Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has thoroughly dominated the elite intellectual conversation during the four weeks since it was published. But it’s now also become a middlebrow phenomenon, the fourth-most popular nonfiction book in the country, according to the New York Times best-seller list and third-best seller (as I write) on Amazon, fiction or non-. That is an astonishing number of books sold to people who are mostly not social scientists. Its sales put it in the same blockbuster category as volumes in which a physician encounters God or Robin Roberts encounters cancer. Its popularity has helped turn inequality into a constant theme not just on MSNBC, but on Fox News. Given the density of the Frenchman's subject matter, spooling out over 700 pages, all of this is a pretty incredible feat, and a testament to the power and lucidity of Piketty's central idea. But it also makes you notice something else: how completely our intellectual conversation is now a conversation about economics. It isn't just that economics is the topic we are most interested in; economics, increasingly, is the only language that we're speaking.New York — Daily Intelligencer
Thomas Piketty’s Mainstream Success Is Proof That America’s New Language Is Economics
Benjamin Wallace-Wells
(h/t Brad DeLong)
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