Mike Konczal — The FT Gets Piketty’s Capital Argument Wrong

Giles writes: "The central theme of Prof Piketty’s work is that wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the first world war."

This is incorrect, or at least badly stated. Piketty's central theme is not that inequality of the ownership of wealth is going to skyrocket. If you look at the text [1], he's somewhat agnostic about this, but it's not determinative. The central theme is that the 1% already owns a lot of the capital stock, and the capital stock is going to get gigantic relative to the rest of the economy.

Inequality expert Branko Milan also tweeted this point, but let's go through it and break down the theory Piketty puts forward. I used three dominos in my Boston Review writeup, and I'm adding a fourth here to make Giles' critique explicit. Let's describe Piketty's argument as four dominos falling into each other:...

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The FT Gets Piketty’s Capital Argument Wrong
Mike Konczal