Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is simultaneously ambitious and modest. The book is ambitious because Piketty sets out to tell a high-level history of the global economy and to outline a fresh theory of where we are heading. It's the sort of grand intellectual enterprise that was common in the 19th century, but has become a rarity in our era of more specialised scholarship. But Capital's also modest because Piketty wants to put economics, his own discipline, back in its place. Refreshingly, he regards economics as merely a branch of the social sciences, eschewing the hubristic claims for supremacy made by some practitioners.
Are the ambitions achieved? On the historical side the answer is yes. Perhaps the greatest contribution of this book is the data it brings to the table. Piketty throws a spotlight on the very wealthiest and those with the chunkiest incomes and puts these patterns in a long historical context. This is important because it tells the story of our time: huge wealth and huge incomes are now concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people. Inequality is approaching 19th-century levels in the rich world. Piketty has been critiqued, but no one quibbles with his data. He has forced people to confront and debate our winner-takes-all economy.
But what next? Piketty's essential argument is that there is a natural tendency for the rich to get richer. This contradicts the widely held assumption that as, economies grow and become more sophisticated, the spoils will tend to be more equally divided across society. Piketty acknowledges that such a levelling occurred in the 20th century but he describes this as a historical aberration. The old economic forces driving inequality, he says, are back. There are good reasons to be sceptical of Piketty's theory. But it's a valid hypothesis. And the facts of the past three decades certainly seems to support his concerns.
The French scholar is a fine teacher. One of the reasons for the book's 600-plus page length is that he takes the reader back to first principles, assuming no specialist knowledge. The English translation by Arthur Goldhammer is limpid. 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.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments