Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. Art Institute of Chicago (CC0)
Belknap Press
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Wealth, inequality and the long return on capital.
$25.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Thomas Piketty
- Publisher
- Belknap Press
- Published
- January 2017
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Paperback
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
Inequality Keeps Books
Thomas Piketty's argument rests on a simple observed tendency: when the return on capital runs ahead of economic growth, wealth concentrates, and the twentieth century's great levelling was the exception rather than the rule. What made the book an event was the evidence, two centuries of tax and estate records across many countries, assembled with collaborators into the longest series on wealth ever compiled.
Published in French in 2013 and in Arthur Goldhammer's English translation the following year, it sold in numbers no seven-hundred-page economics treatise had approached, and set off a debate among economists that has not closed. Whatever one makes of the remedies, the historical ledger it assembled is now part of the furniture of the subject.
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