Capital in the Twenty First Century

Thomas Piketty is a Professor of Economics at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Paris School of Economics, as well as the Codirector of the World Inequality Lab.

What are the grand dynamics that drive capital accumulation and distribution? Political economy is concerned with the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth. However, satisfactory answers have been difficult to come by due to a lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries dating back to the eighteenth century in Capital in the Twenty-First Century to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will change the debate and set the agenda for the next generation of wealth and inequality thinkers.

Piketty demonstrates that modern economic growth and the spread of knowledge have enabled us to avoid the apocalyptic inequalities predicted by Karl Marx. However, we have not changed the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic postwar decades. Today, the main driver of inequality, the tendency of capital returns to exceed the rate of economic growth, threatens to generate extreme inequalities that incite discontent and undermine democratic values. However, economic trends are not supernatural occurrences. Political action has previously reduced dangerous inequalities, according to Piketty, and it may do so again.

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

Author: Thomas Piketty

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/

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