Thomas Piketty — know the name? Most people now do, for this French economist is the author of this year's publishing phenomenon: a dense, 700-page tome of history and data describing global trends in wealth inequality over more than a century, entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Published two months ago, it's an unlikely non-fiction best-seller, although I'm sure most people who have bought it haven't read it, nor will they.
Piketty argues — based on the most accurate data set assembled to date — that economies around the world have recently emerged from a special period, extending roughly from 1910 until about 1980. During this time, a conspiracy of factors, including two world wars and the Great Depression, created an unusually broad dispersal of wealth and, in many societies, a sizeable middle class. Since then, Piketty contends, the global economy has gone back to working as it did before the turn of the twentieth century, with the wealth-creating advantages of capital ownership over labour ensuring a vast and growing disparity between rich and poor.
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