Thomas Piketty has come a long way. He first captured public attention in 2014 with his wildly ambitious, 704-page updating of Marx’s Das Kapital, entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Part of its appeal – it became both an international bestseller and an academic sensation – was the simplicity of its basic thesis. Although packed with history and statistics, its fundamental proposition, that if the return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy, wealth will become increasingly concentrated, could be reduced to one simple equation: r>g.
Piketty’s latest book is almost exactly the opposite. Not only is it much shorter, based on a lecture given to the Société d’Ethnologie in his native France, its key message is: “It’s a lot more complicated than that.” Like Capital, it discusses the evolution of income and wealth inequality over history. But it emphasises historical contingency and, most of all, the role of politics and of collective mobilisation.
