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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“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
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“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
“When it comes to economics…you need to get yourself a hold of Capital in the Twenty-First Century…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…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
“A seminal book on the economic and social evolution of the planet… A masterpiece.”―Emmanuel Todd, Marianne
“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
“Magisterial…This book is economics at its best.”―Philip Roscoe, Times Higher Education
“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
“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 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
“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
“Anyone remotely interested in economics needs to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.”―Matthew Yglesias, Slate
“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
“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
“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
“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 gives us the most important work of economics since John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory.”―Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
“An explosive argument.”―Liberation
“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…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
“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…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
“[Piketty] has demolished the Western myth that all who work hard can expect success.”―Mary Riddell, The Telegraph
“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 Twenty-First 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.”―New Statesman
“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…A timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes.”―Robert Skidelsky, Prospect
“Piketty has shown that we are living in a Second Gilded Age…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
“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
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century laid bare the deep structural forces that have made our brave new neoliberal economic order so dangerously topheavy and unstable.”―Chris Lehmann, In These Times
“The most remarkable work of economics in recent years, if not decades…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
“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.”―Andrew Neather, London Evening Standard
“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
“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.”―America
“Monumental…Translated beautifully by Arthur Goldhammer, [Capital in the Twenty-First Century]…smashed into the intellectual world with incredible force…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
“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
“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…[Piketty] 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
“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
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade…Capital in the Twenty-First 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] sweeping study of wealth in the modern world…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
“This important and fascinating book surely ranks among the most influential economic analysis of recent decades.”―Andrew Berg, Finance & Development
“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
“[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…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
“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
“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…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
“Very readable and often slyly witty…Piketty does economics in a new way; or more accurately, he returns to an older way…He argues that the degree of inequality is not just the product of economic forces; it is also the product of politics.”―George Fallis, Literary Review of Canada
“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!
“This is a truly path-breaking book offering a hard-hitting and well-founded critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century…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
“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
“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…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.”―Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly
“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 made his name central to serious discussions of inequality…[He] 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 book of the season.”―Telerama
“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
“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…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
“The most eagerly anticipated book on economics in many years.”―Toby Sanger, Globe and Mail
“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
“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.”―Chad Stone, U.S. News & World Report
“[A] 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
“[A] timely, important book.”―Joseph E. Stiglitz, New York Times
“Outstanding… A political and theoretical bulldozer.”―Mediapart
“[Piketty’s] overarching theme―that increased income disparity as a threat to democratic capitalism―remains prominent…His concerns about social unrest cannot be ignored.”―James Halteman, Christian Century
“The extraordinary resonance of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century suggests that inequality has become the most pressing economic issue of our time.”―Michael Rosen, Times Literary Supplement
“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.
“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
“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
“[Piketty] is now the most talked-about economist on the planet…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
“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
“[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…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
“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…We can only hope that the politicians crafting today’s economic programs will take this book to heart.”―Rana Foroohar, Time
“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
“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
“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…An unignorable account of the history of inequality in capitalist democracies.”―Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk, The Nation
“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…[His] 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.”―James Traub, Foreign Policy
“[An] enormously important book.”―Doug Henwood, Bookforum
“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…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
“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…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
“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
“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
“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
“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…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
“The book is a terrific achievement.”―Alan Ryan, Literary Review
“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
“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…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
“The best business book on economics of the year.”―Daniel Gross, strategy+business
“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
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics.”―Paul Mason, The Observer
“The strength of [Piketty's] thesis is that it is founded on evidence rather than ideology…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
“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
“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…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
“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.”―Rakesh Khurana, Harvard Business School
“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…[This book] effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality.”―Hassan Javid, Dawn
“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
“As befits a book of such size, Capital is broad-ranging, both historically and geographically…Impressive.”―William Keegan, The Tablet
“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.”―Branko Milanovic, American Prospect
“Riveting…[Piketty] embodies a model of engaged and sophisticated public debate, the sort of which politicians can only dream…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.”―Duncan Kelly, Times Literary Supplement
“Piketty's magnum opus…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.”―Ajit Ranade, Business Today
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century is written in the tradition of great economic texts…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
“[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, a prominent economist, explains the tendency in mature societies for wealth to concentrate in a few hands.”―Amy Merrick, New Yorker
“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
“Piketty’s book is revolutionary…[His] multi-century portrait of wealth and income obliterates economists’ complacent narratives…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
“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
“Piketty’s ground-breaking work on the historical evolution of income distribution is impressive…One of the best economic books in decades.”―Paul Sweeney, Irish Times
“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…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
“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…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.”―Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
“The year’s most popular and controversial book.”―Roland White, Sunday Times
“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
“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
“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
“[A] seminal work on capitalism.”―Madan Sabnavis, Financial Express
“[Piketty] has been perhaps the most important thinker on inequality of the past decade or so…Capital will change the political conversation in a more subtle way as well, by focusing it on wealth, not income.”―Jordan Weissmann, Slate
“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…Nearly every page of the book rewards a careful reading with new insights and intriguing questions.”―Matthew Carnes, America
“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 Twenty-First Century, is such a book…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
“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
“Capital in the Twenty-First 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 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
“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
“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’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] is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generation…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.”―Andrew Hussey, The Observer
“Piketty demonstrates in terrifying detail, with painstaking statistical research, that free-market capitalism, in the absence of major state redistribution, produces profound economic inequalities.”―Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune
“Defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism…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.”―Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times
“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
“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
“When it comes to economics…you need to get yourself a hold of Capital in the Twenty-First Century…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…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
“A seminal book on the economic and social evolution of the planet… A masterpiece.”―Emmanuel Todd, Marianne
“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
“Magisterial…This book is economics at its best.”―Philip Roscoe, Times Higher Education
“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
“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 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
“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
“Anyone remotely interested in economics needs to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.”―Matthew Yglesias, Slate
“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
“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
“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
“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 gives us the most important work of economics since John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory.”―Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
“An explosive argument.”―Liberation
“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…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
“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…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
“[Piketty] has demolished the Western myth that all who work hard can expect success.”―Mary Riddell, The Telegraph
“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 Twenty-First 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.”―New Statesman
“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…A timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes.”―Robert Skidelsky, Prospect
“Piketty has shown that we are living in a Second Gilded Age…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
“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
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century laid bare the deep structural forces that have made our brave new neoliberal economic order so dangerously topheavy and unstable.”―Chris Lehmann, In These Times
“The most remarkable work of economics in recent years, if not decades…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
“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.”―Andrew Neather, London Evening Standard
“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
“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.”―America
“Monumental…Translated beautifully by Arthur Goldhammer, [Capital in the Twenty-First Century]…smashed into the intellectual world with incredible force…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
“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
“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…[Piketty] 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
“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
“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade…Capital in the Twenty-First 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] sweeping study of wealth in the modern world…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
“This important and fascinating book surely ranks among the most influential economic analysis of recent decades.”―Andrew Berg, Finance & Development
“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
“[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…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
“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
“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…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
“Very readable and often slyly witty…Piketty does economics in a new way; or more accurately, he returns to an older way…He argues that the degree of inequality is not just the product of economic forces; it is also the product of politics.”―George Fallis, Literary Review of Canada
“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!
“This is a truly path-breaking book offering a hard-hitting and well-founded critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century…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
“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
“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…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.”―Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly
“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 made his name central to serious discussions of inequality…[He] 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 book of the season.”―Telerama
“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
“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…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
“The most eagerly anticipated book on economics in many years.”―Toby Sanger, Globe and Mail
“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
“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.”―Chad Stone, U.S. News & World Report
“[A] 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
“[A] timely, important book.”―Joseph E. Stiglitz, New York Times
“Outstanding… A political and theoretical bulldozer.”―Mediapart
“[Piketty’s] overarching theme―that increased income disparity as a threat to democratic capitalism―remains prominent…His concerns about social unrest cannot be ignored.”―James Halteman, Christian Century
“The extraordinary resonance of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century suggests that inequality has become the most pressing economic issue of our time.”―Michael Rosen, Times Literary Supplement
“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.
“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
“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
“[Piketty] is now the most talked-about economist on the planet…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
“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
“[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…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
“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…We can only hope that the politicians crafting today’s economic programs will take this book to heart.”―Rana Foroohar, Time
“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
“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
“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…An unignorable account of the history of inequality in capitalist democracies.”―Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk, The Nation
“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…[His] 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.”―James Traub, Foreign Policy
“[An] enormously important book.”―Doug Henwood, Bookforum
“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…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
“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…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
“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
“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
“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
“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…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
“The book is a terrific achievement.”―Alan Ryan, Literary Review
“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
“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…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
“The best business book on economics of the year.”―Daniel Gross, strategy+business
“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
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics.”―Paul Mason, The Observer
“The strength of [Piketty's] thesis is that it is founded on evidence rather than ideology…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
“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
“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…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
“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.”―Rakesh Khurana, Harvard Business School
“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…[This book] effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality.”―Hassan Javid, Dawn
“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
“As befits a book of such size, Capital is broad-ranging, both historically and geographically…Impressive.”―William Keegan, The Tablet
“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.”―Branko Milanovic, American Prospect
“Riveting…[Piketty] embodies a model of engaged and sophisticated public debate, the sort of which politicians can only dream…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.”―Duncan Kelly, Times Literary Supplement
“Piketty's magnum opus…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.”―Ajit Ranade, Business Today
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century is written in the tradition of great economic texts…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
“[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, a prominent economist, explains the tendency in mature societies for wealth to concentrate in a few hands.”―Amy Merrick, New Yorker
“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
“Piketty’s book is revolutionary…[His] multi-century portrait of wealth and income obliterates economists’ complacent narratives…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
“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
“Piketty’s ground-breaking work on the historical evolution of income distribution is impressive…One of the best economic books in decades.”―Paul Sweeney, Irish Times
“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…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
“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…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.”―Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
“The year’s most popular and controversial book.”―Roland White, Sunday Times
“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
“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
“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
“[A] seminal work on capitalism.”―Madan Sabnavis, Financial Express
“[Piketty] has been perhaps the most important thinker on inequality of the past decade or so…Capital will change the political conversation in a more subtle way as well, by focusing it on wealth, not income.”―Jordan Weissmann, Slate
“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…Nearly every page of the book rewards a careful reading with new insights and intriguing questions.”―Matthew Carnes, America
“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 Twenty-First Century, is such a book…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
“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
“Capital in the Twenty-First 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 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
“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
“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’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] is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generation…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.”―Andrew Hussey, The Observer
“Piketty demonstrates in terrifying detail, with painstaking statistical research, that free-market capitalism, in the absence of major state redistribution, produces profound economic inequalities.”―Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune
“Defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism…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.”―Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times
“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
“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
Review
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
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…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
The most remarkable work of economics in recent years, if not decades…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
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’s ground-breaking work on the historical evolution of income distribution is impressive…One of the best economic books in decades.
-- Paul Sweeney Irish Times
[Piketty] is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generation…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.
-- Andrew Hussey The Observer
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…A timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes.
-- Robert Skidelsky Prospect
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.
-- Branko Milanovic American Prospect
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
Piketty’s book is revolutionary…[His] multi-century portrait of wealth and income obliterates economists’ complacent narratives…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
Piketty demonstrates in terrifying detail, with painstaking statistical research, that free-market capitalism, in the absence of major state redistribution, produces profound economic inequalities.
-- Michael Robbins Chicago Tribune
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…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
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
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…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
[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
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…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 gives us the most important work of economics since John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory.
-- Harold Meyerson Washington Post
The strength of [Piketty's] thesis is that it is founded on evidence rather than ideology…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
Defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism…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.
-- Thomas B. Edsall New York Times
Piketty's magnum opus…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.
-- Ajit Ranade Business Today
Anyone remotely interested in economics needs to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century.
-- Matthew Yglesias Slate
[A] timely, important book.
-- Joseph E. Stiglitz New York Times
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 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…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
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 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.
-- Andrew Neather London Evening Standard
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
[Piketty] has demolished the Western myth that all who work hard can expect success.
-- Mary Riddell The Telegraph
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…We can only hope that the politicians crafting today’s economic programs will take this book to heart.
-- Rana Foroohar Time online
Magisterial…This book is economics at its best.
-- Philip Roscoe Times Higher Education
[A] seminal work on capitalism.
-- Madan Sabnavis Financial Express
Piketty has shown that we are living in a Second Gilded Age…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
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
Riveting…[Piketty] embodies a model of engaged and sophisticated public debate, the sort of which politicians can only dream…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.
-- Duncan Kelly Times Literary Supplement
Very readable and often slyly witty…Piketty does economics in a new way; or more accurately, he returns to an older way…He argues that the degree of inequality is not just the product of economic forces; it is also the product of politics.
-- George Fallis Literary Review of Canada
Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics.
-- Paul Mason The Observer
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.
Monumental…Translated beautifully by Arthur Goldhammer, [Capital in the Twenty-First Century]…smashed into the intellectual world with incredible force…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
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
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…[This book] effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality.
-- Hassan Javid Dawn
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
[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…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 Twenty-First Century is the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade…Capital in the Twenty-First 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
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
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…[His] 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.
-- James Traub Foreign Policy online
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…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
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
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…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
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…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.
-- 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.
-- America
Capital in the Twenty-First Century is written in the tradition of great economic texts…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…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…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
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
This important and fascinating book surely ranks among the most influential economic analysis of recent decades.
-- Andrew Berg Finance & Development
Piketty has made his name central to serious discussions of inequality…[He] 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
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
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
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…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 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
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…An unignorable account of the history of inequality in capitalist democracies.
-- 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.
-- 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] 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…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…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…Capital will change the political conversation in a more subtle way as well, by focusing it on wealth, not income.
-- Jordan Weissmann Slate
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
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…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.
-- 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
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…[Piketty] 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…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.
-- 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
This is a truly path-breaking book offering a hard-hitting and well-founded critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century…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…Impressive.
-- William Keegan The Tablet
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…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.
-- Cory Doctorow Boing Boing
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
[A] 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!
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…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…Nearly every page of the book rewards a careful reading with new insights and intriguing questions.
-- Matthew Carnes America
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.
-- James Halteman Christian Century
[A] sweeping study of wealth in the modern world…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
The best business book on economics of the year.
-- Daniel Gross strategy+business
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
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
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
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century laid bare the deep structural forces that have made our brave new neoliberal economic order so dangerously topheavy and unstable.
-- Chris Lehmann In These Times
The extraordinary resonance of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century suggests that inequality has become the most pressing economic issue of our time.
-- Michael Rosen Times Literary Supplement
[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
-- 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
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…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
The most remarkable work of economics in recent years, if not decades…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
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’s ground-breaking work on the historical evolution of income distribution is impressive…One of the best economic books in decades.
-- Paul Sweeney Irish Times
[Piketty] is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generation…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.
-- Andrew Hussey The Observer
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…A timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes.
-- Robert Skidelsky Prospect
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.
-- Branko Milanovic American Prospect
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
Piketty’s book is revolutionary…[His] multi-century portrait of wealth and income obliterates economists’ complacent narratives…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
Piketty demonstrates in terrifying detail, with painstaking statistical research, that free-market capitalism, in the absence of major state redistribution, produces profound economic inequalities.
-- Michael Robbins Chicago Tribune
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…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
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
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…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
[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
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…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 gives us the most important work of economics since John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory.
-- Harold Meyerson Washington Post
The strength of [Piketty's] thesis is that it is founded on evidence rather than ideology…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
Defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism…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.
-- Thomas B. Edsall New York Times
Piketty's magnum opus…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.
-- Ajit Ranade Business Today
Anyone remotely interested in economics needs to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century.
-- Matthew Yglesias Slate
[A] timely, important book.
-- Joseph E. Stiglitz New York Times
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 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…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
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 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.
-- Andrew Neather London Evening Standard
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
[Piketty] has demolished the Western myth that all who work hard can expect success.
-- Mary Riddell The Telegraph
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…We can only hope that the politicians crafting today’s economic programs will take this book to heart.
-- Rana Foroohar Time online
Magisterial…This book is economics at its best.
-- Philip Roscoe Times Higher Education
[A] seminal work on capitalism.
-- Madan Sabnavis Financial Express
Piketty has shown that we are living in a Second Gilded Age…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
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
Riveting…[Piketty] embodies a model of engaged and sophisticated public debate, the sort of which politicians can only dream…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.
-- Duncan Kelly Times Literary Supplement
Very readable and often slyly witty…Piketty does economics in a new way; or more accurately, he returns to an older way…He argues that the degree of inequality is not just the product of economic forces; it is also the product of politics.
-- George Fallis Literary Review of Canada
Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics.
-- Paul Mason The Observer
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.
Monumental…Translated beautifully by Arthur Goldhammer, [Capital in the Twenty-First Century]…smashed into the intellectual world with incredible force…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
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
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…[This book] effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality.
-- Hassan Javid Dawn
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
[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…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 Twenty-First Century is the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade…Capital in the Twenty-First 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
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
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…[His] 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.
-- James Traub Foreign Policy online
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…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
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
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…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
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…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.
-- 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.
-- America
Capital in the Twenty-First Century is written in the tradition of great economic texts…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…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…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
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
This important and fascinating book surely ranks among the most influential economic analysis of recent decades.
-- Andrew Berg Finance & Development
Piketty has made his name central to serious discussions of inequality…[He] 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
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
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
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…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 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
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…An unignorable account of the history of inequality in capitalist democracies.
-- 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.
-- 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] 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…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…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…Capital will change the political conversation in a more subtle way as well, by focusing it on wealth, not income.
-- Jordan Weissmann Slate
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
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…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.
-- 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
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…[Piketty] 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…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.
-- 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
This is a truly path-breaking book offering a hard-hitting and well-founded critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century…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…Impressive.
-- William Keegan The Tablet
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…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.
-- Cory Doctorow Boing Boing
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
[A] 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!
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…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…Nearly every page of the book rewards a careful reading with new insights and intriguing questions.
-- Matthew Carnes America
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.
-- James Halteman Christian Century
[A] sweeping study of wealth in the modern world…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
The best business book on economics of the year.
-- Daniel Gross strategy+business
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
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
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
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century laid bare the deep structural forces that have made our brave new neoliberal economic order so dangerously topheavy and unstable.
-- Chris Lehmann In These Times
The extraordinary resonance of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century suggests that inequality has become the most pressing economic issue of our time.
-- Michael Rosen Times Literary Supplement
[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
- ASIN : B074DVRW88
- Publisher : Belknap Press; Reprint edition (August 14, 2017)
- Publication date : August 14, 2017
- Language : English
- File size : 48905 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 817 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #109,557 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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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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4.5 out of 5 stars
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1 Star
The book was damaged when I received
I purchase this book as a gift for my nephew, but when I received this book today the cover is damaged, I don't think this would be a nice gift to be gifted out.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2014
Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2014
This book deserves all the attention it has received, and also deserves the time and mental energy that a careful reading entails. First, the book deals a massive blow to the theory of free-market capitalism that has become a core belief of the capitalist elite, and of much of the economics profession. Secondly, it provides a straightforward theory of how capitalism really works. And thirdly, it proposes solutions to the rising inequality that stems from that process. Those solutions don't look politically possible now, but as the author emphasizes, economic developments have political consequences. Moreover, the point isn't really the precise remedies that Piketty proposes, but the fact that he opens the discussion.
The idea of free market capitalism, over the past half century, has grown from a collection of theories espoused by Adam Smith et al into an economic and political ideology, reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and supported by the economic elite whose interests it has served. The idea that capitalism ultimately benefits all participants -- that "a rising tide lifts all boats" -- is a powerful one that has been accepted by many people whose boats remain unlifted. Much of that reflects that, in the US and Europe, almost everyone between 50 and 70 did grow up in a world where the tide did rise, and most boats rose with it, with income inequality falling drastically compared to pre-war levels. That improvement is very widely assumed to be the result of a capitalist economic system. This is the central "fact" that Piketty demolishes, showing that the 1945-75 period (the thirty glorious years, for the French) reflected economic recovery from the war and political decisions that levelled income distribution.
Rather than the thirty glorious years being the base state, Piketty argues, they were an aberration from the underlying pattern of capitalism, which is that income inequality -- and far more important, wealth inequality -- tends to grow strongly over time. Most of the book is about the data that he uses to arrive at this conclusion, data that were NOT easy to obtain. Indeed, Piketty's achievement in constructing his data base is just as important as his conclusion. Heretofore, we have been discussing inequality almost exclusively as an income phenomenon: what Piketty brings into the discussion is the question of wealth. Not only does he bring it in, he makes it possible to measure it. (Note: most of the reasonable criticism of Piketty so far -- I don't think that yelling Markist! is reasonable criticism -- has focussed on the data. Piketty, in the book, warns over and over of possible data weaknesses, and has made his data available on line. There will be problems, there are always problems with data. But disagreeing with a few data assumptions does not invalidate the argument).
Based on this data, Piketty arrives at his central argument -- that when the rate of return on capital (very broadly defined) exceeds the growth of national income, when r is greater than g, wealth will become more concentrated. In the 50's and 60's, when economies were speeding ahead at 3-5% based on recovery from the war (and from the Depression) and when inflation was low, r was not necessarily greater than g. Since then, however, growth in the advanced countries has slowed sharply, while the return on capital has remained at 5% or better. The result is an increasing concentration of wealth, and Piketty sees no reason why this should change (The US has a special aspect which Piketty examines -- the dramatic increase in income inequality, as high-end wages have soared relative to average wages. This is of interest, but the key point remain r>g
To deal with this, Piketty proposes an international, progressive tax on wealth. That looks improbable at present, but, as he notes, a meaningful income tax looked pretty improbable a century ago. I don't think, however, that Piketty's proposed solution is critical -- what matters is the discussion he has brought to the fore. The essential point is that the state (really a group of states( is the only entity that can offset the concentration of wealth implicit in modern capitalism. Destroying capitalism doesn't work: consider the Soviet Union. But its benefits can be spread more widely by political means (taxes) while leaving the economic motor in place. Ultrahigh taxes, remember, do not seem to have deadened entrepreneurship from 1950 to 1975.
This is not light reading, though it is remarkably free of economic jargon (as a former economist, I am an expert on that topic). But it is well worth the time and effort it demands. It is already playing a major role in the discussion on inequality and its political ramifications, and has certainly changed my thinking on the subject. This is a very major work.
The idea of free market capitalism, over the past half century, has grown from a collection of theories espoused by Adam Smith et al into an economic and political ideology, reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and supported by the economic elite whose interests it has served. The idea that capitalism ultimately benefits all participants -- that "a rising tide lifts all boats" -- is a powerful one that has been accepted by many people whose boats remain unlifted. Much of that reflects that, in the US and Europe, almost everyone between 50 and 70 did grow up in a world where the tide did rise, and most boats rose with it, with income inequality falling drastically compared to pre-war levels. That improvement is very widely assumed to be the result of a capitalist economic system. This is the central "fact" that Piketty demolishes, showing that the 1945-75 period (the thirty glorious years, for the French) reflected economic recovery from the war and political decisions that levelled income distribution.
Rather than the thirty glorious years being the base state, Piketty argues, they were an aberration from the underlying pattern of capitalism, which is that income inequality -- and far more important, wealth inequality -- tends to grow strongly over time. Most of the book is about the data that he uses to arrive at this conclusion, data that were NOT easy to obtain. Indeed, Piketty's achievement in constructing his data base is just as important as his conclusion. Heretofore, we have been discussing inequality almost exclusively as an income phenomenon: what Piketty brings into the discussion is the question of wealth. Not only does he bring it in, he makes it possible to measure it. (Note: most of the reasonable criticism of Piketty so far -- I don't think that yelling Markist! is reasonable criticism -- has focussed on the data. Piketty, in the book, warns over and over of possible data weaknesses, and has made his data available on line. There will be problems, there are always problems with data. But disagreeing with a few data assumptions does not invalidate the argument).
Based on this data, Piketty arrives at his central argument -- that when the rate of return on capital (very broadly defined) exceeds the growth of national income, when r is greater than g, wealth will become more concentrated. In the 50's and 60's, when economies were speeding ahead at 3-5% based on recovery from the war (and from the Depression) and when inflation was low, r was not necessarily greater than g. Since then, however, growth in the advanced countries has slowed sharply, while the return on capital has remained at 5% or better. The result is an increasing concentration of wealth, and Piketty sees no reason why this should change (The US has a special aspect which Piketty examines -- the dramatic increase in income inequality, as high-end wages have soared relative to average wages. This is of interest, but the key point remain r>g
To deal with this, Piketty proposes an international, progressive tax on wealth. That looks improbable at present, but, as he notes, a meaningful income tax looked pretty improbable a century ago. I don't think, however, that Piketty's proposed solution is critical -- what matters is the discussion he has brought to the fore. The essential point is that the state (really a group of states( is the only entity that can offset the concentration of wealth implicit in modern capitalism. Destroying capitalism doesn't work: consider the Soviet Union. But its benefits can be spread more widely by political means (taxes) while leaving the economic motor in place. Ultrahigh taxes, remember, do not seem to have deadened entrepreneurship from 1950 to 1975.
This is not light reading, though it is remarkably free of economic jargon (as a former economist, I am an expert on that topic). But it is well worth the time and effort it demands. It is already playing a major role in the discussion on inequality and its political ramifications, and has certainly changed my thinking on the subject. This is a very major work.
Top reviews from other countries
Marcelo Otávio Lima Barati
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reflexões atuais e interesantes.
Reviewed in Brazil on September 5, 2020
O autor aborda um tema de extrema complexidade de forma simples e didática, expondo um trabalho cientifico muito árduo de forma acessível. Estou na metade, mas gostei bastante do que li ate agora. Recomendo!
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
2 people found this helpful
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Sandy
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good read, but arduous. Pick chapters that interest you.
Reviewed in India on May 3, 2019
I found this book quite fascinating. The author is able to weave through history of income inequality and juxtapose it with current data gathered from US, UK, France, China and India. Quite a good read.
However, the first 100, pages may be a bain to start. Keep at it and you will find the journey rewarding in the end.
Let me iterate this is not a casual reading book ... it is a serious study of the world's inequality and being quite voluminous requires significant ability to concentrate and maintain focus ...You also would need to have some understanding of basic economics to appreciate the work. Piketty, uses a lots of technical terms and rightly so perhaps, which refer to economics principles of demand and supply, r & g (rate of growth of capital vs growth of economy) at al, and lots of tables and charts. This is in that sense not a beginner's book. It's a book by an economist for economist. So don't be ashamed to skip sections of the book which are above you pay grade. There are a lot of interesting case studies, which buttress the central theme "Inequality and how money makes more money".
His proposal for Global Tax on Capital (as he himself puts it) is quite "utopian" in its construct. However it's a start, because the alternative of high tariffs and capital control is an unsatisfactory substitute.
My only advice is to not read the book from cover to cover and pick chapters which interest you. The second half of the book is really interesting. There are some good case studies, like the Havard University's $30 billion endowment and how they manage it, which are quite fascinating to read.
So don't miss those fascinating parts. To conclude I would say, Piketty has done a great job of harnessing data over several decades, curated, analysed and build a compelling case of " rising capital inequality", however, the proposed solution is quite ambitious and needs to be further fleshed out in context of global politics. Enjoy!
However, the first 100, pages may be a bain to start. Keep at it and you will find the journey rewarding in the end.
Let me iterate this is not a casual reading book ... it is a serious study of the world's inequality and being quite voluminous requires significant ability to concentrate and maintain focus ...You also would need to have some understanding of basic economics to appreciate the work. Piketty, uses a lots of technical terms and rightly so perhaps, which refer to economics principles of demand and supply, r & g (rate of growth of capital vs growth of economy) at al, and lots of tables and charts. This is in that sense not a beginner's book. It's a book by an economist for economist. So don't be ashamed to skip sections of the book which are above you pay grade. There are a lot of interesting case studies, which buttress the central theme "Inequality and how money makes more money".
His proposal for Global Tax on Capital (as he himself puts it) is quite "utopian" in its construct. However it's a start, because the alternative of high tariffs and capital control is an unsatisfactory substitute.
My only advice is to not read the book from cover to cover and pick chapters which interest you. The second half of the book is really interesting. There are some good case studies, like the Havard University's $30 billion endowment and how they manage it, which are quite fascinating to read.
So don't miss those fascinating parts. To conclude I would say, Piketty has done a great job of harnessing data over several decades, curated, analysed and build a compelling case of " rising capital inequality", however, the proposed solution is quite ambitious and needs to be further fleshed out in context of global politics. Enjoy!
Sandy
Reviewed in India on May 3, 2019
However, the first 100, pages may be a bain to start. Keep at it and you will find the journey rewarding in the end.
Let me iterate this is not a casual reading book ... it is a serious study of the world's inequality and being quite voluminous requires significant ability to concentrate and maintain focus ...You also would need to have some understanding of basic economics to appreciate the work. Piketty, uses a lots of technical terms and rightly so perhaps, which refer to economics principles of demand and supply, r & g (rate of growth of capital vs growth of economy) at al, and lots of tables and charts. This is in that sense not a beginner's book. It's a book by an economist for economist. So don't be ashamed to skip sections of the book which are above you pay grade. There are a lot of interesting case studies, which buttress the central theme "Inequality and how money makes more money".
His proposal for Global Tax on Capital (as he himself puts it) is quite "utopian" in its construct. However it's a start, because the alternative of high tariffs and capital control is an unsatisfactory substitute.
My only advice is to not read the book from cover to cover and pick chapters which interest you. The second half of the book is really interesting. There are some good case studies, like the Havard University's $30 billion endowment and how they manage it, which are quite fascinating to read.
So don't miss those fascinating parts. To conclude I would say, Piketty has done a great job of harnessing data over several decades, curated, analysed and build a compelling case of " rising capital inequality", however, the proposed solution is quite ambitious and needs to be further fleshed out in context of global politics. Enjoy!
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62 people found this helpful
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Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book that should be truly suggested at schools and courses in economics and sociology
Reviewed in Italy on July 15, 2017
This book extensively provides data-support for a thesis describing cause of asymmetry of wealth in economy.
Particularly, it introduces two simple laws that shows how, independently from political decision-making and when observed to a proper time-scale of decades (not years), countries undergoes same centralisation of wealth pattern.
It is interesting because also it does not inquire on centralisation of wealth respect to salaries, but to centralisation of wealth respect to return of capital invested, that explains, simply spoken, the asymmetries of "relative poverty" respect to entrepreneurial landscape, not only "labour" landscape.
What I like is that the book pose a legit question, on accessing effect of current capitalism, without assuming ethical or unethical values afore - a book that transparently shows the fingerprint of global economy and yields material for then addressing a governance of economy and seriously reflecting over risks of too much asymmetric societies, with historical examples.
A negative aspect I found it is the way it is written - it is not an easy reading book, sometimes a bit "boring" in explanations not because of the examples, but for the way the description is arranged. Maybe because the writer is not English native, nor me, and the English type is academic but hinder a fluent narrative.
However, because the topic is so amazing and the thesis so straightforward and powerful, I condone the linguistic challenge and give the information carried in this book a 5 stars!
Particularly, it introduces two simple laws that shows how, independently from political decision-making and when observed to a proper time-scale of decades (not years), countries undergoes same centralisation of wealth pattern.
It is interesting because also it does not inquire on centralisation of wealth respect to salaries, but to centralisation of wealth respect to return of capital invested, that explains, simply spoken, the asymmetries of "relative poverty" respect to entrepreneurial landscape, not only "labour" landscape.
What I like is that the book pose a legit question, on accessing effect of current capitalism, without assuming ethical or unethical values afore - a book that transparently shows the fingerprint of global economy and yields material for then addressing a governance of economy and seriously reflecting over risks of too much asymmetric societies, with historical examples.
A negative aspect I found it is the way it is written - it is not an easy reading book, sometimes a bit "boring" in explanations not because of the examples, but for the way the description is arranged. Maybe because the writer is not English native, nor me, and the English type is academic but hinder a fluent narrative.
However, because the topic is so amazing and the thesis so straightforward and powerful, I condone the linguistic challenge and give the information carried in this book a 5 stars!
One person found this helpful
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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.
