Since comparisons over vast stretches of time and space are the essence, there is a problem about finding comparable units in which to measure total wealth or capital in, say, France in 1850 as well as in the United States in 1950. I had a friend, a distinguished algebraist, whose preferred adjective of praise was “serious.” “Z is a serious mathematician,” he would say, or “Now that is a serious painting.” Well, this is a serious book. Now along comes Thomas Piketty, a forty-two-year-old French economist, to fill those gaps and then some. Second, they seem a little adventitious, accidental whereas a forty-year trend common to the advanced economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan would be more likely to rest on some deeper forces within modern industrial capitalism. First, they do not speak to the really dramatic issue: the tendency for the very top incomes-the “1 percent”-to pull away from the rest of society. But even taken together they do not seem to provide a thoroughly satisfactory picture.
The discussion so far has turned up a number of causal factors: the erosion of the real minimum wage the decay of labor unions and collective bargaining globalization and intensified competition from low-wage workers in poor countries technological changes and shifts in demand that eliminate mid-level jobs and leave the labor market polarized between the highly educated and skilled at the top and the mass of poorly educated and unskilled at the bottom.Įach of these candidate causes seems to capture a bit of the truth. A rational and effective policy for dealing with it-if there is to be one-will have to rest on an understanding of the causes of increasing inequality.
This ominous anti-democratic trend has finally found its way into public consciousness and political rhetoric. The most striking aspect has been the widening gap between the rich and the rest. Income inequality in the United States and elsewhere has been worsening since the 1970s. Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press)
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