This is a monumental work about inequality. Despite the title's allusion to Marx's classic (a point emphasized by the dust jacket design), it's neither a primarily theoretical nor a primarily polemical work, though it has elements of both theory and advocacy. Nor is its author (TP) a radical: he taught at MIT, and is thoroughly at home in the concepts and categories of mainstream neoclassical theory. Nonetheless, I think even many who hold less orthodox views about economics will find this book stimulating, valuable and sympathetic in many respects. And all readers ought to find it disturbing.
In the ultra-long comments below, I begin with the book's audience and style (§ 1); then turn to some of the book's main arguments, which are more nuanced than usually reported (§§ 2-6); then to some things that are unclear or missing (§§ 7-8); and I end with some comments about the book's production (§ 9) and some concluding remarks.
1. In the original French edition, TP says that he intended this book to be readable for persons without any particular technical knowledge. In principle, it could be read by a broad, college-educated audience. TP's prose is very clear and direct, with a low density of jargon and a high density of information. (I read the French edition, but Arthur Goldhammer's translation seems to preserve these qualities very well.) The discussion is enlivened by well-chosen references to literature and a sprinkling of sarcastic barbs, both of them techniques that French scholars have developed into art forms (if not as elegant as John Kenneth Galbraith's irony). The allusions here range from Balzac, Jane Austen and Orhan Pamuk to "The Aristocats," "Bones" and "Dirty Sexy Money;" and the sarcasm hits both university economists and The Economist (@636n20), among others.
But: this is a long and demanding book. It talks relatively little about current events or the policies of particular governments, unlike, say, Joseph Stiglitz's "The Price of Inequality" (2012). I wouldn't say Stiglitz's is an easy book, but it was written more with of a popular audience in mind (picking up 270+ Amazon reviews in less than 2 years). TP's presentation is far more methodical and meticulous than Stiglitz's. It helps for the reader to be interested in the fine points of data series and categories, and in the sources of uncertainty in data. Occasionally the discussion will focus on concepts from academic economics, such as Cobb-Douglas production functions, elasticities, and Pareto coefficients; while TP uses words rather than math on these occasions, he generally assumes you pretty much know what he's talking about. Finally, if, as I did, you make it through the whole thing while reading with some attention, I bet dollars to donuts you'll come out of the experience feeling very, very down, on account of TP's message. Actually, that mood will hit you long before the end. Despite its felicities of style, this is an arduous read.
2. The "capital" in the title includes not only farms, factories, equipment and other means of production, but also assets typically owned by individuals, such as real property, stocks and other financial instruments, gold, antiques, etc. -- what's sometimes called "wealth". TP excludes so-called "human capital," because it lacks some features of true capital (ability to be traded in a market, inclusion in national accounts as investment), unless it's in the form of slaves.
The distribution of capital is far more unequal than that of income. Even the Scandinavian countries have a Gini coefficient for capital of 0.58 -- comparable to that for income inequality in Angola and Haiti, among the 10 worst in the world (World Bank figures). For Europe and the US in 2010, the coefficient is at 0.67 and 0.73 respectively, worse than any country on the World Bank income inequality chart. (Of course, the worst countries on that World Bank list have hair-raising capital inequality, too.)
The book's main thesis is that economic growth alone isn't sufficient to overcome three "divergence mechanisms" or "forces" that are in many places returning inequality in income and/or capital to pre-World War I levels. The main mechanisms are:
(A) the historical tendency of capital to earn returns at a higher rate ('r') than the growth rate of national income ('g'), which typically sets a constraint on how workers' salaries grow, symbolized by the mathematical expression, "r > g".
(B) the relatively recent (post-1980) widening spread between salaries, not only between the wealthiest 10% or 1% and the mean, but even within the top 1%.
(C) an even newer inequality in financial returns, which correlates r with the initial size of an investment portfolio -- i.e., different r for different investors.
A point to keep in mind is that g relates to national income, not to GDP. National income = GDP - depreciation of capital + net revenue received from overseas. Among other benefits, this measure corrects for the reconstruction boosts in GDP after wars, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc., since the depreciation term takes the destruction of property into account. Also, an increase in national income usually has two different sources: part of it is truly economic, coming from productivity growth (output per worker), and part is due to population growth. Historically, it's the latter that has dominated.
3. The r > g argument has received the most attention. It's to be seen "as an historical reality dependent on a variety of mechanisms not as an absolute logical necessity" (@361). TP finds that this condition has held throughout most of the past 2,000 years. As long as it does, he says, it's the natural tendency of capitalism to make inequality worse -- and the bigger the difference (r - g), the worse that inequality will be. Many commentators about this book make it sound as if this is an obvious mechanism. But if you play with it on Excel, using reasonable values for r and g, it turns out to be slower and more sensitive to initial conditions than you might expect.
Here's a toy example: Let's suppose r = 4%, g = 1.5%, and that salaries rise as fast as g (a very idealistic assumption!); and let's assume these rates are net of taxes or that no taxes apply. I'll compare the situations of three people in Silicon Valley: X, an engineer who made $8.5 million by exercising stock options when the company she used to work for had an IPO; Y, the same company's former HR manager, who made $6.0 million from her options; and Z, a young lawyer at a local law firm, who has a $200,000 salary when we first meet her.
After a year, X has $340K in disposable income, Y has $240K, and Z gets a raise to $203K. Suppose X and Y spend all their income from their capital every year. Eventually, Z can earn more than each of them: it will take her about 37 years to exceed X's annual income, but only 13 years to make more than Y. Now suppose X and Y each save the equivalent of 1.5% of their capital. Then Z will never overtake either one in gross annual revenue, but the situation as to disposable cash is a bit different. After saving, X will always have more cash to play with than Z, but it will take more than 15 years for her to have just 50% more than Z does. As for Y, she'll actually start out with less annual cash than Z, and it will take her 13 or 14 years just to catch up -- even though she's a multi-millionaire.
The true potency of the r > g mechanism comes from its working in conjunction with other circumstances. For example, according to TP's historical data, I've been way too conservative in my assumptions about X's and Y's advantages over Z.
From the 18th through the early 20th Centuries, the people who earned money from capital had proportionally a lot more than they do today: e.g., in 1910, the wealthiest 1% in Europe held > 60% of all European wealth, about triple the share they hold today (see Fig. 10.6). The US was not so extreme, but still very unequal: From 1810 to 1910, the share of the top 1% grew from 25% of American wealth to 45.1% (Fig. 10.5), compared to 33.8% today. So to set our example 100-200 years ago, the endowments of X and Y could plausibly be much bigger relative to Z's wages (especially if we chose, say, Wilhelmine Germany instead of Silicon Valley).
More recently, since the 1980s, most folks with a lot of capital also earn salaries -- and having a lot of capital tends to be correlated with having a salary well above average. So in a more realistic modern example, we should consider that X and Y have moved on to new companies where they receive hefty salaries, which would give each in total a healthy and growing excess of annual spendable cash versus Z. This is the realm of the second divergence mechanism, which is especially formidable in America. In 2010 the richest 1% not only held more than 33% of American wealth, but they earned between 17x and 20x the mean American income (depending on whether capital gains are included). Even the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans work, for average incomes roughly 75x the mean (or 95x, if capital gains are included) (see Table S8.2). At the other end of the spectrum, I was shocked to learn that the purchasing power of the US Federal minimum wage peaked in *1969* -- what was $1.60 an hour back then would be worth $10.10 in 2013 dollars. In those same dollars, the current statutory minimum hourly wage is $7.25 or a bit less (see Fig. 9.1 and nearby text).
On top of these trends, succession to family wealth is becoming important again today, even if not to the full degree it was in 19th Century novels. TP frames this in terms of the dialogue of the worldly Vautrin and the young, ambitious Rastignac in Balzac's "Père Goriot" (1853). Rastignac aspires to wealth by studying law. Vautrin counsels him that unless he can claw his way to become one of the five richest lawyers in Paris, his path will be easier if he simply marries an heiress in lieu of study. Cut to the present: judging by TP's Fig. 11.10, law school might have been the better choice for Baby Boomers, but if you're a Rastignac in your 20s or 30s when you read this, consider marrying up. Maybe you think you'd rather found the next Facebook or Google -- but why work so hard, and against such long odds? TP shows that when Steve Jobs died in 2011, his $8 billion fortune was only 1/3rd that of French heiress Liliane Bettencourt, who has never worked a day in her life.
4. There's another way that "r > g" is inadequate as a summary of TP's argument: TP calculates that during the past century (1913-2012), we've seen r < g, the opposite of its usual polarity (Chapter 10).
High rates of growth -- or at least, what we're accustomed to thinking of as high rates of growth, 3%-4% or more -- aren't a sufficient explanation. In fact, such rates of growth aren't sustainable in the long term, and were not sustained in most countries; they're mainly a catch-up mechanism lasting a few decades, according to TP. During the period from 1970-2010, the actual per capita growth rate of national income averaged about 1.8% for the US and Germany, 1.9% for the UK, and 1.6%-1.7% for France, Italy, Canada and Australia. The wealthy country with the highest per capita rate was Japan, at 2.0 (Table 5.1). (Think about that, next time you're tempted to swallow what Paul Krugman and other pundits pronounce.) Nonetheless, growth rates in this range appear to be what TP calls "weak" (e.g., @23).
Rather, the main reasons for the flip are the tremendous destruction of capital in Europe due to the two world wars, and the imposition of very substantial taxes on capital, at an average rate of about 30% in recent years. These greatly reduced r.
Despite these trends, inequality has been getting worse during the past few decades. This isn't a paradox, but rather the impact of the other divergence mechanisms, especially the rise of the "working rich" and the spread of inequality in salaries. So we should be quite alarmed by TP's assertion that we'll flip back to r > g during the 21st Century. His explanations for this seem rather more speculative than most of the rest of the book, though it's clear he expects g to remain low. I return to this a bit more in § 7 below.
In any case, it's clear that r > g isn't a necessary condition for inequality to get worse.
5. TP reserves his most anxious prose ("radical divergence," "explosive trajectories and uncontrolled inegalitarian spirals") for the third mechanism, inequality in returns from capital (@431, 439). Those with a great deal of capital are able to earn higher returns on it -- such as 6%-7%, or even 10%-11% in the case of billionaires like Bill Gates and Bettencourt -- compared to those with only a few hundred thousand or millions of dollars, who may earn closer to 2%-4%. This results from two types of economies of scale: the ultra-rich can afford more intermediaries and advisers, and they can afford to take on more risk.
Unfortunately, public records don't provide adequate information on this point, and while TP does look at Forbes's and other magazines' lists of the wealthy, those present many methodological issues. So TP corroborates his findings by looking at the more than 800 US universities who report about their endowments. Most spend less than 1%, or even less than 0.5%, of their endowments on annual management fees. Harvard University spent around $100 million annually (ca. 0.3%) on management of its $30 billion endowment, and earned net returns of 10.2% annually during 1980-2010 (not counting an additional 2% annual growth from new gifts). Yale and Princeton, each with a $20 billion endowment, earned a similar rate. A majority of universities have endowments of less than $100 million, and so obviously can't fork over $100 million to managers; they earned average returns of 6.2% during that period (still better on average than you or me).
TP of course doesn't worry that universities will own most of the world, nor does he find it plausible that sovereign funds from Asia or oil-producing countries will either. The bigger danger, he contends, is private oligarchs, and he believes this process is already underway. Since the officially documented ownership of global assets comes up slightly negative, TP calculates that either the rich are already hiding the equivalent of at least 8% of global GDP in tax havens, or else that our planet is owned by Mars (@465-466).
6. In Part IV of the book, TP considers policy approaches to deal with the three forces of divergence. In short, the answer for all three is a progressive, annual global tax on capital, to be set at an internationally agreed rate and its proceeds apportioned among countries according to a negotiated schedule (@515). This will also need a global real-time reporting system for transactions in capital assets. Many will attack these ideas, but it seems that TP's main intention is to get a serious conversation going. His admits his approach is utopian, but maintains that utopian ideas are useful as points of reference.
What interested me most was that TP doesn't see pumping up g as a viable approach to preventing r > g from returning. For one thing, demographics create some limitations in how far g can be pushed, especially in countries whose populations will soon be declining (or Japan, where that's happening already). For another, the same forces that pump up g can also increase r, at least in theory, so (r - g) wouldn't necessarily change much. The more practical answer then, is to bring down r.
In his final chapter TP turns to the very topical question of public debt, which he sees as an issue of wealth distribution and not of absolute wealth. He reminds us about two of its important aspects: One is that public debt takes money from the pockets of the mass of citizens, who pay taxes, and puts it in the pockets of the smaller group of people who are wealthy enough to make loans to the state. The other point is that nations are rich -- it's only states who are strapped for funds. He calculates that in many countries, a one-time progressive capital tax of up to 20% on property portfolios worth more than 1 million Euro could bring the national debt to zero, or nearly so.
Actually, TP doesn't believe that such a drastic reduction in debt levels is urgent, any more than he believes that such a gigantic tax is politically feasible. But his observation puts the lie to the notion that one must raise consumption taxes or income taxes (or, for that matter, experience economic growth) to reduce debt levels.
7. There were a couple of rare instances where I didn't feel the text was sufficiently clear. TP very graciously replied to my emailed inquiries about these matters, but without that input, I'd have remained quite confused by them.
(a) The first arose in Chapter 1, where α (alpha) is defined as designating the "share of income from capital in national income." According to the perhaps intemperately named "first law of capitalism," α = rβ, where β is the ratio of the stock of capital to the flow of national income (and r is as above, the rate of return on capital).
But an important category of income from capital is capital gains, the profits you make when you buy assets cheap and sell them dear. Unrealized capital gains make up a substantial part of the fortunes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and other billionaires mentioned in the book. And capital gains are *not* included in national income, according to the algorithm for computing that quantity. (Nor are they included in GDP.) This makes the use of the preposition "in" confusing -- does it mean that capital gains aren't considered as income from capital?
This issue seems to have its root in academic economics, where α appears as a parameter in the neoclassical growth model developed by Robert Solow. The model represents an economy that produces one type of good -- i.e., it's all about making and selling stuff that gets consumed, so capital gains aren't considered. (In a sense, this model supplies a lot of the motivation for Part II of the book: the academic debate over the relative shares of capital and labor in the national income, i.e., the size of α and whether it changes with time, is a long and at times contentious one. But you can still benefit from reading Part II without knowing that.)
The answer I got from TP is that because capital gains don't seem to be very important in the long term (>100 years), netting out to roughly zero over such periods, he didn't consider them when discussing α. The subject of capital gains does come up later in other contexts, though, and TP does consider them important in the short-term (which in some contexts can mean a timescale of several decades).
(b) The second issue relates to TP's prediction that our current condition of r < g will flip back to r > g later this century. TP mentions that for the past 100 years, wartime destruction and, later, an average 30% tax rate on capital have brought r below g, despite currently weak growth rates in many countries. The data in the book, though is rather opaque about the relative contributions of these factors. Also, the book's clearest explanation of why matters might reverse rests on the possibility that countries will compete to attract capital by a race to the bottom in capital tax rates, allowing r to edge back up. This sounded rather too speculative to warrant such definite conviction about the return of r > g.
I checked the online material, and found the Excel file (not the pdf file) of supplementary Table S10.3, which mentions some of TP's assumptions. Among other things, this makes it clear that TP factors in destruction of capital from WWII in calculating r even for the most recent 50 years. It seems plausible that this will be less important going forward, so that even a 30% average tax rate on capital might not be sufficient in and of itself to prevent r from popping above g again ... maybe. I'm still not entirely convinced that TP's argument about the future of r is among the strongest in the book; but I'd be even less so if I hadn't consulted the online information.
8. No book can talk about everything pertinent to its theme, so it's all too easy to think of things one wishes had been included. Still, I was disappointed that the book was conventional both in its thinking about economic growth, and in its thinking less about growth's environmental consequences.
TP tells us that part of "the reality of growth" is that "the material conditions of life have clearly improved dramatically since the Industrial Revolution" (@89). Its main benefits include its roles as a social equalizer, and as a "diversifi[er] of lifestyles" (@ 83, 90). "[A] society that grows at 1 percent a year ... is a society that undergoes deep and permanent change" (@96).
Growth's equalizing effect, though, comes largely from population-based growth, whereas "a stagnant, or worse, decreasing population increases the influence of capital in previous generations" (@84). So is a country already in that condition, such as Japan, supposed to open its doors to immigrants? As an immigrant to Japan myself, I can appreciate that there are many social, cultural and political reasons why this could be a bad path both for country and for many of the immigrants as well. How about focusing on productivity-led growth instead? Maybe, because "in a society where output per capita grows tenfold in a generation, it is better to count on what one can earn and save from one's own labor" (@84), instead of relying on an inheritance. The problem is, this takes for granted that gains from productivity improvements will be shared with labor, rather than shareholders. Yet Part II shows that labor's share has been flat or declining. In Japan, productivity improvements nowadays tend to come from using temporary employees instead of higher-paid permanent ones, and from using robots in lieu of employees at all. These have worked out to be more methods for enhancing inequality, than for abating it.
Both population growth and productivity growth have other costs, too. The rapid growth of output TP alludes to could only be of the transitory, catch-up sort, such as China has been experiencing since the 1980s. The environmental consequences of that haven't exactly been benign. Nor does the book give any consideration to the environmental consequences of population growth, when the population in question aspires to a wealthy country's per capita environmental footprint.
So are countries with declining populations doomed to oligarchy until all the other countries in the world can agree on a global capital tax? Obviously there are better ways to proceed. Such as examining whether growth truly is necessary for further improving health and other material conditions of life, even in an already-wealthy country. And inquiring whether deep and permanent change is a virtue in itself, or whether good sorts of changes can be achieved without following policies obsessed with growth. Exploring such questions thoroughly would certainly have been outside the scope of this book, but failing even to hint at their existence was either a missed opportunity or a lapse of imagination.
9. In addition to the good translation, some other aspects of the book's transition to English succeed. The US hardcover has sewn signatures; my closely-read and much-shlepped French copy, which comes in at nearly 1,000 pages in a perfect binding, is already showing signs of loose leaves. The US edition has a pretty good index, whereas the French lacked one entirely. It's not quite complete, though: e.g., you won't find the above-mentioned references to Mars, "Bones" or The Economist in it, and I noticed a few references to Japan that were missing, too. On the other hand, the notes didn't fare as well. The notes in this book are long, discursive and informative; you really should read them. The French original used footnotes, but Harvard opted for endnotes, which means you'll either be doing a lot of flipping back and forth, or else ignoring a lot of good material.
A mixed blessing in both editions is that the technical appendix has been punted online. The package is generous, and includes files for the book's tables and figures in both pdf and Excel formats. The expository appendix (evidently translated by someone other than Dr. Goldhammer) includes hyperlinks to pertinent scholarly articles. Downloading the 2013 paper TP wrote with Gabriel Zucman, "Capital is Back," along with its own humongous technical appendix, might be a good choice: the present book's technical appendix refers to this often. If you want all relevant Excel files (including, e.g., some UN data and TP's comments to the Angus Maddison historical data), be sure to scroll through the pdf of the appendix and click on appropriate links, since several such items are absent from the website's "Piketty 2014 Excel files" folder.
Unfortunately, no one can know if this website will be maintained a few decades from now, or how easy it will be to read .pdf and .xls files by then. Just as is the case today with books by leading mid-20th Century economists, this is the sort of book that scholars will still want to read in future, even after it's out of print. They'll be very frustrated by the many cross-references to the technical appendix (at least 100-200 times by my eyeball count) if the information has vanished. I hope that in the not-too-distant future TP will freeze and publish a hard copy of this supplemental material for archival purposes.
It's also surprising that not even the website provides a comprehensive bibliography. The technical appendix includes a number of references, but these are spread out over a list at the beginning and more references embedded into a chapter-by-chapter commentary. Even this fragmented resource doesn't pick up many of the books and articles mentioned in the printed book's endnotes/footnotes. Again, I hope TP or the publisher will remedy this soon.
===
Among its other accomplishments, the book demolishes a couple of abstractions from the 1950s that economists have cherished for decades. One is the "Kuznets curve," according to which income inequality first rises, then peaks and thereafter declines as per capita GDP (or earlier, GNP) continues to rise. Another is the Modigliani "life-cycle" saving theory, which posits that the people save for their retirement and then spend pretty much everything by the time they die. TP's long runs of data show that both of these theories were plausible, if ever, at best only during a brief era around the time they were formulated, when both capital and income were distributed in a more egalitarian way.
How will the economists of today react to this book? Paul Krugman didn't provide an encouraging sign in his blog a few days after the US edition appeared. First thing he did was to try to "understand" it by plugging TP's data into another abstract 1950s-era mathematical model. The vast majority of mainstream economists didn't see the 2008 crash coming, but after it happened they insisted that their models weren't defective. If an historical event of that magnitude couldn't make a dent in their worldview, one has to be a great optimist to believe that this book will. More realistic may be to hope that this book's impact can be political. Luckily, that isn't up just to economists, but to readers like us.
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Capital in the Twenty-First Century Paperback – August 14, 2017
by
Thomas Piketty
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Arthur Goldhammer
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“It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year―and maybe of the decade.”
―Paul Krugman, New York Times
“The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat.”
―The Economist
“Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years.”
―Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post
“Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book…In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy.”
―Martin Wolf, Financial Times
“A sweeping account of rising inequality…Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.”
―John Cassidy, New Yorker
“Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years.”
―Timothy Shenk, The Nation
- Print length816 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBelknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
- Publication dateAugust 14, 2017
- Dimensions5.75 x 1.75 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100674979850
- ISBN-13978-0674979857
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Editorial Reviews
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“It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year―and maybe of the decade. Piketty, arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we’re on the way back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent.”―Paul Krugman, New York Times
“A sweeping account of rising inequality… Eventually, Piketty says, we could see the reemergence of a world familiar to nineteenth-century Europeans; he cites the novels of Austen and Balzac. In this ‘patrimonial society,’ a small group of wealthy rentiers lives lavishly on the fruits of its inherited wealth, and the rest struggle to keep up… The proper role of public intellectuals is to question accepted dogmas, conceive of new methods of analysis, and expand the terms of public debate. Capital in the Twenty-first Century does all these things… Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.”―John Cassidy, New Yorker
“An extraordinary sweep of history backed by remarkably detailed data and analysis… Piketty’s economic analysis and historical proofs are breathtaking.”―Robert B. Reich, The Guardian
“Piketty’s treatment of inequality is perfectly matched to its moment. Like [Paul] Kennedy a generation ago, Piketty has emerged as a rock star of the policy-intellectual world… But make no mistake, his work richly deserves all the attention it is receiving… Piketty, in collaboration with others, has spent more than a decade mining huge quantities of data spanning centuries and many countries to document, absolutely conclusively, that the share of income and wealth going to those at the very top―the top 1 percent, .1 percent, and .01 percent of the population―has risen sharply over the last generation, marking a return to a pattern that prevailed before World War I… Even if none of Piketty’s theories stands up, the establishment of this fact has transformed political discourse and is a Nobel Prize–worthy contribution. Piketty provides an elegant framework for making sense of a complex reality. His theorizing is bold and simple and hugely important if correct. In every area of thought, progress comes from simple abstract paradigms that guide later thinking, such as Darwin’s idea of evolution, Ricardo’s notion of comparative advantage, or Keynes’s conception of aggregate demand. Whether or not his idea ultimately proves out, Piketty makes a major contribution by putting forth a theory of natural economic evolution under capitalism… Piketty writes in the epic philosophical mode of Keynes, Marx, or Adam Smith… By focusing attention on what has happened to a fortunate few among us, and by opening up for debate issues around the long-run functioning of our market system, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a profoundly important contribution.”―Lawrence H. Summers, Democracy
“It is easy to overlook the achievement of Thomas Piketty’s new bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, as a work of economic history. Debates about the book have largely focused on inequality. But on any given page, there is data about the total level of private capital and the percentage of income paid out to labor in England from the 1700s onward, something that would have been impossible for early researchers… Capital reflects decades of work in collecting national income data across centuries, countries, and class, done in partnership with academics across the globe. But beyond its remarkably rich and instructive history, the book’s deep and novel understanding of inequality in the economy has drawn well-deserved attention… [Piketty’s] engagement with the rest of the social sciences also distinguishes him from most economists… The book is filled with brilliant moments… The book is an attempt to ground the debate over inequality in strong empirical data, put the question of distribution back into economics, and open the debate not just to the entirety of the social sciences but to people themselves.”―Mike Konczal, Boston Review
“What makes Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century such a triumph is that it seems to have been written specifically to demolish the great economic shibboleths of our time… Piketty’s magnum opus.”―Thomas Frank, Salon
“[A] 700-page punch in the plutocracy’s pampered gut… It’s been half a century since a book of economic history broke out of its academic silo with such fireworks.”―Giles Whittell, The Times
“Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics has done the definitive comparative historical research on income inequality in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century.”―Paul Starr, New York Review of Books
“Bracing… Piketty provides a fresh and sweeping analysis of the world’s economic history that puts into question many of our core beliefs about the organization of market economies. His most startling news is that the belief that inequality will eventually stabilize and subside on its own, a long-held tenet of free market capitalism, is wrong. Rather, the economic forces concentrating more and more wealth into the hands of the fortunate few are almost sure to prevail for a very long time.”―Eduardo Porter, New York Times
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come. In the way it is written and the importance of the questions it asks, it is a book the classic authors of economics could have written if they lived today and had access to the vast empirical material Piketty and his colleagues collected… In a short review, it is impossible to do even partial justice to the wealth of information, data, analysis, and discussion contained in this book of almost 700 pages. Piketty has returned economics to the classical roots where it seeks to understand the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalism. He has re-emphasized the distinction between ‘unearned’ and ‘earned’ income that had been tucked away for so long under misleading terminologies of ‘human capital,’ ‘economic agents,’ and ‘factors of production.’ Labor and capital―those who have to work for a living and those who live from property―people in flesh―are squarely back in economics via this great book.”―Branko Milanovic, American Prospect
“Monumental… [Piketty] documents a sharp increase in such inequality over the last 25 years, not only in the United States, but also in Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa, with people with the highest incomes far outstripping the rest of society. The book is impressive in its wealth of information.”―Robert J. Shiller, New York Times
“Instantly influential… [Its] euphoric reception is richly merited… [Piketty’s] chief intellectual accomplishment is to show how the basic forces of capitalism tend inevitably toward an ever-greater accumulation of wealth at the tip of the pyramid… Over the past couple decades, we have started to realize that capitalism is no longer delivering for the vast majority of people in most Western democracies. The middle class is being hollowed out, even as fortunes continue to grow at the very top. Piketty has now delivered the most empirically grounded, intellectually coherent explanation of what is going on… His masterwork… That’s why the most successful societies of the 21st century will be the ones whose plutocrats read Piketty and help come up with the political answers to the economic forces he so powerfully describes. Piketty shows that the economics of the postwar era―when the West enjoyed strong, widely-shared growth―was a historical exception. For our Western democracies, it was also a political necessity. Capitalism is facing an existential challenge; smart plutocrats will be part of the solution.”―Chrystia Freeland, Politico
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade… Capital in the 21st Century essentially takes the existing debate on income inequality and supercharges it. It does so by asserting that in the long run the economic inequality that matters won’t be the gap between people who earn high salaries and those who earn low ones, it will be the gap between people who inherit large sums of money and those who don’t.”―Matthew Yglesias, Vox
“[A] magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality… The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties… Piketty has written a truly superb book. It’s a work that melds grand historical sweep―when was the last time you heard an economist invoke Jane Austen and Balzac?―with painstaking data analysis… A tour de force of economic modeling, an approach that integrates the analysis of economic growth with that of the distribution of income and wealth. This is a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics… Capital in the Twenty-First Century is, as I hope I’ve made clear, an awesome work. At a time when the concentration of wealth and income in the hands of a few has resurfaced as a central political issue, Piketty doesn’t just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame… Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes it clear that public policy can make an enormous difference, that even if the underlying economic conditions point toward extreme inequality, what Piketty calls ‘a drift toward oligarchy’ can be halted and even reversed if the body politic so chooses… His masterwork… Sometimes it seems as if a substantial part of our political class is actively working to restore Piketty’s patrimonial capitalism. And if you look at the sources of political donations, many of which come from wealthy families, this possibility is a lot less outlandish than it might seem… [A] masterly diagnosis of where we are and where we’re heading… Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an extremely important book on all fronts. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to.”―Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books
“Monumental…one of the most thorough and illuminating studies of capitalist economics since Karl Marx published the original Capital 150 years earlier.”―Gary Gerstle, Washington Post
“Groundbreaking…The usefulness of economics is determined by the quality of data at our disposal. Piketty’s new volume offers a fresh perspective and a wealth of newly compiled data that will go a long way in helping us understand how capitalism actually works.”―Christopher Matthews, Fortune.com
“French economist Thomas Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book. Open-minded readers will surely find themselves unable to ignore the evidence and arguments he has brought to bear… In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy… The result is a work of vast historical scope, grounded in exhaustive fact-based research, and suffused with literary references. It is both normative and political. Piketty rejects theorizing ungrounded in data… The book is built on a 15-year program of empirical research conducted in conjunction with other scholars. Its result is a transformation of what we know about the evolution of income and wealth (which he calls capital) over the past three centuries in leading high-income countries. That makes it an enthralling economic, social and political history.”―Martin Wolf, Financial Times
“About as close to a blockbuster as there is in the world of economic literature―easily the most discussed book of its genre in years. The central premise is provocative and profoundly bleak… Piketty challenges one of the underpinnings of modern democracies―namely, that growth and productivity make each generation better off than the previous one.”―Barrie McKenna, Globe and Mail
“Piketty has unearthed the history of income distribution for at least the past hundred years in every major capitalist nation. It makes for fascinating, grim and alarming reading… Piketty’s book provides a valuable explanatory context for America’s economic woes… Piketty gives us the most important work of economics since John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory.”―Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
“Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years… Although the contours of Piketty’s history confirm what economic historians already know, his anatomizing of the 1 percent’s fortunes over centuries is a revelation. When joined to his magisterial command of the source material and his gift for synthesis, they disclose a history not of steady economic expansion but of stops and starts, with room for sudden departures from seemingly unbreakable patterns. In turn, he links this history to economic theory, demonstrating that there is no inherent drive in markets toward income equality. It’s quite the opposite, in fact.”―Timothy Shenk, The Nation
“Magnificent…Even though it is a work more concerned with the past 200 years, it’s no coincidence that the full title of Piketty’s book is Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Its ambition is to shape debates about the next two centuries, not the past two. And in that it may succeed.”―Christopher Croke, The Australian
“[Piketty] is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generation…He makes his case in a clear and rigorous manner that debunks everything that capitalists believe about the ethical status of making money…He demonstrates that there is no reason to believe that capitalism can ever solve the problem of inequality, which he insists is getting worse rather than better. From the banking crisis of 2008 to the Occupy movement of 2011, this much has been intuited by ordinary people. The singular significance of his book is that it proves ‘scientifically’ that this intuition is correct. This is why his book has crossed over into the mainstream--it says what many people have already been thinking…Unlike many economists he insists that economic thinking cannot be separated from history or politics…As poverty increases across the globe, everyone is being forced to listen to Piketty with great attention. But although his diagnosis is accurate and compelling, it is hard, almost impossible, to imagine that the cure he proposes--tax and more tax--will ever be implemented in a world where, from Beijing to Moscow to Washington, money, and those who have more of it than anyone else, still calls the shots.”―Andrew Hussey, The Observer
“Piketty has won interest and enthusiasm on the left of the political spectrum…for this ambitious work. It is not, however, a politically sectarian argument; perhaps that explains why it has become a surprise bestseller. The strength of his thesis is that it is founded on evidence rather than ideology. Piketty has researched data over more than a century in order to derive his understanding of the dynamics of modern capitalism. He is able to point convincingly to a recent reversal of historical trends, so that the share of national income taken by the owners of capital has expanded over the past generation…What Piketty has done is provide a strong factual understanding for how modern capitalist economies diverge from the image of risk-taking and productive commercial activity. At the very least, the book effectively debunks the notion that there is an economic imperative for low tax rates and a smaller state.”―Oliver Kamm, The Times
“Magisterial…Piketty’s Capital feels very much like a Category 4 hurricane that hasn’t yet made landfall…Piketty draws on a vast store of historical data to argue that the broad dissemination of wealth that occurred during the decades following World War I was not, as economists then mistakenly believed, a natural state of capitalist equilibrium, but rather a halcyon interval between Belle Époque inequality and the rising inequality of our own era…Piketty’s most provocative argument is that the discrepancy between the high returns to capital and much more modest overall economic growth--briefly annulled during the mid-century--ensures that the gulf between the rich (who profit from capital investments) and the middle class (who depend chiefly on income from labor) will only continue to grow…The best reason to raise tax rates is not to punish the rich, of course, but to raise the revenue which the United States needs to invest in infrastructure and research, not to mention to pay for Social Security and health care. That investment gap poses a clear and present danger to American global economic leadership. Rising inequality exacerbates the problem by sapping the collective political will needed to address the problem.”―James Traub, Foreign Policy online
“Defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism…[It] suggests that traditional liberal government policies on spending, taxation and regulation will fail to diminish inequality…Without what [Piketty] acknowledges is a politically unrealistic global wealth tax, he sees the United States and the developed world on a path toward a degree of inequality that will reach levels likely to cause severe social disruption. Final judgment on Piketty’s work will come with time--a problem in and of itself, because if he is right, inequality will worsen, making it all the more difficult to take preemptive action.”―Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times
“This is a serious book…Piketty’s main point, and his new and powerful contribution to an old topic: as long as the rate of return exceeds the rate of growth, the income and wealth of the rich will grow faster than the typical income from work. (There seems to be no offsetting tendency for the aggregate share of capital to shrink; the tendency may be slightly in the opposite direction.) This interpretation of the observed trend toward increasing inequality, and especially the phenomenon of the 1 percent, is not rooted in any failure of economic institutions; it rests primarily on the ability of the economy to absorb increasing amounts of capital without a substantial fall in the rate of return. This may be good news for the economy as a whole, but it is not good news for equity within the economy…There is yet another, also rather dark, implication of this account of underlying trends. If already existing agglomerations of wealth tend to grow faster than incomes from work, it is likely that the role of inherited wealth in society will increase relative to that of recently earned and therefore more merit-based fortunes…The arithmetic suggests that the concentration of wealth and its ability to grow will favor an increasing weight of inheritance as compared with talent…If the ownership of wealth in fact becomes even more concentrated during the rest of the twenty-first century, the outlook is pretty bleak unless you have a taste for oligarchy…Wouldn’t it be interesting if the United States were to become the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the last refuge of increasing inequality at the top (and perhaps also at the bottom)? Would that work for you?”―Robert Solow, New Republic
“The blockbuster economics book of the season, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that the great equalizing decades following World War II, which brought on the rise of the middle class in the United States, were but a historical anomaly. Armed with centuries of data, Piketty says the rich are going to continue to gobble up a greater share of income, and our current system will do nothing to reverse that trend.”―Shaila Dewan, New York Times Magazine
“Anyone remotely interested in economics needs to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century.”―Matthew Yglesias, Slate
“In its magisterial sweep and ambition, Piketty’s latest work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is clearly modeled after Marx’s Das Kapital. But where Marx’s research was spotty, Piketty’s is prodigious. And where Marx foresaw capitalism’s collapse leading to a utopian proletariat paradise, Piketty sees a future of slow growth and Gilded Age disparities in which the wealthy--owners of capital--capture a steadily larger share of global wealth and income…Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years. Piketty offers a timely and well-reasoned reminder that there is nothing inevitable about the dominance of human capital over financial capital, and that there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity.”―Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post
“Though an heir to Tocqueville’s tradition of analytic history, Thomas Piketty has a message that could not be more different: Unless we act, inequality will grow much worse, eventually making a mockery of our democratic institutions. With wealth more and more concentrated, countries racing to cut taxes on capital, and inheritance coming to rival entrepreneurship as a source of riches, a new patrimonial elite may prove as inevitable as Tocqueville once believed democratic equality was. This forecast is based not on speculation but on facts assembled through prodigious research…Private wealth has reached new highs relative to national income and is approaching levels of concentration not seen since before 1929…Piketty is rightly pessimistic about an immediate response. The influence of the wealthy on democratic politics and on how we think about merit and reward presents formidable obstacles…Perhaps with this magisterial book, the troubling realities Piketty unearths will become more visible and the rationalizations of the privileged that sustain them less dominant. Like Tocqueville, Piketty has given us a new image of ourselves. This time, it’s one we should resist, not welcome.”―Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Prospect
“The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat…It is, first and foremost, a very detailed look at 200 years’ worth of data on the distribution of income and wealth across the rich world (with some figures for large emerging markets also included). This mountain of data allows Piketty to tell a simple and compelling story…The database on which the book is built is formidable, and it is difficult to dispute his call for a new perspective on the modern economic era, whether or not one agrees with his policy recommendations… We are all used to sneering at communism because of its manifest failure to deliver the sustained rates of growth managed by market economies. But Marx’s original critique of capitalism was not that it made for lousy growth rates. It was that a rising concentration of wealth couldn’t be sustained politically. Ultimately, those of us who would like to preserve the market system need to grapple with that sort of dynamic, in the context of the worrying numbers on inequality that Piketty presents.”―The Economist
“Piketty’s book is revolutionary. It rewrites the mission of economics, discarding claims that the discipline is a super-science of human behavior or public policy. Piketty wants to return his field to what the 19th century called ‘political economy’: a discipline about power, justice, and--also, but not first--wealth…[Piketty spoils] the longstanding conventional wisdom, supported by economics Nobel winners like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, plus lots of less controversial characters, that capitalism is democracy’s best friend…It shows a world getting radically more unequal, the return of hereditary wealth, and--at least in the U.S.--an economy so distorted that much of what happens at the very top can be fairly described as class-based looting. And he gives some fairly strong reasons to suspect that this, not the relatively open and egalitarian economies of the mid-20th century, is what capitalism looks like… Reading it is like talking to a smart person who knows you’re smart and knows, too, that you’re not an economist…We’ve been spun a story: mainstream economics for the last 60-odd years has succored a complacent folk tale, albeit with lots of mathematical sophistication tacked on. Except for some discernible ‘market failures,’ it told us that all was for the best in this best of worlds. What you earn must be what you are contributing; otherwise, the market would step in to restore efficiency…Piketty reveals that these just-so stories have veiled urgent and inflammatory problems: capitalism produces self-accelerating inequality that corrupts both politics and culture and splits society into privileged rent collectors and everyone else, who must choose either to get halfway rich ministering to capital or to stay on the low end of the pole doing the humanly necessary work of teaching, nursing, keeping the utility wires humming, and so forth. Piketty’s multi-century portrait of wealth and income obliterates economists’ complacent narratives…Yet the period of shared growth in the mid-20th century was not just the aftermath of war and depression. It was also the apex of organized labor’s power in Europe and North America, the fruit of many decades of organizing, not a little of it bloody, not a little under the flag of democratic socialism. Various crises cleared the ground, but the demands of labor, and an organized left more generally, were integral to building the comparatively egalitarian, high-wage world that came after the wars, with its strong public sector, self-assertive workers, and halfway tamed capital. There’s a lesson we can learn here about what we might do to combat inequality, and how…Piketty shows that capitalism’s attractive moral claims--that it can make everyone better off while respecting their freedom--deserve much less respect under our increasingly “pure” markets than in the mixed economies that dominated the North Atlantic countries in the mid-20th century…We are still seeking an economy that is both vibrant and humane, where mutual advantage is real and mutual aid possible. The one we have isn’t it.”―Jedediah Purdy, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The most remarkable work of economics in recent years, if not decades…[It] has caused an intellectual sensation on both sides of the Atlantic…His range is immense. And his open, fluent style will guarantee him a wide readership. In contrast to much of what passes for orthodox economics, he is engaged with the problems of the real world…The discipline of economics, Piketty argues, remains trapped in a juvenile passion for mathematics, divorced from history and its sister social sciences. His work aims to change that.”―Nick Pearce, New Statesman
“A landmark book…which brings a ton of data to bear in reaching the commonsensical conclusion that inequality has to do with more than just blind market forces at work.”―George Packer, New Yorker blog
“[Piketty] is now the most talked-about economist on the planet…Capital is rooted not in theoretical abstractions so much as archaeology. The book analyzes hundreds of years of tax records from France, the U.K., the U.S., Germany and Japan to prove a simple idea: The rich really are getting richer. And their wealth doesn’t trickle down. It trickles up…The stark historical consequences of unchecked inequality are at the heart of Capital.”―Rana Foroohar, Time
“Magisterial…Piketty provides a sweeping, data-driven narrative about inequality trends in the United States and other Western economies over the past century or more, identifies a worrisome increase in income and wealth concentration in a small percentage of the population since 1980, and warns that this trend won’t likely correct itself…Piketty is not optimistic that the forces of greater income and wealth inequality will abate on their own, but he is not an economic determinist. The problem, however, is that countering those forces requires public policies and institutions more like those of the era of shared prosperity than those of today.”―Chad Stone, U.S. News & World Report online
“Piketty’s new book is an important contribution to understanding what we need to do to produce more growth, wider economic opportunity and greater social stability.”―David Cay Johnston, Al Jazeera America
“The book has made everyone with a stake in capitalism sit up and take notice…[Piketty’s] analysis should challenge Americans to rethink our notions of wealth and poverty and whether any semblance of ‘equal opportunity’ actually exists…Piketty has made an important contribution. His book prompts the discerning person to evaluate anew the human and social costs of capitalism. The creative thinking of citizens is now required to combat the ills he has diagnosed.”―America
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century is written in the tradition of great economic texts… Piketty and his colleagues have spent recent years putting together a World Top Incomes Database, their detailed investigation into income in countries around the globe, spanning several decades…Informed by this historical, cross-country data, Piketty evaluates--and rejects--a number of generally accepted conclusions in economic thought, while being careful to note the limitations of inevitably “imperfect and incomplete” sources. The main finding of his investigation is that capital still matters…This book is significant for its findings, as well as for how Piketty arrives at them. It’s easy--and fun--to argue about ideas. It is much more difficult to argue about facts. Facts are what Piketty gives us, while pressing the reader to engage in the journey of sorting through their implications.”―Heather Boushey, American Prospect
“How does a rigorous, seven-hundred page economic history become a lionized hit? Through the canny voice of professor Thomas Piketty, and his demystification of inherited wealth, Karl Marx’s true legacy, and what we mean when we talk about monetary ‘growth’ and ‘inequality.’”―Barnes and Noble Review
“When it comes to economics…you need to get yourself a hold of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty…Piketty’s study will have readers plotting capital’s downfall because what it shows is that the growing inequalities we are seeing between the haves and have nots are endemic to the system. Piketty has been hailed by many on the right as well as the left, for writing a highly significant book. Its strength rests on the fact that he has worked the sources in a way few economists have, analyzing actual data on earnings over decades to come up with some startling conclusions. We are entering a new age of capital, he argues; a time, similar to the early 19th century, when many will live off their money. Without the need for work. Meanwhile, those without capital will always struggle to keep ahead of debts.”―Thomas Quinn, Big Issue
“Piketty, whose previous work we are indebted to for providing statistical verification that the top 1 percent of the population possesses a outsize percentage of wealth, has written a magisterial book about the ever-increasing inequality. A comprehensive overview of Capital’s abundance of historical and analytical data would be impossible here. (Here’s a microreview of Piketty: Read it)…Piketty’s genius lies in proving that inequality is growing and potentially threatens widespread political instability…Piketty has written a trenchant critique of our current economic system.”―Michael Washburn, Boston Globe
“Piketty's magnum opus…But unlike many other authors of tracts from the ‘dismal science,’ this distinguished French economist has rendered an eminently readable account of the history and dynamics of capitalism and inequality…A lucid tale of why inequality in the world is increasing, and what we should be doing about it. The right leaning crowd may be dismayed with his prescriptions of stiff global wealth taxes, but neither leftists nor rightists can dispute the data that he presents…According to Piketty, the only real corrective to capital’s concentration is a global capital tax (because it is freely globally mobile), and a stiff inheritance tax. This is controversial, but what is not disputed is that inequality in income and wealth within each country has gotten much worse in the past three decades. The question is what do we do about it. For starters, we should read this excellent book.”―Ajit Ranade, Business Today
“Intellectually hefty…Piketty has already engendered vigorous argument. Capital is an arduous climb, but the subject is equally weighty, and it demands our best analyses, proposals and dialogues. Capital is an essential volume in the conversation.”―Earl Pike, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“An important book…which paints a compelling, and scary, picture of the deep forces driving toward ever greater inequality in the modern world. Piketty’s historical focus adds power to his analysis of the trend toward greater financial inequality today.”―Charles R. Morris, Commonweal
“Piketty has looked at centuries of tax archives to formulate a theory of capitalism that is evidence-based and rigorously researched, but also attempts to answer the most basic questions in economic theory. His paradigm-shifting thesis is, at its most basic, that late-stage capitalist economies foster inequality and create an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. These ideas feel intuitive and elegant, and Piketty’s emphasis on data-based analysis lend even his most ambitious claims great credibility. Capital in the Twenty-First Century is already being hailed as a seminal work of economic thought, and with very good reason.”―Thomas Flynn, Daily Beast
“This important and fascinating book surely ranks among the most influential economic analysis of recent decades. Much of the debate over inequality in recent years is the result of the work of Thomas Piketty and his fellow researchers…This book contains important lessons for economists. It is a (perhaps unwelcome) reminder that what they measure reflects political choices. It cautions them to be wary of viewing recent decades as some sort of ‘steady state’; the evolution of post-World War II incomes and wealth reflect the unwinding of earlier events, and the point is more general. And it reminds them of the rhetorical and explanatory power of simple comparisons of facts, once collected and arranged, relative to complex statistics and models.”―Andrew Berg, Finance & Development
“Over the last decade or so, economist Thomas Piketty has made his name central to serious discussions of inequality…Piketty expands upon his empirical work of the last 10 years, while also setting forth a political theory of inequality. This last element of the book gives special attention to tax policy and makes some provocative suggestions--new and higher taxes on the very rich.”―Joseph Thorndike, Forbes
“The most eagerly anticipated book on economics in many years.”―Toby Sanger, Globe and Mail
“Many of the book’s 700 pages are spent marshaling the evidence that 21st-century capitalism is on a one-way journey towards inequality--unless we do something. If Piketty is right, there are big political implications, and the beauty of the book is that he never refrains from drawing them…The book’s terms and explanations are utterly simple; with a myriad of historical data, Piketty reduces the story of capitalism to a clear narrative arc. To challenge his argument you have to reject the premises of it, not the working out…Is Piketty the new Karl Marx? Anybody who has read the latter will know he is not…Piketty has, more accurately, placed an unexploded bomb within mainstream, classical economics…The power of Piketty’s work is that it also challenges the narrative of the center-left under globalization, which believed upskilling the workforce, combined with mild redistribution, would promote social justice. This, Piketty demonstrates, is mistaken. All that social democracy and liberalism can produce, with their current policies, is the oligarch’s yacht co-existing with the food bank forever. Piketty’s Capital, unlike Marx’s Capital, contains solutions possible on the terrain of capitalism itself.”―Paul Mason, The Guardian
“Piketty solidifies and gives an intellectual edge to the view that something is wrong here, and something new and bold and radical has got to be done… People like me, and others, are certainly excited by the prospect of where Piketty might take us.”―Len McCluskey, The Guardian
“The big questions that concerned Mill, Marx and Smith are now rearing their heads afresh…Thomas Piketty--who spent long years, during which the mainstream neglected inequality, mapping the distribution of income--is making waves with Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Nodding at Marx, that title helps explain the attention, but his decidedly classical emphasis on historical dynamics in determining who gets what resonates in a world where an increasing proportion of citizens are feeling fleeced by the elite.”―The Guardian
“[Capital in the Twenty-First Century] has jolted the right, who are scrabbling around for an answer to its main message: rising inequality is killing capitalism…It is a big book in every sense of the word, using empirical evidence from 30 countries to describe how capitalism has evolved over the past 300 years and is now reverting to what Piketty calls the Downton Abbey world of a century ago. Where much modern writing about economics is cloaked in impenetrable jargon, Piketty is not afraid to draw on literature and popular culture to make his points…Piketty’s book seems to explain the brutal world of the Great Recession and its aftermath rather better than trickle-down economics…It is rare for economics books to fly off the shelves. Once in every generation, usually when the world has started to recover after a serious recession, there is a search for answers. Will Hutton’s The State We’re In was the must-buy book two decades ago just as Piketty’s is today.”―The Guardian blog
“Piketty sets out to tell a high-level history of the global economy and to outline a fresh theory of where we are heading. It’s the sort of grand intellectual enterprise that was common in the 19th century, but has become a rarity in our era of more specialized scholarship…Piketty says he wants the book to be widely read and his ideas debated. He has succeeded. Questions of economic theory have now reached an uncommonly large audience. One could, of course, fill a book twice the size with the reviews and the commentary Capital has prompted. But there is a better way into the debate than consuming the Piketty media phenomenon: spend a little valuable capital and read the original yourself.”―Ben Chu, The Independent
“Piketty’s ground-breaking work on the historical evolution of income distribution is impressive, but he covers many other areas, including the erosion of meritocracy by inherited wealth, public debt, education, health and taxation. He also proposes challenging ideas for funding the social state in the 21st century…Capital in the Twenty-First Century will be embraced by progressives and rejected by conservatives wary of change. But, if those conservatives who support a meritocracy are convinced, it could be a catalyst for reform. This book is challenging, but one of the best economic books in decades.”―Paul Sweeney, Irish Times
“In the 19th century, tsarist censors banned John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty while letting through Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Mill’s message was so lucidly expressed that it posed an obvious and immediate threat to the regime; Marx’s prose was clotted and convoluted and his economics littered with leftovers from his youthful enthusiasm for Hegel. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shares its title with Marx’s work but its argumentative verve with Mill’s, and it has been a runaway bestseller in the United States. In spite of the efforts of conservative American economists to persuade their readers that anyone who raises questions about inequalities of income and wealth must be a Marxist, Piketty has no time whatsoever for Marx. Piketty’s economics is ‘data driven,’ while Marx was short of useful data, did not make good use of what data he had and generalized wildly from a few exceptional cases of capital-intensive industries…The book is a terrific achievement.”―Alan Ryan, Literary Review
“One of the strengths of Piketty’s book is the depth and rigor of his historical analysis. Yet it is changes taking place now that make his concerns especially urgent…Piketty’s is a potentially apocalyptic view of the future. On that at least, we’d better hope he’s wrong.”―Andrew Neather, London Evening Standard
“The enthusiastic reception in the United States of Piketty’s rigorous Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which answers the empirical spirit of the age with a welcome rush of statistics, may be a promising sign of renewal in the otherwise sedate intellectual pastures of the continent. To have made the word “redistribution” utterable again by mainstream economists is already a considerable achievement. Having offered an unignorable account of the history of inequality in capitalist democracies, Piketty believes he has identified a Band-Aid of sufficient swath--a European tax on wealth and a parliamentary chamber charged with regulating finance in the euro zone--to cover Europe’s wounds.”―Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk, The Nation
“Not since John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 has a work of political theory been as rapturously received on the left as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century…In this supposedly superficial and anti-intellectual age, his 690-page treatise on inequality, rich in empirical research, has resonated because it speaks to one of the central anxieties of our time: that society is becoming ever more fragmented as the very rich pull away from the rest. As Piketty elegantly demonstrates, as long as the rate of return on what he calls capital continues to exceed the growth rate of the economy (as it has done since the 1970s), inequality will widen to levels unknown since the Victorian era.”―New Statesman
“Piketty, a prominent economist, explains the tendency in mature societies for wealth to concentrate in a few hands.”―Amy Merrick, New Yorker
“[Piketty’s] thesis is simple. The growing concentration of capital in fewer hands has enabled its owners to keep it relatively scarce and thus valuable…Continuing high inequality is socially and economically destabilizing, though it need not lead to Marx’s apocalypse. So what we need is another bout of social democracy especially in the form of progressive taxation. You many think that it doesn’t require 600 pages to get this message across. This would be wrong. The strength of Piketty’s book is his close attention to the different sources of inequality, the massive documentation underpinning his history and conclusions, and his impressive culls from sociology and literature, which exhibit the richness of ‘political economy’ compared to its thin mathematical successor that has attained such prominence…Piketty’s book is a timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes.”―Robert Skidelsky, Prospect
“Thomas Piketty…has written a 700 page book on inequality which has achieved something few would have thought possible. He has rocked the neo-liberal economic establishment to its foundations. To read the tidal wave of reviews by economics professors and others across the world is to get a sense of the impact that Piketty’s conclusions are having: that inequality is even more extreme than most experts thought, is worse than at any time since the 19th century and is set to reach nightmare proportions in the years ahead. Even some of the most ideologically blinkered of free market economists, having read this book, now openly admit that Professor Piketty has laid down a challenge which they dare not ignore and which could change the political environment.”―John Palmer, Red Pepper
“Drawing on hundreds of years of economic data (some of which has only recently become available to researchers) Piketty reaches a simple but disturbing conclusion: In the long run, the return on capital tends to be greater than the growth rate of the economies in which that capital is located. What this means is that in a modern market economy the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the already-rich is as natural as water flowing downhill, and can only be ameliorated by powerful political intervention, in the form of wealth redistribution via taxes, and to a lesser extent laws that systematically protect labor from capital…Readers can already guess the dire conclusion that flows from combining Piketty’s theory with the plausible assumption that unregulated wealth leads to plutocracy: If the only way to avoid plutocracy would be to employ political processes that the plutocrats themselves will eventually buy lock, stock and barrel, then the only way to avoid being ruled by the Lords of Capital is to become one of them.”―Paul Campos, Salon
“[Piketty] has been perhaps the most important thinker on inequality of the past decade or so… With his book, he’s handed liberals a coherent framework that justifies the discomfort that they probably already felt about the wealth gap… Capital will change the political conversation in a more subtle way as well, by focusing it on wealth, not income… Whether or not Piketty’s grand unified theory is exactly correct, he’s moving the popular conversation in the right direction.”―Jordan Weissmann, Slate
“There are books that you read and there are books that hit the nail on the head so hard that you want to get your teeth into them. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century…clearly belongs to the second category.”―Perry Lam, South China Morning Post
“Impressive, provocative… The richness, scope and detail of Piketty’s analysis means that it is impossible to summarize it without losing much of the vibrancy which makes it such an exceptionally gripping read… The special conditions for growth created by the two world wars have now evaporated. The forces of convergence are in large measure spent, and the forces of divergence are in the ascendant. Capitalism is reverting to type… The first three parts of Piketty’s book are devoted to describing and analyzing this transition. They represent a brilliant, mesmerizing re-statement of technical matters for a non-specialist readership. Here Piketty’s achievement is superb… There is a huge amount to admire and welcome in this book… Like the radicals of the 1790s, who toasted Edmund Burke in gratitude for the fundamental debate his writings on the French Revolution had provoked, even those who find Piketty’s remedies unpalatable and in some ways worse than the disease he is trying to cure should nevertheless applaud his industry, his acuity, and his humane commitment to the ideal of rational, temperate and informed public debate.”―David Womersley, Standpoint
“[Piketty] has demolished the Western myth that all who work hard can expect success.”―Mary Riddell, The Telegraph
“It proves, irrefutably and clearly, what we’ve all suspected for some time now―the rich ARE getting richer compared to everyone else, and their wealth isn’t trickling down. In fact, it’s trickling up… And as Piketty’s book makes so uncomfortably clear, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better… It’s going to be remembered as the economic tome of our era. Basically, Piketty has finally put to death, with data, the fallacies of trickle down economics and the Laffer curve, as well as the increasingly fantastical notion that we can all just bootstrap our way to the Forbes 400 list… We can only hope that the politicians crafting today’s economic programs will take this book to heart.”―Rana Foroohar, Time online
“Magisterial… Bursting with ideas… This book is economics at its best.”―Philip Roscoe, Times Higher Education
“In Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Piketty sums up his research, tracing the history and pattern of economic inequality across a number of countries from the eighteenth century to the present, analyzing its causes, and evaluating some policy fixes. Spanning nearly 700 densely packed pages, it’s a big book in more than one sense of the word. Clearly written, ambitious in scope, rooted in economics but drawing on insights from related fields like history and sociology, Piketty’s Capital resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned work of political economy by the likes of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes. But what is particularly exciting about this book is that, due to advances in technology, Piketty is able to draw on data that not only spans a substantially longer historical time frame, but is also necessarily more complete and consistent than the records earlier theorists were forced to rely on. As a result, his analysis is significantly more comprehensive than those of his predecessors― and easily as persuasive… Capital is a consistently engrossing read, encompassing topics including the stunning comeback that inherited wealth has made in today’s advanced economies, the dubiousness of the economic theory that a worker’s wage is equal to his or her marginal productivity, the moral insidiousness of meritocratic justifications of inequality, and more. But the book’s major strength lies in Piketty’s ability to see the big picture. His original and rigorously well-documented insights into the deep structures of capitalism show us how the dynamics of capital accumulation have played out historically over the past three centuries, and how they’re likely to develop in the century to come… America’s twenty-first-century inequality crisis is, if anything, even more daunting and complex than the one we experienced a century ago. But as Piketty reminds us, the solutions to this problem are political, and they lie within our grasp. Should Americans choose to deploy those solutions, not only would we be doing the right thing, we’d be living up to our deepest traditions and most cherished ideals.”―Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly
“After receiving widespread attention in his native France, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has received even greater attention on this side of the Atlantic, and deservedly so. It offers a stark and depressing picture for those who believe that some combination of democratic politics and economic growth can protect us from rampant inequality.”―Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage, Washington Post blog
“Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the 21st Century, painstakingly details the dynamics of wealth and income inequality throughout the last two centuries, and offers a somewhat grim picture of the future of economic inequality. Along the way, Piketty also offers his theory of the cause of exploding executive pay and how we can successfully combat this destructive trend.”―Matt Bruenig, The Week
“It’s a brilliant, surprisingly readable work that synthesizes a staggering amount of careful research to make the case that income inequality is no accident. Indeed, Piketty argues that it is a feature of capitalism itself―unless governments take action to rein in capitalism’s excesses… But the value of Piketty’s work is that it shows that capitalism’s postwar heyday―in which incomes at the bottom and the top actually converged―was a historical anomaly. Piketty’s analysis of the last two centuries makes the case that capital in its natural state does not tend to spread out or trickle down, but to concentrate in the hands of a few… He has starkly and convincingly outlined the stakes for future generations. Either we’ll have a new birth of reformed capitalism…or we’ll have wealth concentration on such a colossal scale that it will threaten the democratic order.”―Ryan Cooper, The Week
“It is a great work, a fearsome beast of analysis stuffed with an awesome amount of empirical data, and will surely be a landmark study in economics.”―The Week
“Rarely does a book come along…that completely alters the paradigm through which we frame our worldview. Thomas Piketty’s magisterial study of the structure of capitalism since the 18th century, Capital in the 21st Century, is such a book… As leaders from Pope Francis to Barack Obama have proclaimed, growing inequality is the defining issue of our time. Much indeterminate discussion has swirled around its key causes, from job-displacing technologies to wage-deflating outsourcing of jobs. Capital in the 21st Century clears up all the confused thinking and presents us with the most compelling analysis to date of the key dynamic that drives ever-increasing inequality. This book is more than a must read. It is a manual for action that provides a fresh framework for the new politics of the 21st century.”―Nathan Gardels, The WorldPost
“[An] enormously important book.”―Doug Henwood, Bookforum
“Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high―and is only bound to grow worse.”―Kirkus Reviews
“An explosive argument.”―Liberation
“A seminal book on the economic and social evolution of the planet… A masterpiece.”―Emmanuel Todd, Marianne
“Outstanding… A political and theoretical bulldozer.”―Mediapart
“The book of the season.”―Telerama
“In this magisterial work, Thomas Piketty has performed a great service to the academy and to the public. He has written a pioneering book that is at once thoughtful, measured, and provocative. The force of his case rests not on a diatribe or a political agenda, but on carefully collected and analyzed data and reasoned thought. The book should have a major impact on our discussions of contemporary inequality and its meaning for our democratic institutions and ideals. I can only marvel at Piketty’s discipline and rigor in researching and writing it.”―Rakesh Khurana, Harvard Business School
“This book is not only the definitive account of the historical evolution of inequality in advanced economies, it is also a magisterial treatise on capitalism’s inherent dynamics. Piketty ends his book with a ringing call for the global taxation of capital. Whether or not you agree with him on the solution, this book presents a stark challenge for those who would like to save capitalism from itself.”―Dani Rodrik, Institute for Advanced Study
“Piketty has shown that we are living in a Second Gilded Age…It is too early to expect actual public policies to emerge from his insights. But the significance of his contribution is already apparent in the breadth of his vision. Nestled under the book’s mass of data, elegant mathematical formulae, and literary references is an insistence that the turmoil of capitalism is a human turmoil, within the control of human beings. Piketty’s book is a call to citizenship, not as a series of fatalistic poses, but as a political responsibility. That spirit of engagement is more radical, at this moment in history, than any other proposal.”―Stephen Marche, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Reading Thomas Piketty’s famous book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, after all the fuss about it, is a bit of a shock. It’s both much more radical and much less radical than its reputation…I was anticipating a left-wing rant, but Piketty’s tone is modest and polite--not at all what you expect from a rock-star French intellectual…Piketty and his book remind me of my favorite economist, the 19th-century American Henry George, and his best-selling book, Progress and Poverty (1879). Both men’s books offer a comprehensive explanation of the world, in particular the problem of poverty. Both men acknowledge the importance of market incentives and entrepreneurship and the evils of protectionism and all of that good conservative stuff, even as they rail against the plutocrats. Both think we can end or reduce inequality without giving up the benefits of capitalism. And both see the answer in a new tax on capital…This is beginning to sound sort of reasonable, both in its demands on people at the top and its generosity to those on the bottom.”―Michael Kinsley, Vanity Fair
“Piketty’s book bespeaks the palpable upset that American society, indeed, the world’s societies, seems increasingly rigged; that inequality is worsening and darkening the future. Capital in the Twenty-First Century might be more aptly titled Inequality in the Twenty-First Century…Piketty is relentless in his indictment of inequality…Piketty assembles a mountain of numbers and tables to demonstrate that economic inequality is intensifying; that the wealthier are wealthier; and that the rich own more…Piketty hits bullseye after bullseye about the exacerbating inequalities that disfigure society--especially American society…For [those] who suffer from the relentless blather about why the minimum wage cannot be raised; why ‘job creators’ cannot be taxed; and why American society remains the most open in the world, Piketty is what the doctor ordered.”―Russell Jacoby, New Republic
“This is a truly path-breaking book offering a hard-hitting and well-founded critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century. Piketty is concerned with the dynamics of income and wealth since the eighteenth century to draw lessons for the century ahead. The book has an admirably wide scope, offering systematic comparisons not only across advanced and emerging economies, but also across modern history…It is an exceptionally well-researched book. His sources are well documented. Piketty’s overall analysis and conclusions cannot be waved away by those who feel threatened by the book’s analysis and policy recommendations…In addition to uncovering [some] fundamental contradictions of capitalism and documenting the ensuing inequality in great detail, Piketty’s book contains a large number of less central, but nevertheless very arresting insights and findings…Very importantly, Piketty goes beyond uncovering the dynamics of capitalism and the ensuing inequalities and goes on to suggest policy measures to arrest/reverse them. These are not merely an afterthought but form a significant and well-reasoned part of the book…Piketty shows himself to be not only a supereconomist but also a skilled politician. No wonder his thoughts have resonated even at the highest political levels. One can only hope that his work will actually influence adoption of his policy recommendations.”―Christel Lane, LSE Review of Books
“As befits a book of such size, Capital is broad-ranging, both historically and geographically…This impressive book contains the odd equation and chart that might not appeal to the general reader, but I hope this work will not go the way of A Brief History of Time--a book more talked about than read.”―William Keegan, The Tablet
“Riveting…[Piketty] embodies a model of engaged and sophisticated public debate, the sort of which politicians can only dream…One of Piketty’s main messages is that the structures of inequality societies choose to live with are the results of political choices, not natural or immutable economic tendencies, and that to pretend otherwise is an ‘ideological’ fiction…Capital inequality has dispossessed us of our ‘democratic sovereignty,’ and that’s something we should all really worry about… His book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality…When Piketty’s insights are eventually fused into new histories of economic and political thinking about global competition from the French Revolution to the present, the results will be...electrifying, particularly when it comes to revisiting the political and economic ideas of the global wars of the first half of the twentieth century…[This book] will certainly also shake the foundations of many university courses in political philosophy. That is itself quite a remarkable achievement, and perhaps the sort of achievement that might lead to the sort of political consciousness-raising Piketty is clearly keen to promote. In that, he really is an heir to a long-standing tradition of public intellectuals in French academic life since the Revolution.”―Duncan Kelly, Times Literary Supplement
“Piketty has come in for a lot of praise for the clarity of his writing, and I think it’s deserved. There’s very little math in this book, and it assumes very little prior knowledge of economics. In part, this is because Piketty is offering something fresh in the discourse: an unimaginably massive data-set that traces the ebb and flow of wealth and productivity around the globe for three centuries…Piketty challenges the idea that modernity somehow led to ‘merit’ asserting itself as the new determinant of wealth. Instead, he makes a very convincing case that the increasing size of the capital class--which expanded comfortably during the period of colonial expansion--created a hunger for wealth that turned the aristocracy on itself in a squabble over who got to loot the colonies, which was World War I…This is a crisis. The reason for capitalism is that it is supposed to allocate reward based on ‘merit’--it is supposed to move capital into the hands of the people who can do the most with it--and if all our policy decisions are made in service to a class of supermanagers whose wealth comes from squatting on a fortune managed by some green-eyeshade quants who grow it without its owner ever doing a notable thing apart from being born to dynasty, there is no more reason for capitalism. Piketty darkly hints that the last time this happened, the world tore itself to pieces, twice, in an orgy of destruction that left millions dead and whole nations in ruin…It’s a rare thing to see economists, especially pro-capitalist economists, praising taxation itself, but Piketty--careful, unemotional Piketty--dares…Besides, he says, the thing every red-blooded entrepreneur wants to see is people getting rich by their wits and deeds, not by the birthright of kings…Piketty wants desperately to salvage captalism, even if that means proposing something that every capitalist will hate: a global wealth tax.”―Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
“The impact of the book will be [deep] and long lasting…Piketty has elevated many issues to a higher level by making the study of inequality as one of political economy embedded in history, data and configuration of socio-political groups… This book has all the makings of a classic. It has already changed the way economists think about inequality. One hopes that these ideas will percolate into the chambers of policy-makers in governments and lending institutions and bring about changes in their policies to reduce inequality.”―K. Subramanian, The Hindu
“[A] timely, important book.”―Joseph E. Stiglitz, New York Times
“A book of such magisterial sweep…Piketty deserves huge credit for kickstarting a debate about inequality and illuminating the distribution of income and wealth.”―Stephanie Flanders, The Guardian
“Seven hundred pages on the evolution of inequality in economically advanced societies by the most fashionable new theorist to emerge for a long time. Many have been waiting for such a comprehensive critique of capitalism.”―David Sexton, Evening Standard
“This year’s most unlikely best seller, a crossover from the world of scholarship into general public discussion of a kind that seems rarer than it used to be. The book’s thesis--that economic inequality in the developed world is increasing, with potentially dire consequences for social justice and democratic governance--has struck a nerve in the American body politic. But its implications extend beyond the realm of political economy…The book invites the re-examination of deeply held assumptions about the world.”―A. O. Scott, New York Times
“Using sophisticated computer modeling and analyses, the professor from the Paris School of Economics debunks a long-held assumption--that income from wages will tend to grow at roughly the same rate as wealth--and instead makes a compelling case that, over time, the apparatus of capitalism grows wealth faster than wages. Result: Inequality between the wealthy and everyone else will widen faster and faster; and, without progressive taxation, his data show we’ll return to levels of inequality not seen since America’s Gilded Age.”―Dean Paton, YES!
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century convinces because Piketty supports his arguments about inequality with two innovative forms of evidence largely neglected by his predecessors on both the left and the right. The first is an unprecedented trove of historical economic data, which Piketty uses to demonstrate increasing inequality due to the long-term tendency of returns on capital to outpace economic growth. The second is a series of literary works, which Piketty uses to reveal the social and psychological consequences of this inequality in its erosion of human dignity. The depth and range of evidence Piketty marshals allows him to deliver a devastating blow to the confidence of many economists that capitalism is a tide that gradually lifts all boats. In the process, he mounts an effective critique of the tendency of economic writers on both left and right to rely on theories and formal systems. Many who were content to ignore the warnings of [David] Harvey and company that our economic system will produce unsustainable levels of inequity find that they cannot ignore Piketty’s…His book challenges both mainstream economists’ faith in untested mathematical models, as well as radicals’ resistance to subjecting Marx’s economic theory to rigorous testing.”―Michael W. Clune, Chronicle of Higher Education
“In this monumental, vitally important work, [Piketty] forces us to reconsider what we think we know about the baseline functioning of capitalist economies over the long haul, and to grapple with the implications for ourselves and our times. Piketty’s approach is data-driven. In detective-like fashion, he has collected the most complete historical series on distributions of income and wealth ever assembled, and this data allows him to articulate a penetrating and highly accessible account of the long evolution of inequality within advanced industrial nations…The findings are numerous and sobering, and nearly every page of the book rewards a careful reading with new insights and intriguing questions.”―Matthew Carnes, America
“New research from the Fed shows incomes of the richest Americans are bouncing back strongly after the crisis while average incomes have fallen…In essence, French economist Thomas Piketty’s contention that wealth breeds wealth--and that increasing inequality is part of capitalism’s inherent structure, rather than an occasional condition--looks largely correct, at least since the early 1990s.”―Tomas Hirst, Business Insider
“Piketty demonstrates in terrifying detail, with painstaking statistical research, that free-market capitalism, in the absence of major state redistribution, produces profound economic inequalities. Specifically, after redistributive policies in the mid-20th century narrowed the income and wealth gap somewhat, the gap has widened again in the last few decades, approaching levels not seen since before World War I.”―Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune
“When the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate (which [Piketty] says is what happened until the beginning of the 20th century and is likely to happen again as growth slows), then the money that rich people make from their wealth piles up while wages rise more slowly if at all. The implications of this should be frightening for anyone who believes in a merit-based system. It means we are in danger of entering into an era that, like the 19th century in France and England, is socially and politically dominated by those with vast amounts of inherited wealth…Piketty’s book is important because of the way he has clarified the magnitude of the problem and its dangers. And he has done so at a time of increasing soul-searching about the role technology plays in exacerbating inequality.”―David Rotman, Technology Review
“This past July, I felt compelled to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century after reading several reviews and hearing about it from friends. I’m glad I did. I encourage you to read it too…I agree with his most important conclusions, and I hope his work will draw more smart people into the study of wealth and income inequality.”―Bill Gates, Gates Notes
“[Piketty’s] overarching theme--that increased income disparity as a threat to democratic capitalism--remains prominent…His concerns about social unrest cannot be ignored: the movement from personal interdependence to impersonal global interdependence tends to erode trust and voluntary sharing, and wealth disparities are increasingly seen as unmerited and unfair.”―James Halteman, Christian Century
“[A] sweeping study of wealth in the modern world…Piketty makes his case with three centuries’ worth of economic data from around the world organized in a trove of detailed but lucid tables and graphs. This is a serious, meaty economic treatise, but Piketty’s prose (in Goldhammer’s deft translation) is wonderfully readable and engaging, and illuminates the human reality behind the econometric stats--especially in his explorations of the role of capital in the novels of Jane Austen and Balzac. Full of insights but free of dogma, this is a seminal examination of how entrenched wealth and intractable inequality continue to shape the economy.”―Publishers Weekly
“Very readable and often slyly witty…Piketty does economics in a new way; or more accurately, he returns to an older way. He still uses formal economic theory but regards economics as a sub-discipline of social science, alongside history, sociology, anthropology and political science and prefers to characterize his work as political economy rather than economic science. Piketty draws wonderfully upon the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac to portray the gross inequality of 19th-century societies. He argues that the degree of inequality is not just the product of economic forces; it is also the product of politics, including the tax, expenditure and regulatory decisions of government, and the discourse of justification of inequality…Piketty starts in the 19th century and examines the three eras. He wants to understand the longue durée of capitalism, as did the pioneers of political economy such as Malthus, Ricardo and Marx. And like them, he places the distributional question--the distribution of pre-tax income and the distribution of wealth--at the heart of economic analysis. This approach, which is both empirical and historical, is much needed if we are to understand income inequality and more generally to understand how capitalist economies operate. The ahistorical perspective of hedge fund managers and their risk pricing models helped cause the financial crisis in 2007-08…Piketty’s focus is not labor income but capital income, and here lies his originality.”―George Fallis, Literary Review of Canada
“The best business book on economics of the year.”―Daniel Gross, strategy+business
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics.”―Paul Mason, The Observer
“This was the blockbuster success of 2014 and was named the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. Despite the controversies surrounding it, the book throws much light upon one of the most important questions in economics: what determines the distribution of income and wealth. With an abundance of data and some simple and powerful theories, Piketty has made an immensely important contribution to the public debate.”―Martin Wolf, Financial Times
“This book is the key to understanding how the automatic accumulation and concentration of wealth poses a threat to the peaceful economies in which entrepreneurs prosper.”―Geoffrey James, Inc.
“The year’s most popular and controversial book.”―Roland White, Sunday Times
“Marx believed that free markets produce inequality, social division and violence. Piketty appears to side with Marx, but this is deceptive. When Piketty talks about ‘capital,’ he means the kind of investments held by today’s leisured rentier class whose money is tied up in property and pensions. Piketty argues that a free market overloaded with this kind of capital may or may not lead to anger and alienation, but it will certainly act like lumpy blockages in the smooth running of the economy. Piketty only wants the economy to work better.”―Nicholas Blincoe, The Telegraph
“The fundamental theme on the differences between returns to capital and returns to labor is one that Piketty has brought, quite properly, to the center of policy discussions.”―Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg View
“Monumental…Translated beautifully by Arthur Goldhammer, [Capital in the Twenty-First Century]…smashed into the intellectual world with incredible force…But beyond the media phenomenon, how much substance was there? The answer is: a considerable amount. The book is important, first and foremost, because it brings together a vast trove of research by Piketty and others on the evolution of income and wealth over two centuries. One also has to admire the way Piketty marshals the data to create a sweeping historical narrative, in a style reminiscent of the great thinkers of the 19th century.”―Ben Chu, The Independent
“Belief in markets may be crumbling but as platoons of mercenaries, lawyers, accountants and management consultants continue to plunder the world’s resources on behalf of unaccountable corporations, the tipping point has not yet been reached. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows how privateers use privatization, debt creation and capital inflation as a mechanism for rent extraction, with catastrophic consequences for public services.”―Allyson Pollock, Times Higher Education
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is arguably the most important popular economics book in recent memory. It will take its place among other classics in the field that have survived changing theoretical and political fashions, such as its namesake by Karl Marx (Das Kapital, 1867) or other ambitiously titled books such as John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion about the economic landscape will have to read Piketty.”―Kate Bahn, Women’s Review of Books
“[A] seminal work on capitalism.”―Madan Sabnavis, Financial Express
“Piketty’s great achievement, and one possible reason for the enthusiastic reception of his book, is his effective empirical demonstration of a fact long denied by neoclassical economics and its champions throughout the world: markets, when left to their own devices, do not provide individuals with rewards that are proportional to their efforts and contributions towards producing goods and services, nor do they ensure the most optimal distribution of those goods and services. Instead, they tend to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, giving rise to what Piketty calls a system of ‘patrimonial’ capitalism in which a few major players derive disproportionate benefit simply by virtue of possessing high amounts of capital… As a work of economic history, and a source of data, it effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality, reward effort and innovation, and deliver the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people. At a point in time where slogans about the 1 per cent vs the 99pc abound, this book provides conclusive evidence in support of the idea that the modern-world economy is one that is inherently unjust and exploitative.”―Hassan Javid, Dawn
“Piketty’s book has been a smash because many people are worried about the slow rate of growth in the developed economies since the financial crisis. Many are also worried about rising inequality. Capital seems to offer an elegant way to explain both…He deserves huge credit for illuminating the distribution of income and wealth.”―Stephanie Flanders, The Guardian
“[Piketty’s] magnum opus, which kicked off years of debate over the causes of and potential solutions for deep poverty in wealthy societies.”―Martin Wolk, Los Angeles Times
“Piketty presents the problem of inequality afresh, using new forms of historical narration and explanation that cut across disciplines and theoretical frameworks.”―William Davies, London Review of Books
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century looks back in order to look forward, plumbing economic patterns from the 18th century onward and homing in on the staggering inequities that dominate our age.”―Hamilton Cain, The Atlantic
“A sweeping account of rising inequality… Eventually, Piketty says, we could see the reemergence of a world familiar to nineteenth-century Europeans; he cites the novels of Austen and Balzac. In this ‘patrimonial society,’ a small group of wealthy rentiers lives lavishly on the fruits of its inherited wealth, and the rest struggle to keep up… The proper role of public intellectuals is to question accepted dogmas, conceive of new methods of analysis, and expand the terms of public debate. Capital in the Twenty-first Century does all these things… Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.”―John Cassidy, New Yorker
“An extraordinary sweep of history backed by remarkably detailed data and analysis… Piketty’s economic analysis and historical proofs are breathtaking.”―Robert B. Reich, The Guardian
“Piketty’s treatment of inequality is perfectly matched to its moment. Like [Paul] Kennedy a generation ago, Piketty has emerged as a rock star of the policy-intellectual world… But make no mistake, his work richly deserves all the attention it is receiving… Piketty, in collaboration with others, has spent more than a decade mining huge quantities of data spanning centuries and many countries to document, absolutely conclusively, that the share of income and wealth going to those at the very top―the top 1 percent, .1 percent, and .01 percent of the population―has risen sharply over the last generation, marking a return to a pattern that prevailed before World War I… Even if none of Piketty’s theories stands up, the establishment of this fact has transformed political discourse and is a Nobel Prize–worthy contribution. Piketty provides an elegant framework for making sense of a complex reality. His theorizing is bold and simple and hugely important if correct. In every area of thought, progress comes from simple abstract paradigms that guide later thinking, such as Darwin’s idea of evolution, Ricardo’s notion of comparative advantage, or Keynes’s conception of aggregate demand. Whether or not his idea ultimately proves out, Piketty makes a major contribution by putting forth a theory of natural economic evolution under capitalism… Piketty writes in the epic philosophical mode of Keynes, Marx, or Adam Smith… By focusing attention on what has happened to a fortunate few among us, and by opening up for debate issues around the long-run functioning of our market system, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a profoundly important contribution.”―Lawrence H. Summers, Democracy
“It is easy to overlook the achievement of Thomas Piketty’s new bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, as a work of economic history. Debates about the book have largely focused on inequality. But on any given page, there is data about the total level of private capital and the percentage of income paid out to labor in England from the 1700s onward, something that would have been impossible for early researchers… Capital reflects decades of work in collecting national income data across centuries, countries, and class, done in partnership with academics across the globe. But beyond its remarkably rich and instructive history, the book’s deep and novel understanding of inequality in the economy has drawn well-deserved attention… [Piketty’s] engagement with the rest of the social sciences also distinguishes him from most economists… The book is filled with brilliant moments… The book is an attempt to ground the debate over inequality in strong empirical data, put the question of distribution back into economics, and open the debate not just to the entirety of the social sciences but to people themselves.”―Mike Konczal, Boston Review
“What makes Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century such a triumph is that it seems to have been written specifically to demolish the great economic shibboleths of our time… Piketty’s magnum opus.”―Thomas Frank, Salon
“[A] 700-page punch in the plutocracy’s pampered gut… It’s been half a century since a book of economic history broke out of its academic silo with such fireworks.”―Giles Whittell, The Times
“Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics has done the definitive comparative historical research on income inequality in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century.”―Paul Starr, New York Review of Books
“Bracing… Piketty provides a fresh and sweeping analysis of the world’s economic history that puts into question many of our core beliefs about the organization of market economies. His most startling news is that the belief that inequality will eventually stabilize and subside on its own, a long-held tenet of free market capitalism, is wrong. Rather, the economic forces concentrating more and more wealth into the hands of the fortunate few are almost sure to prevail for a very long time.”―Eduardo Porter, New York Times
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come. In the way it is written and the importance of the questions it asks, it is a book the classic authors of economics could have written if they lived today and had access to the vast empirical material Piketty and his colleagues collected… In a short review, it is impossible to do even partial justice to the wealth of information, data, analysis, and discussion contained in this book of almost 700 pages. Piketty has returned economics to the classical roots where it seeks to understand the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalism. He has re-emphasized the distinction between ‘unearned’ and ‘earned’ income that had been tucked away for so long under misleading terminologies of ‘human capital,’ ‘economic agents,’ and ‘factors of production.’ Labor and capital―those who have to work for a living and those who live from property―people in flesh―are squarely back in economics via this great book.”―Branko Milanovic, American Prospect
“Monumental… [Piketty] documents a sharp increase in such inequality over the last 25 years, not only in the United States, but also in Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa, with people with the highest incomes far outstripping the rest of society. The book is impressive in its wealth of information.”―Robert J. Shiller, New York Times
“Instantly influential… [Its] euphoric reception is richly merited… [Piketty’s] chief intellectual accomplishment is to show how the basic forces of capitalism tend inevitably toward an ever-greater accumulation of wealth at the tip of the pyramid… Over the past couple decades, we have started to realize that capitalism is no longer delivering for the vast majority of people in most Western democracies. The middle class is being hollowed out, even as fortunes continue to grow at the very top. Piketty has now delivered the most empirically grounded, intellectually coherent explanation of what is going on… His masterwork… That’s why the most successful societies of the 21st century will be the ones whose plutocrats read Piketty and help come up with the political answers to the economic forces he so powerfully describes. Piketty shows that the economics of the postwar era―when the West enjoyed strong, widely-shared growth―was a historical exception. For our Western democracies, it was also a political necessity. Capitalism is facing an existential challenge; smart plutocrats will be part of the solution.”―Chrystia Freeland, Politico
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade… Capital in the 21st Century essentially takes the existing debate on income inequality and supercharges it. It does so by asserting that in the long run the economic inequality that matters won’t be the gap between people who earn high salaries and those who earn low ones, it will be the gap between people who inherit large sums of money and those who don’t.”―Matthew Yglesias, Vox
“[A] magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality… The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties… Piketty has written a truly superb book. It’s a work that melds grand historical sweep―when was the last time you heard an economist invoke Jane Austen and Balzac?―with painstaking data analysis… A tour de force of economic modeling, an approach that integrates the analysis of economic growth with that of the distribution of income and wealth. This is a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics… Capital in the Twenty-First Century is, as I hope I’ve made clear, an awesome work. At a time when the concentration of wealth and income in the hands of a few has resurfaced as a central political issue, Piketty doesn’t just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame… Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes it clear that public policy can make an enormous difference, that even if the underlying economic conditions point toward extreme inequality, what Piketty calls ‘a drift toward oligarchy’ can be halted and even reversed if the body politic so chooses… His masterwork… Sometimes it seems as if a substantial part of our political class is actively working to restore Piketty’s patrimonial capitalism. And if you look at the sources of political donations, many of which come from wealthy families, this possibility is a lot less outlandish than it might seem… [A] masterly diagnosis of where we are and where we’re heading… Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an extremely important book on all fronts. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to.”―Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books
“Monumental…one of the most thorough and illuminating studies of capitalist economics since Karl Marx published the original Capital 150 years earlier.”―Gary Gerstle, Washington Post
“Groundbreaking…The usefulness of economics is determined by the quality of data at our disposal. Piketty’s new volume offers a fresh perspective and a wealth of newly compiled data that will go a long way in helping us understand how capitalism actually works.”―Christopher Matthews, Fortune.com
“French economist Thomas Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book. Open-minded readers will surely find themselves unable to ignore the evidence and arguments he has brought to bear… In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy… The result is a work of vast historical scope, grounded in exhaustive fact-based research, and suffused with literary references. It is both normative and political. Piketty rejects theorizing ungrounded in data… The book is built on a 15-year program of empirical research conducted in conjunction with other scholars. Its result is a transformation of what we know about the evolution of income and wealth (which he calls capital) over the past three centuries in leading high-income countries. That makes it an enthralling economic, social and political history.”―Martin Wolf, Financial Times
“About as close to a blockbuster as there is in the world of economic literature―easily the most discussed book of its genre in years. The central premise is provocative and profoundly bleak… Piketty challenges one of the underpinnings of modern democracies―namely, that growth and productivity make each generation better off than the previous one.”―Barrie McKenna, Globe and Mail
“Piketty has unearthed the history of income distribution for at least the past hundred years in every major capitalist nation. It makes for fascinating, grim and alarming reading… Piketty’s book provides a valuable explanatory context for America’s economic woes… Piketty gives us the most important work of economics since John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory.”―Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
“Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years… Although the contours of Piketty’s history confirm what economic historians already know, his anatomizing of the 1 percent’s fortunes over centuries is a revelation. When joined to his magisterial command of the source material and his gift for synthesis, they disclose a history not of steady economic expansion but of stops and starts, with room for sudden departures from seemingly unbreakable patterns. In turn, he links this history to economic theory, demonstrating that there is no inherent drive in markets toward income equality. It’s quite the opposite, in fact.”―Timothy Shenk, The Nation
“Magnificent…Even though it is a work more concerned with the past 200 years, it’s no coincidence that the full title of Piketty’s book is Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Its ambition is to shape debates about the next two centuries, not the past two. And in that it may succeed.”―Christopher Croke, The Australian
“[Piketty] is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generation…He makes his case in a clear and rigorous manner that debunks everything that capitalists believe about the ethical status of making money…He demonstrates that there is no reason to believe that capitalism can ever solve the problem of inequality, which he insists is getting worse rather than better. From the banking crisis of 2008 to the Occupy movement of 2011, this much has been intuited by ordinary people. The singular significance of his book is that it proves ‘scientifically’ that this intuition is correct. This is why his book has crossed over into the mainstream--it says what many people have already been thinking…Unlike many economists he insists that economic thinking cannot be separated from history or politics…As poverty increases across the globe, everyone is being forced to listen to Piketty with great attention. But although his diagnosis is accurate and compelling, it is hard, almost impossible, to imagine that the cure he proposes--tax and more tax--will ever be implemented in a world where, from Beijing to Moscow to Washington, money, and those who have more of it than anyone else, still calls the shots.”―Andrew Hussey, The Observer
“Piketty has won interest and enthusiasm on the left of the political spectrum…for this ambitious work. It is not, however, a politically sectarian argument; perhaps that explains why it has become a surprise bestseller. The strength of his thesis is that it is founded on evidence rather than ideology. Piketty has researched data over more than a century in order to derive his understanding of the dynamics of modern capitalism. He is able to point convincingly to a recent reversal of historical trends, so that the share of national income taken by the owners of capital has expanded over the past generation…What Piketty has done is provide a strong factual understanding for how modern capitalist economies diverge from the image of risk-taking and productive commercial activity. At the very least, the book effectively debunks the notion that there is an economic imperative for low tax rates and a smaller state.”―Oliver Kamm, The Times
“Magisterial…Piketty’s Capital feels very much like a Category 4 hurricane that hasn’t yet made landfall…Piketty draws on a vast store of historical data to argue that the broad dissemination of wealth that occurred during the decades following World War I was not, as economists then mistakenly believed, a natural state of capitalist equilibrium, but rather a halcyon interval between Belle Époque inequality and the rising inequality of our own era…Piketty’s most provocative argument is that the discrepancy between the high returns to capital and much more modest overall economic growth--briefly annulled during the mid-century--ensures that the gulf between the rich (who profit from capital investments) and the middle class (who depend chiefly on income from labor) will only continue to grow…The best reason to raise tax rates is not to punish the rich, of course, but to raise the revenue which the United States needs to invest in infrastructure and research, not to mention to pay for Social Security and health care. That investment gap poses a clear and present danger to American global economic leadership. Rising inequality exacerbates the problem by sapping the collective political will needed to address the problem.”―James Traub, Foreign Policy online
“Defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism…[It] suggests that traditional liberal government policies on spending, taxation and regulation will fail to diminish inequality…Without what [Piketty] acknowledges is a politically unrealistic global wealth tax, he sees the United States and the developed world on a path toward a degree of inequality that will reach levels likely to cause severe social disruption. Final judgment on Piketty’s work will come with time--a problem in and of itself, because if he is right, inequality will worsen, making it all the more difficult to take preemptive action.”―Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times
“This is a serious book…Piketty’s main point, and his new and powerful contribution to an old topic: as long as the rate of return exceeds the rate of growth, the income and wealth of the rich will grow faster than the typical income from work. (There seems to be no offsetting tendency for the aggregate share of capital to shrink; the tendency may be slightly in the opposite direction.) This interpretation of the observed trend toward increasing inequality, and especially the phenomenon of the 1 percent, is not rooted in any failure of economic institutions; it rests primarily on the ability of the economy to absorb increasing amounts of capital without a substantial fall in the rate of return. This may be good news for the economy as a whole, but it is not good news for equity within the economy…There is yet another, also rather dark, implication of this account of underlying trends. If already existing agglomerations of wealth tend to grow faster than incomes from work, it is likely that the role of inherited wealth in society will increase relative to that of recently earned and therefore more merit-based fortunes…The arithmetic suggests that the concentration of wealth and its ability to grow will favor an increasing weight of inheritance as compared with talent…If the ownership of wealth in fact becomes even more concentrated during the rest of the twenty-first century, the outlook is pretty bleak unless you have a taste for oligarchy…Wouldn’t it be interesting if the United States were to become the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the last refuge of increasing inequality at the top (and perhaps also at the bottom)? Would that work for you?”―Robert Solow, New Republic
“The blockbuster economics book of the season, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that the great equalizing decades following World War II, which brought on the rise of the middle class in the United States, were but a historical anomaly. Armed with centuries of data, Piketty says the rich are going to continue to gobble up a greater share of income, and our current system will do nothing to reverse that trend.”―Shaila Dewan, New York Times Magazine
“Anyone remotely interested in economics needs to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century.”―Matthew Yglesias, Slate
“In its magisterial sweep and ambition, Piketty’s latest work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is clearly modeled after Marx’s Das Kapital. But where Marx’s research was spotty, Piketty’s is prodigious. And where Marx foresaw capitalism’s collapse leading to a utopian proletariat paradise, Piketty sees a future of slow growth and Gilded Age disparities in which the wealthy--owners of capital--capture a steadily larger share of global wealth and income…Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years. Piketty offers a timely and well-reasoned reminder that there is nothing inevitable about the dominance of human capital over financial capital, and that there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity.”―Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post
“Though an heir to Tocqueville’s tradition of analytic history, Thomas Piketty has a message that could not be more different: Unless we act, inequality will grow much worse, eventually making a mockery of our democratic institutions. With wealth more and more concentrated, countries racing to cut taxes on capital, and inheritance coming to rival entrepreneurship as a source of riches, a new patrimonial elite may prove as inevitable as Tocqueville once believed democratic equality was. This forecast is based not on speculation but on facts assembled through prodigious research…Private wealth has reached new highs relative to national income and is approaching levels of concentration not seen since before 1929…Piketty is rightly pessimistic about an immediate response. The influence of the wealthy on democratic politics and on how we think about merit and reward presents formidable obstacles…Perhaps with this magisterial book, the troubling realities Piketty unearths will become more visible and the rationalizations of the privileged that sustain them less dominant. Like Tocqueville, Piketty has given us a new image of ourselves. This time, it’s one we should resist, not welcome.”―Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Prospect
“The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat…It is, first and foremost, a very detailed look at 200 years’ worth of data on the distribution of income and wealth across the rich world (with some figures for large emerging markets also included). This mountain of data allows Piketty to tell a simple and compelling story…The database on which the book is built is formidable, and it is difficult to dispute his call for a new perspective on the modern economic era, whether or not one agrees with his policy recommendations… We are all used to sneering at communism because of its manifest failure to deliver the sustained rates of growth managed by market economies. But Marx’s original critique of capitalism was not that it made for lousy growth rates. It was that a rising concentration of wealth couldn’t be sustained politically. Ultimately, those of us who would like to preserve the market system need to grapple with that sort of dynamic, in the context of the worrying numbers on inequality that Piketty presents.”―The Economist
“Piketty’s book is revolutionary. It rewrites the mission of economics, discarding claims that the discipline is a super-science of human behavior or public policy. Piketty wants to return his field to what the 19th century called ‘political economy’: a discipline about power, justice, and--also, but not first--wealth…[Piketty spoils] the longstanding conventional wisdom, supported by economics Nobel winners like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, plus lots of less controversial characters, that capitalism is democracy’s best friend…It shows a world getting radically more unequal, the return of hereditary wealth, and--at least in the U.S.--an economy so distorted that much of what happens at the very top can be fairly described as class-based looting. And he gives some fairly strong reasons to suspect that this, not the relatively open and egalitarian economies of the mid-20th century, is what capitalism looks like… Reading it is like talking to a smart person who knows you’re smart and knows, too, that you’re not an economist…We’ve been spun a story: mainstream economics for the last 60-odd years has succored a complacent folk tale, albeit with lots of mathematical sophistication tacked on. Except for some discernible ‘market failures,’ it told us that all was for the best in this best of worlds. What you earn must be what you are contributing; otherwise, the market would step in to restore efficiency…Piketty reveals that these just-so stories have veiled urgent and inflammatory problems: capitalism produces self-accelerating inequality that corrupts both politics and culture and splits society into privileged rent collectors and everyone else, who must choose either to get halfway rich ministering to capital or to stay on the low end of the pole doing the humanly necessary work of teaching, nursing, keeping the utility wires humming, and so forth. Piketty’s multi-century portrait of wealth and income obliterates economists’ complacent narratives…Yet the period of shared growth in the mid-20th century was not just the aftermath of war and depression. It was also the apex of organized labor’s power in Europe and North America, the fruit of many decades of organizing, not a little of it bloody, not a little under the flag of democratic socialism. Various crises cleared the ground, but the demands of labor, and an organized left more generally, were integral to building the comparatively egalitarian, high-wage world that came after the wars, with its strong public sector, self-assertive workers, and halfway tamed capital. There’s a lesson we can learn here about what we might do to combat inequality, and how…Piketty shows that capitalism’s attractive moral claims--that it can make everyone better off while respecting their freedom--deserve much less respect under our increasingly “pure” markets than in the mixed economies that dominated the North Atlantic countries in the mid-20th century…We are still seeking an economy that is both vibrant and humane, where mutual advantage is real and mutual aid possible. The one we have isn’t it.”―Jedediah Purdy, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The most remarkable work of economics in recent years, if not decades…[It] has caused an intellectual sensation on both sides of the Atlantic…His range is immense. And his open, fluent style will guarantee him a wide readership. In contrast to much of what passes for orthodox economics, he is engaged with the problems of the real world…The discipline of economics, Piketty argues, remains trapped in a juvenile passion for mathematics, divorced from history and its sister social sciences. His work aims to change that.”―Nick Pearce, New Statesman
“A landmark book…which brings a ton of data to bear in reaching the commonsensical conclusion that inequality has to do with more than just blind market forces at work.”―George Packer, New Yorker blog
“[Piketty] is now the most talked-about economist on the planet…Capital is rooted not in theoretical abstractions so much as archaeology. The book analyzes hundreds of years of tax records from France, the U.K., the U.S., Germany and Japan to prove a simple idea: The rich really are getting richer. And their wealth doesn’t trickle down. It trickles up…The stark historical consequences of unchecked inequality are at the heart of Capital.”―Rana Foroohar, Time
“Magisterial…Piketty provides a sweeping, data-driven narrative about inequality trends in the United States and other Western economies over the past century or more, identifies a worrisome increase in income and wealth concentration in a small percentage of the population since 1980, and warns that this trend won’t likely correct itself…Piketty is not optimistic that the forces of greater income and wealth inequality will abate on their own, but he is not an economic determinist. The problem, however, is that countering those forces requires public policies and institutions more like those of the era of shared prosperity than those of today.”―Chad Stone, U.S. News & World Report online
“Piketty’s new book is an important contribution to understanding what we need to do to produce more growth, wider economic opportunity and greater social stability.”―David Cay Johnston, Al Jazeera America
“The book has made everyone with a stake in capitalism sit up and take notice…[Piketty’s] analysis should challenge Americans to rethink our notions of wealth and poverty and whether any semblance of ‘equal opportunity’ actually exists…Piketty has made an important contribution. His book prompts the discerning person to evaluate anew the human and social costs of capitalism. The creative thinking of citizens is now required to combat the ills he has diagnosed.”―America
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century is written in the tradition of great economic texts… Piketty and his colleagues have spent recent years putting together a World Top Incomes Database, their detailed investigation into income in countries around the globe, spanning several decades…Informed by this historical, cross-country data, Piketty evaluates--and rejects--a number of generally accepted conclusions in economic thought, while being careful to note the limitations of inevitably “imperfect and incomplete” sources. The main finding of his investigation is that capital still matters…This book is significant for its findings, as well as for how Piketty arrives at them. It’s easy--and fun--to argue about ideas. It is much more difficult to argue about facts. Facts are what Piketty gives us, while pressing the reader to engage in the journey of sorting through their implications.”―Heather Boushey, American Prospect
“How does a rigorous, seven-hundred page economic history become a lionized hit? Through the canny voice of professor Thomas Piketty, and his demystification of inherited wealth, Karl Marx’s true legacy, and what we mean when we talk about monetary ‘growth’ and ‘inequality.’”―Barnes and Noble Review
“When it comes to economics…you need to get yourself a hold of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty…Piketty’s study will have readers plotting capital’s downfall because what it shows is that the growing inequalities we are seeing between the haves and have nots are endemic to the system. Piketty has been hailed by many on the right as well as the left, for writing a highly significant book. Its strength rests on the fact that he has worked the sources in a way few economists have, analyzing actual data on earnings over decades to come up with some startling conclusions. We are entering a new age of capital, he argues; a time, similar to the early 19th century, when many will live off their money. Without the need for work. Meanwhile, those without capital will always struggle to keep ahead of debts.”―Thomas Quinn, Big Issue
“Piketty, whose previous work we are indebted to for providing statistical verification that the top 1 percent of the population possesses a outsize percentage of wealth, has written a magisterial book about the ever-increasing inequality. A comprehensive overview of Capital’s abundance of historical and analytical data would be impossible here. (Here’s a microreview of Piketty: Read it)…Piketty’s genius lies in proving that inequality is growing and potentially threatens widespread political instability…Piketty has written a trenchant critique of our current economic system.”―Michael Washburn, Boston Globe
“Piketty's magnum opus…But unlike many other authors of tracts from the ‘dismal science,’ this distinguished French economist has rendered an eminently readable account of the history and dynamics of capitalism and inequality…A lucid tale of why inequality in the world is increasing, and what we should be doing about it. The right leaning crowd may be dismayed with his prescriptions of stiff global wealth taxes, but neither leftists nor rightists can dispute the data that he presents…According to Piketty, the only real corrective to capital’s concentration is a global capital tax (because it is freely globally mobile), and a stiff inheritance tax. This is controversial, but what is not disputed is that inequality in income and wealth within each country has gotten much worse in the past three decades. The question is what do we do about it. For starters, we should read this excellent book.”―Ajit Ranade, Business Today
“Intellectually hefty…Piketty has already engendered vigorous argument. Capital is an arduous climb, but the subject is equally weighty, and it demands our best analyses, proposals and dialogues. Capital is an essential volume in the conversation.”―Earl Pike, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“An important book…which paints a compelling, and scary, picture of the deep forces driving toward ever greater inequality in the modern world. Piketty’s historical focus adds power to his analysis of the trend toward greater financial inequality today.”―Charles R. Morris, Commonweal
“Piketty has looked at centuries of tax archives to formulate a theory of capitalism that is evidence-based and rigorously researched, but also attempts to answer the most basic questions in economic theory. His paradigm-shifting thesis is, at its most basic, that late-stage capitalist economies foster inequality and create an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. These ideas feel intuitive and elegant, and Piketty’s emphasis on data-based analysis lend even his most ambitious claims great credibility. Capital in the Twenty-First Century is already being hailed as a seminal work of economic thought, and with very good reason.”―Thomas Flynn, Daily Beast
“This important and fascinating book surely ranks among the most influential economic analysis of recent decades. Much of the debate over inequality in recent years is the result of the work of Thomas Piketty and his fellow researchers…This book contains important lessons for economists. It is a (perhaps unwelcome) reminder that what they measure reflects political choices. It cautions them to be wary of viewing recent decades as some sort of ‘steady state’; the evolution of post-World War II incomes and wealth reflect the unwinding of earlier events, and the point is more general. And it reminds them of the rhetorical and explanatory power of simple comparisons of facts, once collected and arranged, relative to complex statistics and models.”―Andrew Berg, Finance & Development
“Over the last decade or so, economist Thomas Piketty has made his name central to serious discussions of inequality…Piketty expands upon his empirical work of the last 10 years, while also setting forth a political theory of inequality. This last element of the book gives special attention to tax policy and makes some provocative suggestions--new and higher taxes on the very rich.”―Joseph Thorndike, Forbes
“The most eagerly anticipated book on economics in many years.”―Toby Sanger, Globe and Mail
“Many of the book’s 700 pages are spent marshaling the evidence that 21st-century capitalism is on a one-way journey towards inequality--unless we do something. If Piketty is right, there are big political implications, and the beauty of the book is that he never refrains from drawing them…The book’s terms and explanations are utterly simple; with a myriad of historical data, Piketty reduces the story of capitalism to a clear narrative arc. To challenge his argument you have to reject the premises of it, not the working out…Is Piketty the new Karl Marx? Anybody who has read the latter will know he is not…Piketty has, more accurately, placed an unexploded bomb within mainstream, classical economics…The power of Piketty’s work is that it also challenges the narrative of the center-left under globalization, which believed upskilling the workforce, combined with mild redistribution, would promote social justice. This, Piketty demonstrates, is mistaken. All that social democracy and liberalism can produce, with their current policies, is the oligarch’s yacht co-existing with the food bank forever. Piketty’s Capital, unlike Marx’s Capital, contains solutions possible on the terrain of capitalism itself.”―Paul Mason, The Guardian
“Piketty solidifies and gives an intellectual edge to the view that something is wrong here, and something new and bold and radical has got to be done… People like me, and others, are certainly excited by the prospect of where Piketty might take us.”―Len McCluskey, The Guardian
“The big questions that concerned Mill, Marx and Smith are now rearing their heads afresh…Thomas Piketty--who spent long years, during which the mainstream neglected inequality, mapping the distribution of income--is making waves with Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Nodding at Marx, that title helps explain the attention, but his decidedly classical emphasis on historical dynamics in determining who gets what resonates in a world where an increasing proportion of citizens are feeling fleeced by the elite.”―The Guardian
“[Capital in the Twenty-First Century] has jolted the right, who are scrabbling around for an answer to its main message: rising inequality is killing capitalism…It is a big book in every sense of the word, using empirical evidence from 30 countries to describe how capitalism has evolved over the past 300 years and is now reverting to what Piketty calls the Downton Abbey world of a century ago. Where much modern writing about economics is cloaked in impenetrable jargon, Piketty is not afraid to draw on literature and popular culture to make his points…Piketty’s book seems to explain the brutal world of the Great Recession and its aftermath rather better than trickle-down economics…It is rare for economics books to fly off the shelves. Once in every generation, usually when the world has started to recover after a serious recession, there is a search for answers. Will Hutton’s The State We’re In was the must-buy book two decades ago just as Piketty’s is today.”―The Guardian blog
“Piketty sets out to tell a high-level history of the global economy and to outline a fresh theory of where we are heading. It’s the sort of grand intellectual enterprise that was common in the 19th century, but has become a rarity in our era of more specialized scholarship…Piketty says he wants the book to be widely read and his ideas debated. He has succeeded. Questions of economic theory have now reached an uncommonly large audience. One could, of course, fill a book twice the size with the reviews and the commentary Capital has prompted. But there is a better way into the debate than consuming the Piketty media phenomenon: spend a little valuable capital and read the original yourself.”―Ben Chu, The Independent
“Piketty’s ground-breaking work on the historical evolution of income distribution is impressive, but he covers many other areas, including the erosion of meritocracy by inherited wealth, public debt, education, health and taxation. He also proposes challenging ideas for funding the social state in the 21st century…Capital in the Twenty-First Century will be embraced by progressives and rejected by conservatives wary of change. But, if those conservatives who support a meritocracy are convinced, it could be a catalyst for reform. This book is challenging, but one of the best economic books in decades.”―Paul Sweeney, Irish Times
“In the 19th century, tsarist censors banned John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty while letting through Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Mill’s message was so lucidly expressed that it posed an obvious and immediate threat to the regime; Marx’s prose was clotted and convoluted and his economics littered with leftovers from his youthful enthusiasm for Hegel. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shares its title with Marx’s work but its argumentative verve with Mill’s, and it has been a runaway bestseller in the United States. In spite of the efforts of conservative American economists to persuade their readers that anyone who raises questions about inequalities of income and wealth must be a Marxist, Piketty has no time whatsoever for Marx. Piketty’s economics is ‘data driven,’ while Marx was short of useful data, did not make good use of what data he had and generalized wildly from a few exceptional cases of capital-intensive industries…The book is a terrific achievement.”―Alan Ryan, Literary Review
“One of the strengths of Piketty’s book is the depth and rigor of his historical analysis. Yet it is changes taking place now that make his concerns especially urgent…Piketty’s is a potentially apocalyptic view of the future. On that at least, we’d better hope he’s wrong.”―Andrew Neather, London Evening Standard
“The enthusiastic reception in the United States of Piketty’s rigorous Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which answers the empirical spirit of the age with a welcome rush of statistics, may be a promising sign of renewal in the otherwise sedate intellectual pastures of the continent. To have made the word “redistribution” utterable again by mainstream economists is already a considerable achievement. Having offered an unignorable account of the history of inequality in capitalist democracies, Piketty believes he has identified a Band-Aid of sufficient swath--a European tax on wealth and a parliamentary chamber charged with regulating finance in the euro zone--to cover Europe’s wounds.”―Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk, The Nation
“Not since John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 has a work of political theory been as rapturously received on the left as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century…In this supposedly superficial and anti-intellectual age, his 690-page treatise on inequality, rich in empirical research, has resonated because it speaks to one of the central anxieties of our time: that society is becoming ever more fragmented as the very rich pull away from the rest. As Piketty elegantly demonstrates, as long as the rate of return on what he calls capital continues to exceed the growth rate of the economy (as it has done since the 1970s), inequality will widen to levels unknown since the Victorian era.”―New Statesman
“Piketty, a prominent economist, explains the tendency in mature societies for wealth to concentrate in a few hands.”―Amy Merrick, New Yorker
“[Piketty’s] thesis is simple. The growing concentration of capital in fewer hands has enabled its owners to keep it relatively scarce and thus valuable…Continuing high inequality is socially and economically destabilizing, though it need not lead to Marx’s apocalypse. So what we need is another bout of social democracy especially in the form of progressive taxation. You many think that it doesn’t require 600 pages to get this message across. This would be wrong. The strength of Piketty’s book is his close attention to the different sources of inequality, the massive documentation underpinning his history and conclusions, and his impressive culls from sociology and literature, which exhibit the richness of ‘political economy’ compared to its thin mathematical successor that has attained such prominence…Piketty’s book is a timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes.”―Robert Skidelsky, Prospect
“Thomas Piketty…has written a 700 page book on inequality which has achieved something few would have thought possible. He has rocked the neo-liberal economic establishment to its foundations. To read the tidal wave of reviews by economics professors and others across the world is to get a sense of the impact that Piketty’s conclusions are having: that inequality is even more extreme than most experts thought, is worse than at any time since the 19th century and is set to reach nightmare proportions in the years ahead. Even some of the most ideologically blinkered of free market economists, having read this book, now openly admit that Professor Piketty has laid down a challenge which they dare not ignore and which could change the political environment.”―John Palmer, Red Pepper
“Drawing on hundreds of years of economic data (some of which has only recently become available to researchers) Piketty reaches a simple but disturbing conclusion: In the long run, the return on capital tends to be greater than the growth rate of the economies in which that capital is located. What this means is that in a modern market economy the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the already-rich is as natural as water flowing downhill, and can only be ameliorated by powerful political intervention, in the form of wealth redistribution via taxes, and to a lesser extent laws that systematically protect labor from capital…Readers can already guess the dire conclusion that flows from combining Piketty’s theory with the plausible assumption that unregulated wealth leads to plutocracy: If the only way to avoid plutocracy would be to employ political processes that the plutocrats themselves will eventually buy lock, stock and barrel, then the only way to avoid being ruled by the Lords of Capital is to become one of them.”―Paul Campos, Salon
“[Piketty] has been perhaps the most important thinker on inequality of the past decade or so… With his book, he’s handed liberals a coherent framework that justifies the discomfort that they probably already felt about the wealth gap… Capital will change the political conversation in a more subtle way as well, by focusing it on wealth, not income… Whether or not Piketty’s grand unified theory is exactly correct, he’s moving the popular conversation in the right direction.”―Jordan Weissmann, Slate
“There are books that you read and there are books that hit the nail on the head so hard that you want to get your teeth into them. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century…clearly belongs to the second category.”―Perry Lam, South China Morning Post
“Impressive, provocative… The richness, scope and detail of Piketty’s analysis means that it is impossible to summarize it without losing much of the vibrancy which makes it such an exceptionally gripping read… The special conditions for growth created by the two world wars have now evaporated. The forces of convergence are in large measure spent, and the forces of divergence are in the ascendant. Capitalism is reverting to type… The first three parts of Piketty’s book are devoted to describing and analyzing this transition. They represent a brilliant, mesmerizing re-statement of technical matters for a non-specialist readership. Here Piketty’s achievement is superb… There is a huge amount to admire and welcome in this book… Like the radicals of the 1790s, who toasted Edmund Burke in gratitude for the fundamental debate his writings on the French Revolution had provoked, even those who find Piketty’s remedies unpalatable and in some ways worse than the disease he is trying to cure should nevertheless applaud his industry, his acuity, and his humane commitment to the ideal of rational, temperate and informed public debate.”―David Womersley, Standpoint
“[Piketty] has demolished the Western myth that all who work hard can expect success.”―Mary Riddell, The Telegraph
“It proves, irrefutably and clearly, what we’ve all suspected for some time now―the rich ARE getting richer compared to everyone else, and their wealth isn’t trickling down. In fact, it’s trickling up… And as Piketty’s book makes so uncomfortably clear, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better… It’s going to be remembered as the economic tome of our era. Basically, Piketty has finally put to death, with data, the fallacies of trickle down economics and the Laffer curve, as well as the increasingly fantastical notion that we can all just bootstrap our way to the Forbes 400 list… We can only hope that the politicians crafting today’s economic programs will take this book to heart.”―Rana Foroohar, Time online
“Magisterial… Bursting with ideas… This book is economics at its best.”―Philip Roscoe, Times Higher Education
“In Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Piketty sums up his research, tracing the history and pattern of economic inequality across a number of countries from the eighteenth century to the present, analyzing its causes, and evaluating some policy fixes. Spanning nearly 700 densely packed pages, it’s a big book in more than one sense of the word. Clearly written, ambitious in scope, rooted in economics but drawing on insights from related fields like history and sociology, Piketty’s Capital resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned work of political economy by the likes of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes. But what is particularly exciting about this book is that, due to advances in technology, Piketty is able to draw on data that not only spans a substantially longer historical time frame, but is also necessarily more complete and consistent than the records earlier theorists were forced to rely on. As a result, his analysis is significantly more comprehensive than those of his predecessors― and easily as persuasive… Capital is a consistently engrossing read, encompassing topics including the stunning comeback that inherited wealth has made in today’s advanced economies, the dubiousness of the economic theory that a worker’s wage is equal to his or her marginal productivity, the moral insidiousness of meritocratic justifications of inequality, and more. But the book’s major strength lies in Piketty’s ability to see the big picture. His original and rigorously well-documented insights into the deep structures of capitalism show us how the dynamics of capital accumulation have played out historically over the past three centuries, and how they’re likely to develop in the century to come… America’s twenty-first-century inequality crisis is, if anything, even more daunting and complex than the one we experienced a century ago. But as Piketty reminds us, the solutions to this problem are political, and they lie within our grasp. Should Americans choose to deploy those solutions, not only would we be doing the right thing, we’d be living up to our deepest traditions and most cherished ideals.”―Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly
“After receiving widespread attention in his native France, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has received even greater attention on this side of the Atlantic, and deservedly so. It offers a stark and depressing picture for those who believe that some combination of democratic politics and economic growth can protect us from rampant inequality.”―Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage, Washington Post blog
“Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the 21st Century, painstakingly details the dynamics of wealth and income inequality throughout the last two centuries, and offers a somewhat grim picture of the future of economic inequality. Along the way, Piketty also offers his theory of the cause of exploding executive pay and how we can successfully combat this destructive trend.”―Matt Bruenig, The Week
“It’s a brilliant, surprisingly readable work that synthesizes a staggering amount of careful research to make the case that income inequality is no accident. Indeed, Piketty argues that it is a feature of capitalism itself―unless governments take action to rein in capitalism’s excesses… But the value of Piketty’s work is that it shows that capitalism’s postwar heyday―in which incomes at the bottom and the top actually converged―was a historical anomaly. Piketty’s analysis of the last two centuries makes the case that capital in its natural state does not tend to spread out or trickle down, but to concentrate in the hands of a few… He has starkly and convincingly outlined the stakes for future generations. Either we’ll have a new birth of reformed capitalism…or we’ll have wealth concentration on such a colossal scale that it will threaten the democratic order.”―Ryan Cooper, The Week
“It is a great work, a fearsome beast of analysis stuffed with an awesome amount of empirical data, and will surely be a landmark study in economics.”―The Week
“Rarely does a book come along…that completely alters the paradigm through which we frame our worldview. Thomas Piketty’s magisterial study of the structure of capitalism since the 18th century, Capital in the 21st Century, is such a book… As leaders from Pope Francis to Barack Obama have proclaimed, growing inequality is the defining issue of our time. Much indeterminate discussion has swirled around its key causes, from job-displacing technologies to wage-deflating outsourcing of jobs. Capital in the 21st Century clears up all the confused thinking and presents us with the most compelling analysis to date of the key dynamic that drives ever-increasing inequality. This book is more than a must read. It is a manual for action that provides a fresh framework for the new politics of the 21st century.”―Nathan Gardels, The WorldPost
“[An] enormously important book.”―Doug Henwood, Bookforum
“Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high―and is only bound to grow worse.”―Kirkus Reviews
“An explosive argument.”―Liberation
“A seminal book on the economic and social evolution of the planet… A masterpiece.”―Emmanuel Todd, Marianne
“Outstanding… A political and theoretical bulldozer.”―Mediapart
“The book of the season.”―Telerama
“In this magisterial work, Thomas Piketty has performed a great service to the academy and to the public. He has written a pioneering book that is at once thoughtful, measured, and provocative. The force of his case rests not on a diatribe or a political agenda, but on carefully collected and analyzed data and reasoned thought. The book should have a major impact on our discussions of contemporary inequality and its meaning for our democratic institutions and ideals. I can only marvel at Piketty’s discipline and rigor in researching and writing it.”―Rakesh Khurana, Harvard Business School
“This book is not only the definitive account of the historical evolution of inequality in advanced economies, it is also a magisterial treatise on capitalism’s inherent dynamics. Piketty ends his book with a ringing call for the global taxation of capital. Whether or not you agree with him on the solution, this book presents a stark challenge for those who would like to save capitalism from itself.”―Dani Rodrik, Institute for Advanced Study
“Piketty has shown that we are living in a Second Gilded Age…It is too early to expect actual public policies to emerge from his insights. But the significance of his contribution is already apparent in the breadth of his vision. Nestled under the book’s mass of data, elegant mathematical formulae, and literary references is an insistence that the turmoil of capitalism is a human turmoil, within the control of human beings. Piketty’s book is a call to citizenship, not as a series of fatalistic poses, but as a political responsibility. That spirit of engagement is more radical, at this moment in history, than any other proposal.”―Stephen Marche, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Reading Thomas Piketty’s famous book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, after all the fuss about it, is a bit of a shock. It’s both much more radical and much less radical than its reputation…I was anticipating a left-wing rant, but Piketty’s tone is modest and polite--not at all what you expect from a rock-star French intellectual…Piketty and his book remind me of my favorite economist, the 19th-century American Henry George, and his best-selling book, Progress and Poverty (1879). Both men’s books offer a comprehensive explanation of the world, in particular the problem of poverty. Both men acknowledge the importance of market incentives and entrepreneurship and the evils of protectionism and all of that good conservative stuff, even as they rail against the plutocrats. Both think we can end or reduce inequality without giving up the benefits of capitalism. And both see the answer in a new tax on capital…This is beginning to sound sort of reasonable, both in its demands on people at the top and its generosity to those on the bottom.”―Michael Kinsley, Vanity Fair
“Piketty’s book bespeaks the palpable upset that American society, indeed, the world’s societies, seems increasingly rigged; that inequality is worsening and darkening the future. Capital in the Twenty-First Century might be more aptly titled Inequality in the Twenty-First Century…Piketty is relentless in his indictment of inequality…Piketty assembles a mountain of numbers and tables to demonstrate that economic inequality is intensifying; that the wealthier are wealthier; and that the rich own more…Piketty hits bullseye after bullseye about the exacerbating inequalities that disfigure society--especially American society…For [those] who suffer from the relentless blather about why the minimum wage cannot be raised; why ‘job creators’ cannot be taxed; and why American society remains the most open in the world, Piketty is what the doctor ordered.”―Russell Jacoby, New Republic
“This is a truly path-breaking book offering a hard-hitting and well-founded critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century. Piketty is concerned with the dynamics of income and wealth since the eighteenth century to draw lessons for the century ahead. The book has an admirably wide scope, offering systematic comparisons not only across advanced and emerging economies, but also across modern history…It is an exceptionally well-researched book. His sources are well documented. Piketty’s overall analysis and conclusions cannot be waved away by those who feel threatened by the book’s analysis and policy recommendations…In addition to uncovering [some] fundamental contradictions of capitalism and documenting the ensuing inequality in great detail, Piketty’s book contains a large number of less central, but nevertheless very arresting insights and findings…Very importantly, Piketty goes beyond uncovering the dynamics of capitalism and the ensuing inequalities and goes on to suggest policy measures to arrest/reverse them. These are not merely an afterthought but form a significant and well-reasoned part of the book…Piketty shows himself to be not only a supereconomist but also a skilled politician. No wonder his thoughts have resonated even at the highest political levels. One can only hope that his work will actually influence adoption of his policy recommendations.”―Christel Lane, LSE Review of Books
“As befits a book of such size, Capital is broad-ranging, both historically and geographically…This impressive book contains the odd equation and chart that might not appeal to the general reader, but I hope this work will not go the way of A Brief History of Time--a book more talked about than read.”―William Keegan, The Tablet
“Riveting…[Piketty] embodies a model of engaged and sophisticated public debate, the sort of which politicians can only dream…One of Piketty’s main messages is that the structures of inequality societies choose to live with are the results of political choices, not natural or immutable economic tendencies, and that to pretend otherwise is an ‘ideological’ fiction…Capital inequality has dispossessed us of our ‘democratic sovereignty,’ and that’s something we should all really worry about… His book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality…When Piketty’s insights are eventually fused into new histories of economic and political thinking about global competition from the French Revolution to the present, the results will be...electrifying, particularly when it comes to revisiting the political and economic ideas of the global wars of the first half of the twentieth century…[This book] will certainly also shake the foundations of many university courses in political philosophy. That is itself quite a remarkable achievement, and perhaps the sort of achievement that might lead to the sort of political consciousness-raising Piketty is clearly keen to promote. In that, he really is an heir to a long-standing tradition of public intellectuals in French academic life since the Revolution.”―Duncan Kelly, Times Literary Supplement
“Piketty has come in for a lot of praise for the clarity of his writing, and I think it’s deserved. There’s very little math in this book, and it assumes very little prior knowledge of economics. In part, this is because Piketty is offering something fresh in the discourse: an unimaginably massive data-set that traces the ebb and flow of wealth and productivity around the globe for three centuries…Piketty challenges the idea that modernity somehow led to ‘merit’ asserting itself as the new determinant of wealth. Instead, he makes a very convincing case that the increasing size of the capital class--which expanded comfortably during the period of colonial expansion--created a hunger for wealth that turned the aristocracy on itself in a squabble over who got to loot the colonies, which was World War I…This is a crisis. The reason for capitalism is that it is supposed to allocate reward based on ‘merit’--it is supposed to move capital into the hands of the people who can do the most with it--and if all our policy decisions are made in service to a class of supermanagers whose wealth comes from squatting on a fortune managed by some green-eyeshade quants who grow it without its owner ever doing a notable thing apart from being born to dynasty, there is no more reason for capitalism. Piketty darkly hints that the last time this happened, the world tore itself to pieces, twice, in an orgy of destruction that left millions dead and whole nations in ruin…It’s a rare thing to see economists, especially pro-capitalist economists, praising taxation itself, but Piketty--careful, unemotional Piketty--dares…Besides, he says, the thing every red-blooded entrepreneur wants to see is people getting rich by their wits and deeds, not by the birthright of kings…Piketty wants desperately to salvage captalism, even if that means proposing something that every capitalist will hate: a global wealth tax.”―Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
“The impact of the book will be [deep] and long lasting…Piketty has elevated many issues to a higher level by making the study of inequality as one of political economy embedded in history, data and configuration of socio-political groups… This book has all the makings of a classic. It has already changed the way economists think about inequality. One hopes that these ideas will percolate into the chambers of policy-makers in governments and lending institutions and bring about changes in their policies to reduce inequality.”―K. Subramanian, The Hindu
“[A] timely, important book.”―Joseph E. Stiglitz, New York Times
“A book of such magisterial sweep…Piketty deserves huge credit for kickstarting a debate about inequality and illuminating the distribution of income and wealth.”―Stephanie Flanders, The Guardian
“Seven hundred pages on the evolution of inequality in economically advanced societies by the most fashionable new theorist to emerge for a long time. Many have been waiting for such a comprehensive critique of capitalism.”―David Sexton, Evening Standard
“This year’s most unlikely best seller, a crossover from the world of scholarship into general public discussion of a kind that seems rarer than it used to be. The book’s thesis--that economic inequality in the developed world is increasing, with potentially dire consequences for social justice and democratic governance--has struck a nerve in the American body politic. But its implications extend beyond the realm of political economy…The book invites the re-examination of deeply held assumptions about the world.”―A. O. Scott, New York Times
“Using sophisticated computer modeling and analyses, the professor from the Paris School of Economics debunks a long-held assumption--that income from wages will tend to grow at roughly the same rate as wealth--and instead makes a compelling case that, over time, the apparatus of capitalism grows wealth faster than wages. Result: Inequality between the wealthy and everyone else will widen faster and faster; and, without progressive taxation, his data show we’ll return to levels of inequality not seen since America’s Gilded Age.”―Dean Paton, YES!
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century convinces because Piketty supports his arguments about inequality with two innovative forms of evidence largely neglected by his predecessors on both the left and the right. The first is an unprecedented trove of historical economic data, which Piketty uses to demonstrate increasing inequality due to the long-term tendency of returns on capital to outpace economic growth. The second is a series of literary works, which Piketty uses to reveal the social and psychological consequences of this inequality in its erosion of human dignity. The depth and range of evidence Piketty marshals allows him to deliver a devastating blow to the confidence of many economists that capitalism is a tide that gradually lifts all boats. In the process, he mounts an effective critique of the tendency of economic writers on both left and right to rely on theories and formal systems. Many who were content to ignore the warnings of [David] Harvey and company that our economic system will produce unsustainable levels of inequity find that they cannot ignore Piketty’s…His book challenges both mainstream economists’ faith in untested mathematical models, as well as radicals’ resistance to subjecting Marx’s economic theory to rigorous testing.”―Michael W. Clune, Chronicle of Higher Education
“In this monumental, vitally important work, [Piketty] forces us to reconsider what we think we know about the baseline functioning of capitalist economies over the long haul, and to grapple with the implications for ourselves and our times. Piketty’s approach is data-driven. In detective-like fashion, he has collected the most complete historical series on distributions of income and wealth ever assembled, and this data allows him to articulate a penetrating and highly accessible account of the long evolution of inequality within advanced industrial nations…The findings are numerous and sobering, and nearly every page of the book rewards a careful reading with new insights and intriguing questions.”―Matthew Carnes, America
“New research from the Fed shows incomes of the richest Americans are bouncing back strongly after the crisis while average incomes have fallen…In essence, French economist Thomas Piketty’s contention that wealth breeds wealth--and that increasing inequality is part of capitalism’s inherent structure, rather than an occasional condition--looks largely correct, at least since the early 1990s.”―Tomas Hirst, Business Insider
“Piketty demonstrates in terrifying detail, with painstaking statistical research, that free-market capitalism, in the absence of major state redistribution, produces profound economic inequalities. Specifically, after redistributive policies in the mid-20th century narrowed the income and wealth gap somewhat, the gap has widened again in the last few decades, approaching levels not seen since before World War I.”―Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune
“When the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate (which [Piketty] says is what happened until the beginning of the 20th century and is likely to happen again as growth slows), then the money that rich people make from their wealth piles up while wages rise more slowly if at all. The implications of this should be frightening for anyone who believes in a merit-based system. It means we are in danger of entering into an era that, like the 19th century in France and England, is socially and politically dominated by those with vast amounts of inherited wealth…Piketty’s book is important because of the way he has clarified the magnitude of the problem and its dangers. And he has done so at a time of increasing soul-searching about the role technology plays in exacerbating inequality.”―David Rotman, Technology Review
“This past July, I felt compelled to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century after reading several reviews and hearing about it from friends. I’m glad I did. I encourage you to read it too…I agree with his most important conclusions, and I hope his work will draw more smart people into the study of wealth and income inequality.”―Bill Gates, Gates Notes
“[Piketty’s] overarching theme--that increased income disparity as a threat to democratic capitalism--remains prominent…His concerns about social unrest cannot be ignored: the movement from personal interdependence to impersonal global interdependence tends to erode trust and voluntary sharing, and wealth disparities are increasingly seen as unmerited and unfair.”―James Halteman, Christian Century
“[A] sweeping study of wealth in the modern world…Piketty makes his case with three centuries’ worth of economic data from around the world organized in a trove of detailed but lucid tables and graphs. This is a serious, meaty economic treatise, but Piketty’s prose (in Goldhammer’s deft translation) is wonderfully readable and engaging, and illuminates the human reality behind the econometric stats--especially in his explorations of the role of capital in the novels of Jane Austen and Balzac. Full of insights but free of dogma, this is a seminal examination of how entrenched wealth and intractable inequality continue to shape the economy.”―Publishers Weekly
“Very readable and often slyly witty…Piketty does economics in a new way; or more accurately, he returns to an older way. He still uses formal economic theory but regards economics as a sub-discipline of social science, alongside history, sociology, anthropology and political science and prefers to characterize his work as political economy rather than economic science. Piketty draws wonderfully upon the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac to portray the gross inequality of 19th-century societies. He argues that the degree of inequality is not just the product of economic forces; it is also the product of politics, including the tax, expenditure and regulatory decisions of government, and the discourse of justification of inequality…Piketty starts in the 19th century and examines the three eras. He wants to understand the longue durée of capitalism, as did the pioneers of political economy such as Malthus, Ricardo and Marx. And like them, he places the distributional question--the distribution of pre-tax income and the distribution of wealth--at the heart of economic analysis. This approach, which is both empirical and historical, is much needed if we are to understand income inequality and more generally to understand how capitalist economies operate. The ahistorical perspective of hedge fund managers and their risk pricing models helped cause the financial crisis in 2007-08…Piketty’s focus is not labor income but capital income, and here lies his originality.”―George Fallis, Literary Review of Canada
“The best business book on economics of the year.”―Daniel Gross, strategy+business
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics.”―Paul Mason, The Observer
“This was the blockbuster success of 2014 and was named the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. Despite the controversies surrounding it, the book throws much light upon one of the most important questions in economics: what determines the distribution of income and wealth. With an abundance of data and some simple and powerful theories, Piketty has made an immensely important contribution to the public debate.”―Martin Wolf, Financial Times
“This book is the key to understanding how the automatic accumulation and concentration of wealth poses a threat to the peaceful economies in which entrepreneurs prosper.”―Geoffrey James, Inc.
“The year’s most popular and controversial book.”―Roland White, Sunday Times
“Marx believed that free markets produce inequality, social division and violence. Piketty appears to side with Marx, but this is deceptive. When Piketty talks about ‘capital,’ he means the kind of investments held by today’s leisured rentier class whose money is tied up in property and pensions. Piketty argues that a free market overloaded with this kind of capital may or may not lead to anger and alienation, but it will certainly act like lumpy blockages in the smooth running of the economy. Piketty only wants the economy to work better.”―Nicholas Blincoe, The Telegraph
“The fundamental theme on the differences between returns to capital and returns to labor is one that Piketty has brought, quite properly, to the center of policy discussions.”―Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg View
“Monumental…Translated beautifully by Arthur Goldhammer, [Capital in the Twenty-First Century]…smashed into the intellectual world with incredible force…But beyond the media phenomenon, how much substance was there? The answer is: a considerable amount. The book is important, first and foremost, because it brings together a vast trove of research by Piketty and others on the evolution of income and wealth over two centuries. One also has to admire the way Piketty marshals the data to create a sweeping historical narrative, in a style reminiscent of the great thinkers of the 19th century.”―Ben Chu, The Independent
“Belief in markets may be crumbling but as platoons of mercenaries, lawyers, accountants and management consultants continue to plunder the world’s resources on behalf of unaccountable corporations, the tipping point has not yet been reached. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows how privateers use privatization, debt creation and capital inflation as a mechanism for rent extraction, with catastrophic consequences for public services.”―Allyson Pollock, Times Higher Education
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is arguably the most important popular economics book in recent memory. It will take its place among other classics in the field that have survived changing theoretical and political fashions, such as its namesake by Karl Marx (Das Kapital, 1867) or other ambitiously titled books such as John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion about the economic landscape will have to read Piketty.”―Kate Bahn, Women’s Review of Books
“[A] seminal work on capitalism.”―Madan Sabnavis, Financial Express
“Piketty’s great achievement, and one possible reason for the enthusiastic reception of his book, is his effective empirical demonstration of a fact long denied by neoclassical economics and its champions throughout the world: markets, when left to their own devices, do not provide individuals with rewards that are proportional to their efforts and contributions towards producing goods and services, nor do they ensure the most optimal distribution of those goods and services. Instead, they tend to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, giving rise to what Piketty calls a system of ‘patrimonial’ capitalism in which a few major players derive disproportionate benefit simply by virtue of possessing high amounts of capital… As a work of economic history, and a source of data, it effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality, reward effort and innovation, and deliver the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people. At a point in time where slogans about the 1 per cent vs the 99pc abound, this book provides conclusive evidence in support of the idea that the modern-world economy is one that is inherently unjust and exploitative.”―Hassan Javid, Dawn
“Piketty’s book has been a smash because many people are worried about the slow rate of growth in the developed economies since the financial crisis. Many are also worried about rising inequality. Capital seems to offer an elegant way to explain both…He deserves huge credit for illuminating the distribution of income and wealth.”―Stephanie Flanders, The Guardian
“[Piketty’s] magnum opus, which kicked off years of debate over the causes of and potential solutions for deep poverty in wealthy societies.”―Martin Wolk, Los Angeles Times
“Piketty presents the problem of inequality afresh, using new forms of historical narration and explanation that cut across disciplines and theoretical frameworks.”―William Davies, London Review of Books
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century looks back in order to look forward, plumbing economic patterns from the 18th century onward and homing in on the staggering inequities that dominate our age.”―Hamilton Cain, The Atlantic
About the Author
Thomas Piketty is Professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Paris School of Economics and Codirector of the World Inequality Lab.
Product details
- Publisher : Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press; Reprint edition (August 14, 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 816 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0674979850
- ISBN-13 : 978-0674979857
- Item Weight : 2.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1.75 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #15,131 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5 in Economic Policy
- #10 in Theory of Economics
- #16 in Economic History (Books)
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Thomas Piketty (French: [tɔˈma pikɛˈti]; born on 7 May 1971) is a French economist who works on wealth and income inequality. He is a professor (directeur d'études) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), professor at the Paris School of Economics and Centennial professor at the London School of Economics new International Inequalities Institute.
He is the author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which emphasises the themes of his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. He considers that to be a problem, and to address it, he proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Gobierno de Chile [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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In his introduction to this book, Piketty states, “When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.” He further states that “Intellectual and political debate about the distribution of wealth has long been based on an abundance of prejudice and a paucity of fact.” He then addresses this paucity with the presentation and analysis of the results the project he led to acquire an enormous volume of historical data about global income and wealth.
In the introduction, he briefly reviews the contributions but also the errors of earlier debate without data. These included Malthus’s concern with overpopulation and the need to end all welfare, Ricardo’s principle of scarcity with population and production growing as land becomes increasingly scarce, and Marx’s principle of infinite accumulation with the industrial revolution leading to no limit on the accumulation of capital (which did not consider coming social democracy, technological progress, and how to organize society without private capital). The Kuznets Curve of 1955 introduced data from US tax returns and Kuznets’s own estimates of national income to conclude that inequality increased in the early phase but declined in the later phases of industrialization. Unfortunately, this curve greatly understated the roles of the World Wars and violent economic and political shocks that led to the reduction in inequality between 1914 and 1945 and failed to explain the rising inequality after 1970.
Piketty seeks to contribute “to the debate about the best way to organize society…to achieve a just social order….achieved effectively under rule of law…subject to democratic debate.” He states he has “no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se…as long as they are justified.” He worked briefly in the US and found the work of US economists unconvincing. “There had been no significant effort to collect historical data on the dynamics of inequality since Kuznets, yet the profession continued to churn out purely theoretical results without even knowing (the) facts.” He found that “the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and the purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation.” Subsequently, he returned to France and set out to collect the missing data.
He gathered data in two main categories: 1) inequality in distribution of income and 2) inequality in the distribution of wealth and the relation of wealth to income. For income, he built the World Top Incomes Database (WTID), which is based on the joint work of some thirty researchers around the world. This data series begins in each country when an income tax was established (usually 1910-1920 but as early as the 1880s in Japan and Germany). For wealth his sources included estate tax returns (usually dating back to the 1920s, but in a few cases as far back as the French Revolution), the relative contributions of inherited wealth and savings, and measures of the total stock of national wealth. In collecting as complete and consistent a set of historical sources as possible, he had two advantages over previous authors—a longer historical perspective (now including data from the 2000s) and advances in computer technology.
Piketty reports two major conclusions from his study. “The first is that one should be wary of any economic determinism in regard to inequalities of wealth and income (that they emerge according to immutable natural laws). The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanisms. In particular, the reduction of inequality…between 1910 and 1950 was above all a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war.” “The resurgence of inequality after 1980 is due largely to political shifts…especially in regard to taxation and finance. The history of inequality is shaped by the way…actors view what is just…as well as the relative power of those actors.”
The second conclusion is “that the dynamics of wealth distribution reveal powerful mechanisms pushing alternately toward convergence (equality) and divergence (inequality)….There is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing ineqalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.” “Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality (convergence) has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.” Other proposed forces for greater equality, such as advanced technology creating a need for greater skills or class warfare giving way to less divisive generational warfare as the population ages, appear to be largely illusory.
“No matter how potent a force the diffusion of knowledge and skills may be, it can nevertheless be thwarted and overwhelmed by powerful forces pushing…toward greater inequality (divergence).” With respect to income, the spectacular increase in inequality from labor income, particularly in the US and UK, largely reflects the recent marked separation of the top managers of large firms from the rest of the population, not because of increased productivity, but because they can set their own remuneration. This separation is amplified by marginal tax rates that actually decrease for the highest incomes. Capital income from large fortunes also contributes to income inequality but may be understated due to hidden off-shore accounts and by producing only the relatively small portion of income needed for expenses while the rest remains within the fortune. (Fig. I.1 shows income inequality in the US from 1910 to 2010.)
With respect to wealth, inequality (divergence) is increased when the rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy (r > g) as it did until the nineteenth century and is likely to in the twenty-first century. “Under such conditions it is inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labor by a wide margin” and lead to extreme inequality. This increasing inequality of wealth is greatly amplified by structural factors leading to higher rates of increase for the largest fortunes that are no longer related to whatever entrepreneurial activities were at the onset of their origin. (Fig. I.2 shows wealth inequality in Europe from 1870 to 2010.) This analysis also shows a major shift in the main components of wealth from land, slaves (in the US), and colonies (in Europe) to domestic capital and housing.
Historically, the rate of return on capital was 4.5-5% from antiquity to 1913, fell to 1.5% by 1950, and is rising again to 4% or more by 2012 and beyond. During the same period, the global rate of growth was close to zero before the industrial revolution, rose to 1.5% by 1913 and to 3.5% in the mid to late twentieth century (due to catch-up after World War II and in the developing world), and is now falling and projected to be 1-1.5% in the twenty-first century. Thus the unusual fall of the return on capital (r) below growth (g) in the mid twentieth century was associated with a temporary reduction in the rate of increasing inequality. (Fig 10.10 shows a comparison of the return on capital [r] to growth [g] from antiquity to 2100.)
This review barely scratches the surface of the core contribution of this book, which is the enormous volume of data and analysis it provides. The numerical information is presented in a very well developed series of 97 illustrations and 18 tables. This information is used as support for extensive analysis and discussion of the many aspects of historical, present, and likely future inequality that often contradict positions related to ideology and simplistic models. An excellent 22 page overview of “A Social State for the Twenty-First Century” is provided at the beginning of the fourth and final part of the book. This is followed by “Rethinking the Progressive Income Tax,” “The Question of the Public Debt,” the author’s preference for “A Global Tax on Capital,” and finally, the conclusion.
The conclusion reiterates that the principal destabilizing force leading to ever-increasing inequality is a return on capital (r) significantly higher than the rate of growth of income and output (g) for long periods of time. Hence wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages, and the entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier no longer of use in promoting growth. A progressive annual tax on capital would be the right solution to this problem, although it would require a high level of international cooperation. Piketty objects to the expression “economic science” which implies little to do with the logic of politics or culture in conclusions about inequality. He prefers the expression “political economy” which considers economics as a sub discipline of the social sciences, alongside history, sociology, anthropology, and political science. He insists that economic and political changes are inextricably entwined and must be studied together.
This review is supplemented by a relatively random selection of multiple comments and assertions from the book:
“The nature of capital has changed: it once was mainly land but has become primarily housing plus industrial and financial assets.”
“Capital…is always risk-oriented and entrepreneurial, at least at its inception; yet it always tends to transform itself into rents as it accumulates….”
With respect to global inequality, the industrial revolution led to growth of Europe and America’s share of global output to two to three times their share of population. This share is now rapidly decreasing due to higher growth in developing economies in the “catch-up” phase than in mature economies.
Europe and America’s share of global production of goods and services rose from about 30-35% in 1700 to 70-80% from 1900 to 1980, fell to 50% by 2010, and may go as low as 20-30% later in the twenty-first century.
European and American national inequality rose to record heights in 1910, decreased markedly by the 1940s due to the world wars and Great Depression, then began a rapid return to high levels after the 1970s, particularly in the US.
The share of national income for the top 10% in Europe was over 45% in 1910, under 25% in 1970, and about 30% in 2010. In the US it was over 40% in 1910, under 30% in 1970, and nearly 50% in 2010.
“Numerous studies mention a significant increase in the share of national income in the rich countries going to profits and capital after 1970, along with the concomitant decrease in the share going to wages and labor.”
In the past several decades, the share of national income for the top 0.1% increased from 2 to 10% in the US, from 1.5 to 2.5% in France and Japan, and from 1 to 2% in Sweden.
“It is important to note the considerable transfer of US national income—on the order of 15 points—from the poorest 90% to the richest 10% since 1980”— 5 to 7 times greater than the 2 to 3 points in Europe and Japan.
“The vast majority (60 to 70%)…of the top 0.1% of the income hierarchy in 2000-2010 consists of top managers. By comparison, athletes, actors, and artists of all kinds make up less than 5% of this group.”
“At the very highest levels salaries are set by the executives themselves or by corporate compensation committees whose members usually earn comparable salaries….”
“It is when sales and profits increase for external reasons that executive pay rises most rapidly. This is particularly clear in the case of US corporations…pay for luck.”
Global inequality of wealth in the early 2010s is comparable to that of Europe in 1900-1919. The top 0.1% own nearly 20%, the top 1% about 50%, the top 10% between 80 and 90%, and the bottom half less than 5%.
The share of national wealth ownership in Europe for the top 10% and top 1% was 90% and over 50% in 1910, 60% and 20% in 1970, and about 63% and 24% in 2010. During this time, the share for the 50th to the 90th percentile increased from 5% to 40%, creating a middle class, but the share for the bottom 50% remained at 5%.
In the US, shares for the top 10% and top 1% were about 80% and 45% in 1910, 64% and 30% in 1970, and about 70% and 34% in 2010—with a much more rapid increase after 1970 than in Europe, reaching 70% and 34% versus 63% and 24% by 2010 (while the bottom half claim just 2%).
Inherited wealth is estimated to account for 60-70% of the largest fortunes worldwide. This figure is lower than the 80-90% reached during the belle Epoque, but trending strongly toward a return to that level.
Forbes magazine divides billionaires into three groups—pure heirs, heirs who subsequently grow their wealth, and pure entrepreneurs, with each of these groups representing about a third of the total.
Due to increased life expectancy, the average age of heirs at the age of inheritance has increased from thirty in the nineteenth century to fifty in the twenty-first century, although with larger inheritances.
Today, transmission of capital by gift is nearly as important as transmission by inheritance. This change counters increased life expectancy and accounts for almost half of the present inheritance flows.
“No matter how justified inequalities of wealth may be initially, fortunes can grow and perpetuate themselves beyond all reasonable limits and beyond any possible rational justification in terms of social utility.”
Large fortunes experience increasing rates of growth related to size alone independent of their origins—
10% from $15-30 billion, about 9% from $1-15 billion, about 8% from$500 million to $1 billion, about 7% from $100-500 million, and about 6% below $100 million for university endowments.
From 1990 to 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates, the Microsoft genius, grew from $4 billion to $50 billion, while that of Liliane Bettencourt, a cosmetics heiress who never worked a day in her life, grew at a similar rate from $2 billion to $25 billion.
In 2013, sovereign wealth funds were worth $5.3 trillion ($3.2 trillion from petroleum exporting states and 2.1 trillion from nonpetroleum states like China, Hong Kong, and Singapore), similar to the total of $5.4 trillion for Forbes billionaires. Together, these sources account for 3% of global wealth.
Large amounts of unreported financial assets are held in tax havens—approximately 10% according to the negative global balance of payments (more money leaves countries than enters them).
In the US, parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access—average income of parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000.
“Broadly speaking, the US and British policies of economic liberalization (after 1980)…neither increased growth nor decreased it.”
The US economy was much more innovative in 1950-1970 than in 1990-2010….Productivity growth was nearly twice as high in the former period as in the latter.
In most countries taxes have (or will soon) become regressive at the top of the income hierarchy.”
The optimal tax rate in the developed countries is probably above 80%.
One of the most important reforms (is) to establish a unified retirement scheme based on individual accounts with equal rights for everyone, no matter how complex one’s career path.
Debt often becomes a backhanded form of redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich (who as a general rule ought to be paying taxes rather than lending).
Inflation is at best a very imperfect substitute for a progressive tax on capital. It is hard to control, and much of the desired effect disappears once it becomes embedded in expectations.
Defining the meaning of inequality and justifying the position of the winners is a matter of vital importance, and one can expect to see all sorts of misrepresentations of the facts in service of the cause.
No hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interests—and that includes economists, who currently occupy an enviable place the US income hierarchy.
“Modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States, is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the grounds of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom.”
The history of the progressive tax over the course of the twentieth century suggests that the risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism about where the United States is headed.
In the introduction, he briefly reviews the contributions but also the errors of earlier debate without data. These included Malthus’s concern with overpopulation and the need to end all welfare, Ricardo’s principle of scarcity with population and production growing as land becomes increasingly scarce, and Marx’s principle of infinite accumulation with the industrial revolution leading to no limit on the accumulation of capital (which did not consider coming social democracy, technological progress, and how to organize society without private capital). The Kuznets Curve of 1955 introduced data from US tax returns and Kuznets’s own estimates of national income to conclude that inequality increased in the early phase but declined in the later phases of industrialization. Unfortunately, this curve greatly understated the roles of the World Wars and violent economic and political shocks that led to the reduction in inequality between 1914 and 1945 and failed to explain the rising inequality after 1970.
Piketty seeks to contribute “to the debate about the best way to organize society…to achieve a just social order….achieved effectively under rule of law…subject to democratic debate.” He states he has “no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se…as long as they are justified.” He worked briefly in the US and found the work of US economists unconvincing. “There had been no significant effort to collect historical data on the dynamics of inequality since Kuznets, yet the profession continued to churn out purely theoretical results without even knowing (the) facts.” He found that “the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and the purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation.” Subsequently, he returned to France and set out to collect the missing data.
He gathered data in two main categories: 1) inequality in distribution of income and 2) inequality in the distribution of wealth and the relation of wealth to income. For income, he built the World Top Incomes Database (WTID), which is based on the joint work of some thirty researchers around the world. This data series begins in each country when an income tax was established (usually 1910-1920 but as early as the 1880s in Japan and Germany). For wealth his sources included estate tax returns (usually dating back to the 1920s, but in a few cases as far back as the French Revolution), the relative contributions of inherited wealth and savings, and measures of the total stock of national wealth. In collecting as complete and consistent a set of historical sources as possible, he had two advantages over previous authors—a longer historical perspective (now including data from the 2000s) and advances in computer technology.
Piketty reports two major conclusions from his study. “The first is that one should be wary of any economic determinism in regard to inequalities of wealth and income (that they emerge according to immutable natural laws). The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanisms. In particular, the reduction of inequality…between 1910 and 1950 was above all a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war.” “The resurgence of inequality after 1980 is due largely to political shifts…especially in regard to taxation and finance. The history of inequality is shaped by the way…actors view what is just…as well as the relative power of those actors.”
The second conclusion is “that the dynamics of wealth distribution reveal powerful mechanisms pushing alternately toward convergence (equality) and divergence (inequality)….There is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing ineqalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.” “Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality (convergence) has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.” Other proposed forces for greater equality, such as advanced technology creating a need for greater skills or class warfare giving way to less divisive generational warfare as the population ages, appear to be largely illusory.
“No matter how potent a force the diffusion of knowledge and skills may be, it can nevertheless be thwarted and overwhelmed by powerful forces pushing…toward greater inequality (divergence).” With respect to income, the spectacular increase in inequality from labor income, particularly in the US and UK, largely reflects the recent marked separation of the top managers of large firms from the rest of the population, not because of increased productivity, but because they can set their own remuneration. This separation is amplified by marginal tax rates that actually decrease for the highest incomes. Capital income from large fortunes also contributes to income inequality but may be understated due to hidden off-shore accounts and by producing only the relatively small portion of income needed for expenses while the rest remains within the fortune. (Fig. I.1 shows income inequality in the US from 1910 to 2010.)
With respect to wealth, inequality (divergence) is increased when the rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy (r > g) as it did until the nineteenth century and is likely to in the twenty-first century. “Under such conditions it is inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labor by a wide margin” and lead to extreme inequality. This increasing inequality of wealth is greatly amplified by structural factors leading to higher rates of increase for the largest fortunes that are no longer related to whatever entrepreneurial activities were at the onset of their origin. (Fig. I.2 shows wealth inequality in Europe from 1870 to 2010.) This analysis also shows a major shift in the main components of wealth from land, slaves (in the US), and colonies (in Europe) to domestic capital and housing.
Historically, the rate of return on capital was 4.5-5% from antiquity to 1913, fell to 1.5% by 1950, and is rising again to 4% or more by 2012 and beyond. During the same period, the global rate of growth was close to zero before the industrial revolution, rose to 1.5% by 1913 and to 3.5% in the mid to late twentieth century (due to catch-up after World War II and in the developing world), and is now falling and projected to be 1-1.5% in the twenty-first century. Thus the unusual fall of the return on capital (r) below growth (g) in the mid twentieth century was associated with a temporary reduction in the rate of increasing inequality. (Fig 10.10 shows a comparison of the return on capital [r] to growth [g] from antiquity to 2100.)
This review barely scratches the surface of the core contribution of this book, which is the enormous volume of data and analysis it provides. The numerical information is presented in a very well developed series of 97 illustrations and 18 tables. This information is used as support for extensive analysis and discussion of the many aspects of historical, present, and likely future inequality that often contradict positions related to ideology and simplistic models. An excellent 22 page overview of “A Social State for the Twenty-First Century” is provided at the beginning of the fourth and final part of the book. This is followed by “Rethinking the Progressive Income Tax,” “The Question of the Public Debt,” the author’s preference for “A Global Tax on Capital,” and finally, the conclusion.
The conclusion reiterates that the principal destabilizing force leading to ever-increasing inequality is a return on capital (r) significantly higher than the rate of growth of income and output (g) for long periods of time. Hence wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages, and the entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier no longer of use in promoting growth. A progressive annual tax on capital would be the right solution to this problem, although it would require a high level of international cooperation. Piketty objects to the expression “economic science” which implies little to do with the logic of politics or culture in conclusions about inequality. He prefers the expression “political economy” which considers economics as a sub discipline of the social sciences, alongside history, sociology, anthropology, and political science. He insists that economic and political changes are inextricably entwined and must be studied together.
This review is supplemented by a relatively random selection of multiple comments and assertions from the book:
“The nature of capital has changed: it once was mainly land but has become primarily housing plus industrial and financial assets.”
“Capital…is always risk-oriented and entrepreneurial, at least at its inception; yet it always tends to transform itself into rents as it accumulates….”
With respect to global inequality, the industrial revolution led to growth of Europe and America’s share of global output to two to three times their share of population. This share is now rapidly decreasing due to higher growth in developing economies in the “catch-up” phase than in mature economies.
Europe and America’s share of global production of goods and services rose from about 30-35% in 1700 to 70-80% from 1900 to 1980, fell to 50% by 2010, and may go as low as 20-30% later in the twenty-first century.
European and American national inequality rose to record heights in 1910, decreased markedly by the 1940s due to the world wars and Great Depression, then began a rapid return to high levels after the 1970s, particularly in the US.
The share of national income for the top 10% in Europe was over 45% in 1910, under 25% in 1970, and about 30% in 2010. In the US it was over 40% in 1910, under 30% in 1970, and nearly 50% in 2010.
“Numerous studies mention a significant increase in the share of national income in the rich countries going to profits and capital after 1970, along with the concomitant decrease in the share going to wages and labor.”
In the past several decades, the share of national income for the top 0.1% increased from 2 to 10% in the US, from 1.5 to 2.5% in France and Japan, and from 1 to 2% in Sweden.
“It is important to note the considerable transfer of US national income—on the order of 15 points—from the poorest 90% to the richest 10% since 1980”— 5 to 7 times greater than the 2 to 3 points in Europe and Japan.
“The vast majority (60 to 70%)…of the top 0.1% of the income hierarchy in 2000-2010 consists of top managers. By comparison, athletes, actors, and artists of all kinds make up less than 5% of this group.”
“At the very highest levels salaries are set by the executives themselves or by corporate compensation committees whose members usually earn comparable salaries….”
“It is when sales and profits increase for external reasons that executive pay rises most rapidly. This is particularly clear in the case of US corporations…pay for luck.”
Global inequality of wealth in the early 2010s is comparable to that of Europe in 1900-1919. The top 0.1% own nearly 20%, the top 1% about 50%, the top 10% between 80 and 90%, and the bottom half less than 5%.
The share of national wealth ownership in Europe for the top 10% and top 1% was 90% and over 50% in 1910, 60% and 20% in 1970, and about 63% and 24% in 2010. During this time, the share for the 50th to the 90th percentile increased from 5% to 40%, creating a middle class, but the share for the bottom 50% remained at 5%.
In the US, shares for the top 10% and top 1% were about 80% and 45% in 1910, 64% and 30% in 1970, and about 70% and 34% in 2010—with a much more rapid increase after 1970 than in Europe, reaching 70% and 34% versus 63% and 24% by 2010 (while the bottom half claim just 2%).
Inherited wealth is estimated to account for 60-70% of the largest fortunes worldwide. This figure is lower than the 80-90% reached during the belle Epoque, but trending strongly toward a return to that level.
Forbes magazine divides billionaires into three groups—pure heirs, heirs who subsequently grow their wealth, and pure entrepreneurs, with each of these groups representing about a third of the total.
Due to increased life expectancy, the average age of heirs at the age of inheritance has increased from thirty in the nineteenth century to fifty in the twenty-first century, although with larger inheritances.
Today, transmission of capital by gift is nearly as important as transmission by inheritance. This change counters increased life expectancy and accounts for almost half of the present inheritance flows.
“No matter how justified inequalities of wealth may be initially, fortunes can grow and perpetuate themselves beyond all reasonable limits and beyond any possible rational justification in terms of social utility.”
Large fortunes experience increasing rates of growth related to size alone independent of their origins—
10% from $15-30 billion, about 9% from $1-15 billion, about 8% from$500 million to $1 billion, about 7% from $100-500 million, and about 6% below $100 million for university endowments.
From 1990 to 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates, the Microsoft genius, grew from $4 billion to $50 billion, while that of Liliane Bettencourt, a cosmetics heiress who never worked a day in her life, grew at a similar rate from $2 billion to $25 billion.
In 2013, sovereign wealth funds were worth $5.3 trillion ($3.2 trillion from petroleum exporting states and 2.1 trillion from nonpetroleum states like China, Hong Kong, and Singapore), similar to the total of $5.4 trillion for Forbes billionaires. Together, these sources account for 3% of global wealth.
Large amounts of unreported financial assets are held in tax havens—approximately 10% according to the negative global balance of payments (more money leaves countries than enters them).
In the US, parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access—average income of parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000.
“Broadly speaking, the US and British policies of economic liberalization (after 1980)…neither increased growth nor decreased it.”
The US economy was much more innovative in 1950-1970 than in 1990-2010….Productivity growth was nearly twice as high in the former period as in the latter.
In most countries taxes have (or will soon) become regressive at the top of the income hierarchy.”
The optimal tax rate in the developed countries is probably above 80%.
One of the most important reforms (is) to establish a unified retirement scheme based on individual accounts with equal rights for everyone, no matter how complex one’s career path.
Debt often becomes a backhanded form of redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich (who as a general rule ought to be paying taxes rather than lending).
Inflation is at best a very imperfect substitute for a progressive tax on capital. It is hard to control, and much of the desired effect disappears once it becomes embedded in expectations.
Defining the meaning of inequality and justifying the position of the winners is a matter of vital importance, and one can expect to see all sorts of misrepresentations of the facts in service of the cause.
No hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interests—and that includes economists, who currently occupy an enviable place the US income hierarchy.
“Modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States, is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the grounds of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom.”
The history of the progressive tax over the course of the twentieth century suggests that the risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism about where the United States is headed.
Top reviews from other countries
Franco Leal
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good
Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on November 3, 2021
A bit long, but mostly not a hard read
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Dr Zhu Weiguang
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very good book on economics.
Reviewed in Singapore 🇸🇬 on March 24, 2021
A very good and educational book.
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Excelente libro, muy interesante para cualquiera interesado en temas de desigualdad y distribución de riqueza. La calidad del producto es lo mejor
Carlos Alduncin
5.0 out of 5 stars
Always learning
Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on June 26, 2019
Todos lis dias se aprende
OLGA
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buen libro
Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on November 19, 2019
Buen libro
