Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)

Overview

A New York Times #1 Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Sunday Times Bestseller
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the British Academy Medal
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.

Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality—the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth—today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.

A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674430006
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2014
Pages:	704
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Thomas Piketty is Professor of Economics and Economic History at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and the Paris School of Economics. His books include A Brief History of Equality, Capital and Ideology, and the bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

Part 1 Income and Capital

1 Income and Output 39

2 Growth: Illusions and Realities 72

Part 2 The Dynamics of the Capital/Income Ratio

3 The Metamorphoses of Capital 113

4 From Old Europe to the New World 140

5 The Capital/Income Ratio over the Long Run 164

6 The Capital-Labor Split in the Twenty-First Century 199

Part 3 The Structure of Inequality

7 Inequality and Concentration: Preliminary Bearings 237

8 Two Worlds 271

9 Inequality of Labor Income 304

10 Inequality of Capital Ownership 336

11 Merit and Inheritance in the Long Run 377

12 Global Inequality of Wealth in the Twenty-First Century 430

Part 4 Regulating Capital in the Twenty-First Century

13 A Social State for the Twenty-First Century 471

14 Rethinking the Progressive Income Tax 493

15 A Global Tax on Capital 515

16 The Question of the Public Debt 540

Conclusion 571

Notes 579

Contents in Detail 657

List of Tables and Illustrations 665

Index 671

Editorial Reviews

★ 2014-04-30
A French academic serves up a long, rigorous critique, dense with historical data, of American-style predatory capitalism—and offers remedies that Karl Marx might applaud.Economist Piketty considers capital, in the monetary sense, from the vantage of what he considers the capital of the world, namely Paris; at times, his discussions of how capital works, and especially public capital, befit Locke-ian France and not Hobbesian America, a source of some controversy in the wide discussion surrounding his book. At heart, though, his argument turns on well-founded economic principles, notably r > g, meaning that the "rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy," in Piketty's gloss. It logically follows that when such conditions prevail, then wealth will accumulate in a few hands faster than it can be broadly distributed. By the author's reckoning, the United States is one of the leading nations in the "high inequality" camp, though it was not always so. In the colonial era, Piketty likens the inequality quotient in New England to be about that of Scandinavia today, with few abject poor and few mega-rich. The difference is that the rich now—who are mostly the "supermanagers" of business rather than the "superstars" of sports and entertainment—have surrounded themselves with political shields that keep them safe from the specter of paying more in taxes and adding to the fund of public wealth. The author's data is unassailable. His policy recommendations are considerably more controversial, including his call for a global tax on wealth. From start to finish, the discussion is written in plainspoken prose that, though punctuated by formulas, also draws on a wide range of cultural references.Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high—and is only bound to grow worse.

Kirkus Reviews