Since the 1970s both wealth and income gaps have been rising back towards their pre-20th-century norms. In doing so, he shows that the period from about 1914 to the 1970s was an historical outlier in which both income inequality and the stock of wealth (relative to annual national income) fell dramatically. First, Mr Piketty, a pioneer in using tax statistics to measure inequality, painstakingly documents the evolution of income and wealth over the past 300 years, particularly in Europe and America. “Capital” makes three big contributions in its 577 pages. For like its 19th-century namesake, “Capital” contains some marvellous scholarship, but as a guide to action, is deeply flawed. But if Mr Piketty does set the tone of debate on inequality, the world will be the poorer for it. “Capital” has duly enraptured the left, infuriated the right and spiced up the dismal science in the popular mind (see article).
Hence the attraction of a book which argues that growing wealth concentration is inherent to capitalism and recommends a global tax on wealth as the progressive solution. Having for years dismissed the gaps between the haves and have-nots as a European obsession, Americans, stung by the excesses of Wall Street, are suddenly talking about the rich and redistribution. Inequality has suddenly become a fevered topic, especially in America.
The book’s success has a lot to do with being about the right subject at the right time. In America it is the top-selling book on Amazon, fiction included. Originally published in French (when we first reviewed it), Mr Piketty’s vast tome on income-and-wealth distribution has become a bestseller since the English translation appeared in March. By comparison, Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is an overnight sensation. It was not translated into English for two decades, and this newspaper did not see fit to mention it until 1907. WHEN the first volume of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” was published in 1867, it took five years to sell 1,000 copies in its original German.
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