Kenneth Thomas — Understanding Piketty, part 3

Part 3 of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the longest section of the book (230 pages out of 577), providing his analysis of inequality at the level of individuals. Notably, Piketty largely avoids the use of the familiar Gini index because, in his view, it obscures the issue by combining the effects of inequality based on income with those of inequality based on wealth. He treats the two sources of inequality separately throughout this analysis. 

The first point Piketty emphasizes is one regular readers will be familiar with from my previous discussions of the Crédit Suisse wealth reports: Wealth is always more unequally distributed than income.…
Piketty then turns to the evolution of inequality over the course of the 20th century.… 

Piketty's final points refer to global dimensions of inequality of wealth.… 

This long section of the book is the necessary set-up for Part Four, where Piketty takes on still more received theories, and proposes his own recommendations for what can be done about inequality. I will turn to those questions in my next post.

Middle Class
Political EconomistUnderstanding Piketty, part 3
Kenneth Thomas | Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis