Tom Clark - Thomas Piketty’s capital idea

The French economist with a celebrated theory of inequality is back—this time with a theory of everything in 1,100 pages. But is he, Paul Krugman asks Prospect, sufficient a polymath to pull it off?

But before long, Piketty was receiving—and rejecting—all sorts of highly-paying corporate invitations to speak: the Davos set sensed an argument it could not afford to ignore. Six years on, there is no closing down the discussion that he blasted open: the Democratic primaries in the US have seen Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in a bidding war over progressive wealth taxes, and Michael Bloomberg’s billions are proving to be almost as much of a political problem as they are a campaigning asset. By ranging across even more countries, and tightening the argument about how far political choices about taxation have sometimes reduced inequality, the new book provides more powerful ammo, especially when combined with the recent manifesto of two of Piketty’s closest collaborators, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay.

Prospect

Tom Clark - Thomas Piketty’s capital idea