Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Thomas Piketty

www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674430006

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Harvard University Press
bit.ly/piketty-intro

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, economist 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.

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.

www.hup.harvard.edu/features/capital-in-the-twenty-first-century-introduction.html

RELATED LINKS
www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674430006

Read why Prospect chose Thomas Piketty as a “top thinker for the Covid-19 age”
Read Wired UK’s in-depth profile of Professor Piketty (April 2020)
Read a Nation interview with Piketty (March 2020) on confronting mass inequality during a global pandemic
Watch a Financial Times video interview with Piketty (February 2020) in which he explains why we need a radical new wealth tax
Read a (February 2020) New Statesman interview with Piketty in which he warns of “another economic crash”
Read a Times Higher Education interview with Piketty
On the Economist podcast The Economist Asks, listen to Piketty debate how unfair societies can learn from their mistakes, and whether inequality is ever in the public interest
At Five Books, read Piketty’s recommendations in the area of “Historical Change and Economic Ideology”
Listen to Piketty discuss the 2018 World Inequality Report—and what he would consider the “right” amount of economic inequality to be—on the Harvard Kennedy School’s PolicyCast
Watch Piketty give the 2018 James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Lecture in Economic Inequality at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics
At The Wire, read Piketty’s argument that the cure for unequal societies is not a basic income, but a fair wage
In the Guardian, read Piketty’s warning, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, that we must rethink globalization lest “Trumpism” prevail globally as well as in the United States
Watch Piketty discuss Capital in the Twenty-First Century in an in-depth interview with Charlie Rose, on The Colbert Report, PBS NewsHour, Channel 4 News, MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes and Now with Alex Wagner, and Bloomberg TV’s Market Markers, and with The Economist, Foreign Affairs, CNN Money, and HuffPost Live
Read interviews with Piketty at the New York Times blog Economix, Vox, Salon, The New Republic, and the Irish Times
View “Piketty’s Inequality Story in Six Charts” at the New Yorker blog Rational Irrationality, “Capital in 3 Minutes” from the BBC’s Newsnight, and, at Business Insider, 23 of Piketty’s charts “that will make you worried about the future”
Read Bill Gates’s review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
At the NYT blog Upshot, read “everything you need to know about Thomas Piketty vs. the Financial Times”
View footage from Piketty’s conversation with United States Senator Elizabeth Warren
Watch Piketty’s July 2014 lecture [in English] at AK Wien, Austria
Watch Bill Moyers discuss the book with Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on Moyers & Company
Read short guides to the book from Vox, the Harvard Business Review, and Tom the Dancing Bug
Read profiles of Piketty in the New York Times Business section and Sunday Styles section as well as the Chronicle Review
Listen to Piketty discuss the book on the BBC World Service’s Business Daily, WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show, WBUR’s On Point, and KPFA’s Against the Grain
Read lengthy considerations of the book from Thomas Frank at Salon, Larry Summers at Democracy, and the Guardian
Read analyses of the frenzy surrounding the book at the New Yorker blog Rational Irrationality, The Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Post
Read coverage of Piketty’s book tour from the New York Times, New York Magazine, New Yorker, New Republic, Guardian, and Wall Street Journal
In the New York Times, read about the stir Capital in the Twenty-First Century has caused among leading economists, and, in The Week, why it’s the book that “everyone is talking about”
Follow along with The Economist’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century book club
Read Bloomburg BusinessWeek’s take on Piketty’s “immodest proposal” for a global tax on wealth
Listen to Piketty discuss the financial dynamics at work against social mobility on the BBC World Service’s The Forum
Read a Fortune post on the “fresh perspective” and “wealth of newly compiled data” with which Capital in the Twenty-First Century helps us to understand the actual workings of capitalism
At Chicago Magazine, read about Thomas Piketty’s theories of inequality and new work on the cognitive rationalization process that happens among the well-off
On the eve of the 2014 World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, read in the Wall Street Journal about Piketty’s theories on inequality
Read an early take on Capital in the Twenty-First Century from The Economist
At The Week, explore Piketty’s conclusions via the classic Disney film The Aristocats
In the New York Times, read about Piketty’s finding (with Emmanuel Saez) that the top 10 percent of earners in 2012 took home the highest percentage of total American income ever recorded
In the Guardian, read Piketty and Saez’s argument for substantially raising top marginal tax rates
Plot graphs of income inequality over the past century via the World Top Incomes Database, an ongoing endeavor by Piketty, Saez, Facundo Alvaredo, and Tony Atkinson
Download Piketty’s Technical Appendix for the book, which includes additional figures and tables, as well as Internet links to all the series, excel files, programs, formulas, primary sources and technical studies used as the bedrock of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Browse a selection of HUP works on capitalism and its discontents