Capital In The Twenty-First Century

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. Prizes: Winner of PROSE Awards and Arthur Ross Book Award 2015. Nominated for FAF Translation Prize 2015 and Robert Jervis and Paul Schroeder Best Book Award 2015 and Sidney Hillman Prize for Book Journalism 2015 and Joseph J. Spengler Best Book Prize 2016. Author Biography: 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. Review: It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year-and maybe of the decade. -- Paul Krugman * New York Times * The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat. * The Economist * Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years. -- Steven Pearlstein * Washington Post * Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book...In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy. -- Martin Wolf * Financial Times * A sweeping account of rising inequality...Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore. -- John Cassidy * New Yorker * Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years. -- Timothy Shenk * The Nation * At a time when the concentration of wealth and income in the hands of a few has resurfaced as a central political issue, Piketty doesn't just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame...Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we'll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to. -- Paul Krugman * New York Review of Books * The most remarkable work of economics in recent years, if not decades...The discipline of economics, Piketty argues, remains trapped in a juvenile passion for mathematics, divorced from history and its sister social sciences. His work aims to change that. -- Nick Pearce * New Statesman * Magnificent...Even though it is a work more concerned with the past 200 years, it's no coincidence that the full title of Piketty's book is Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Its ambition is to shape debates about the next two centuries, not the past two. And in that it may succeed. -- Christopher Croke * The Australian * Piketty's ground-breaking work on the historical evolution of income distribution is impressive...One of the best economic books in decades. -- Paul Sweeney * Irish Times * [Piketty] is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generation...He demonstrates that there is no reason to believe that capitalism can ever solve the problem of inequality, which he insists is getting worse rather than better. From the banking crisis of 2008 to the Occupy movement of 2011, this much has been intuited by ordinary people. The singular significance of his book is that it proves 'scientifically' that this intuition is correct. This is why his book has crossed over into the mainstream-it says what many people have already been thinking. -- Andrew Hussey * The Observer * The strength of Piketty's book is his close attention to the different sources of inequality, the massive documentation underpinning his history and conclusions, and his impressive culls from sociology and literature, which exhibit the richness of 'political economy' compared to its thin mathematical successor that has attained such prominence...A timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes. -- Robert Skidelsky * Prospect * A monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come. In the way it is written and the importance of the questions it asks, it is a book the classic authors of economics could have written if they lived today and had access to the vast empirical material Piketty and his colleagues collected. -- Branko Milanovic * American Prospect * This book has all the makings of a classic. It has already changed the way economists think about inequality. One hopes that these ideas will percolate into the chambers of policy-makers in governments and lending institutions and bring about changes in their policies to reduce inequality. -- K. Subramanian * The Hindu * Piketty's book is revolutionary...[His] multi-century portrait of wealth and income obliterates economists' complacent narratives...We are still seeking an economy that is both vibrant and humane, where mutual advantage is real and mutual aid possible. The one we have isn't it. -- Jedediah Purdy * Los Angeles Review of Books * Piketty demonstrates in terrifying detail, with painstaking statistical research, that free-market capitalism, in the absence of major state redistribution, produces profound economic inequalities. -- Michael Robbins * Chicago Tribune * An extraordinary sweep of history backed by remarkably detailed data and analysis...Piketty's economic analysis and historical proofs are breathtaking. -- Robert B. Reich * The Guardian * Piketty's treatment of inequality is perfectly matched to its moment. Like [Paul] Kennedy a generation ago, Piketty has emerged as a rock star of the policy-intellectual world...But make no mistake, his work richly deserves all the attention it is receiving...By focusing attention on what has happened to a fortunate few among us, and by opening up for debate issues around the long-run functioning of our market system, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a profoundly important contribution. -- Lawrence H. Summers * Democracy * What makes Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century such a triumph is that it seems to have been written specifically to demolish the great economic shibboleths of our time...Piketty's magnum opus. -- Thomas Frank * Salon * Capital reflects decades of work in collecting national income data across centuries, countries, and class, done in partnership with academics across the globe. But beyond its remarkably rich and instructive history, the book's deep and novel understanding of inequality in the economy has drawn well-deserved attention...The book is an attempt to ground the debate over inequality in strong empirical data, put the question of distribution back into economics, and open the debate not just to the entirety of the social sciences but to people themselves. -- Mike Konczal * Boston Review * [A] 700-page punch in the plutocracy's pampered gut...It's been half a century since a book of economic history broke out of its academic silo with such fireworks. -- Giles Whittell * The Times * Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics has done the definitive comparative historical research on income inequality in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century. -- Paul Starr * New York Review of Books * Bracing...Piketty provides a fresh and sweeping analysis of the world's economic history that puts into question many of our core beliefs about the organization of market economies. His most startling news is that the belief that inequality will eventually stabilize and subside on its own, a long-held tenet of free market capitalism, is wrong. Rather, the economic forces concentrating more and more wealth into the hands of the fortunate few are almost sure to prevail for a very long time. -- Eduardo Porter * New York Times * About as close to a blockbuster as there is in the world of economic literature-easily the most