Capital in the Twenty-First Century

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 (06/27/2017) Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century is arguably the most important popular economics book in recent memory. It will take its place among other classics in the field that have survived changing theoretical and political fashions, such as its namesake by Karl Marx (Das Kapital, 1867) or other ambitiously titled books such as John Maynard Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion about the economic landscape will have to read Piketty.--Kate Bahn Women's Review of Books (01/01/2015) Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics.--Paul Mason The Observer (11/30/2014) Magisterial...Piketty's Capital feels very much like a Category 4 hurricane that hasn't yet made landfall...Piketty draws on a vast store of historical data to argue that the broad dissemination of wealth that occurred during the decades following World War I was not, as economists then mistakenly believed, a natural state of capitalist equilibrium, but rather a halcyon interval between Belle �poque inequality and the rising inequality of our own era...Piketty's most provocative argument is that the discrepancy between the high returns to capital and much more modest overall economic growth--briefly annulled during the mid-century--ensures that the gulf between the rich (who profit from capital investments) and the middle class (who depend chiefly on income from labor) will only continue to grow...The best reason to raise tax rates is not to punish the rich, of course, but to raise the revenue which the United States needs to invest in infrastructure and research, not to mention to pay for Social Security and health care. That investment gap poses a clear and present danger to American global economic leadership. Rising inequality exacerbates the problem by sapping the collective political will needed to address the problem.--James Traub Foreign Policy online (04/11/2014)