David Ricardo theorized that the landed gentry would become ever more wealthy as the value of a fixed amount of land rose relative to the expanding supply of other goods. Thomas Malthus theorized that population growth would keep the bulk of mankind trapped in misery and poverty, as was indeed the case for much of human history. The quest for a unifying theory on the nature of capitalism began with the earliest political economists.
“The clash of communism and capitalism sterilized rather than stimulated research on capital and inequality by historians, economists, and even philosophers,” writes Piketty. And where Marx foresaw capitalism’s collapse leading to a utopian proletariat paradise, Piketty sees a future of slow growth and Gilded Age disparities in which the wealthy - owners of capital - capture a steadily larger share of global wealth and income. In its magisterial sweep and ambition, Piketty’s latest work, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” is clearly modeled after Marx’s “Das Kapital.” But where Marx’s research was spotty, Piketty’s is prodigious. Piketty and Saez gathered data from tax returns that confirm the story of stagnant middle-class incomes over the past 30 years while revealing how much the super-rich have pulled away from everyone else. The economist is Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, who with Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley has recently turbocharged the debate about income inequality.
Just when you thought Karl Marx had finally lost all political and economic relevance, a brilliant French economist has come along to pick up where the German philosopher left off - correcting for many of Marx’s mistakes, updating his analysis in light of subsequent experience and unearthing a bounty of modern economic data to support a theory about capitalism’s inherent and self-destructive contradictions.
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