attack, about the phone-hacking scandal that embroiled Rupert Murdoch’s media empire; The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, about the promise of the digital revolution; Creativity, Inc., by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace, on how Mr Catmull manages the animation studio’s “smart creatives”; House of Debt, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi’s analysis of how to prevent future recessions; and Dragnet Nation, an investigation of the growth of the “surveillance economy” by Julia Angwin.
扫码加好友，拉您进群
全部版块
我的主页
收藏
