The book’s scope is ambitious and broad, including long chapters on India and post-Communist societies that I will not even attempt to cover here. Capital and Ideology traces the evolution of economic inequality across the centuries and across national borders, while offering a policy framework for a more equitable society. Piketty’s 2020 book might not be a blockbuster, but it merits attention. Coming on the heels of Occupy Wall Street, Capital in the Twenty-First Century helped provide an intellectual foundation for, among other things, the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016. To prevent further wealth concentration, Piketty proposed a global wealth tax. The last four decades, however, saw the tax burden shift away from the wealthy to the working class, with wealth inequality reaching astronomical levels. These developments created political space for higher taxes on the wealthy that paid for what became known as the welfare state. (To grossly oversimplify, this is the result of returns to capital typically exceeding economic growth).įor Piketty, the 30 years after World War II when economic inequality fell was the product of an unusual period marked by strong labor unions and social democracy (or the New Deal in the US) the Great Depression and two world wars. That book, just shy of 700 pages, examined why inequality has tended to rise over time in capitalism.

Piketty’s 2020 tome is, at any rate, hardly the bestseller his 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century was. Early reviews appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, and the New Yorker in March 2020, just in time to be overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Piketty’s new book has faded a bit into obscurity, in part the victim of bad timing. “Every human society must justify its inequalities … in today’s societies, those justificatory narratives comprise theories of property, entrepreneurship, and meritocracy.” So begins Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, a 1,000-page-plus tome.

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty