Three expert takes on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French
economist Thomas Piketty's data-driven magnum opus on inequality.
In the 1990s, two young French economists then affiliated with the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez,
began the first rigorous effort to gather facts on income inequality in
developed countries going back decades. In the wake of the 2007
financial crash, fundamental questions about the economy that had long
been ignored again garnered attention. Piketty and Saez’s research stood
ready with data showing that elites in developed countries had, in
recent years, grown far wealthier relative to the general population
than most economists had suspected. By the past decade, according to
Piketty and Saez, inequality had returned to levels nearing those of the
early 20th century.
Last fall, Piketty published his magnum opus,
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in France. The book seeks to model the history, recent trends, and back-to-the-19th-century future of capitalism.
The American Prospect
asked experts and scholars in the field of inequality to weigh in on
Piketty’s argument and potential impact for policymaking on our shores.
Jacob S. Hacker, director of the Institution for Social and Policy
Studies and Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale, and
Paul Pierson, the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the
University of California at Berkeley, are the co-authors most recently
of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and
Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Heather Boushey is the executive
director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable
Growth. Branko Milanovic is a visiting presidential professor at the
Graduate Center, City University of New York, a visiting senior scholar
at the Luxembourg Income Study Center, and the author of The Haves and
the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality.
