Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century: a short review
In the past, wealth and its social distribution were not routinely or extensively covered in economics. An important reason for this is that the analytical point of departure of the dominant neo-classical school—in particular, the theory of the distribution of factor incomes—begins after the distribution of wealth has taken place (Stilwell, 2019, p. 96). In the course of the past decade, however, wealth as a subject of academic investigation has re-emerged, in part boosted by the worldwide success of Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century , which is a detailed empirical investigation into the changing patterns of economic inequality over the long term, with a focus on western Europe and the US. In the book, Piketty runs through some of prominent early works on wealth and income inequality from the pre-history of the subject. This covers the ideas of Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, and ends with the optimistic prognosis of Simon Kuznets in the US following the Second W