the wolf of wall street stratton oakmont

Many might sit down to view Scorsese’s film to be entertained and discover something similar to what Piketty has shown us. Few people will wade through Piketty’s massive tome with its charts, statistics, fundamental laws, and generalized predictions. Neither Scorsese nor Belfort have the statistical and longitudinal analysis present in Piketty’s monumental work, but Piketty’s work on inequality helps us understand how Belfort’s brokerage firm, and its nihilistic practices, are not only possible but all too predictable. Scorsese turns to Jordan Belfort’s inelegant The Wolf of Wall Street to show us something similar about inequality in the twenty-first century. Piketty turns to the elegant novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac for detailed information about nineteenth-century inequality. Film and literature, nineteenth century novels especially, are full of detailed information about the relative wealth and living standards of different social groups, and especially about the deep structures of inequality, the way it is justified, and its impact on individual lives. To be sure, it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the intuitive knowledge that everyone acquires about contemporary wealth and income levels, even in the absence of any theoretical framework or statistical analysis. In his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French Economist Thomas Piketty states that income inequality is too important to be left to the economists.

The wolf of wall street stratton oakmont