Ten years ago, French economist Thomas Piketty wrote a book trying to explain the fundamental economic forces that shape the world. Capital in the Twenty-First Century became an unlikely bestseller, introducing to the book-buying masses such themes as the capital-income ratio, modifications to the Kuznets curve and the elasticity of substitution of labour. For a while, this unassuming Frenchman became a rock star akin to Jean-Paul Sartre (the mood of whose 1945 lecture Time magazine’s caption writer captured thus: “Philosopher Sartre. Women swoon”).
Nobody swooned at London’s Peacock theatre when Piketty gave a lecture there one summer’s evening nine years ago, but there were queues around the block. Piketty had a message people wanted to hear: economics should be used for good rather than evil, to effectively redistribute wealth.
