When we go and walk around in the city, we don’t see so many people, but we see a lot of homeless who have, of course, no place to go, and they clearly have fewer people than usual to give them money so they’re really asking a lot.

We stay at home most of the time, so we really don’t see much. media is so focused on the American experience, it almost makes it feel like the rest of the world isn’t going through the same thing. The people who are suffering are people in small apartments, people who have to go and work. We have a pretty nice apartment, so we’re not people who are suffering from this. I’ve been here with my wife, Julia, for the past six consecutive weeks. Where are you? That apartment looks like it’s in Paris. It was published on March 10, just as the coronavirus crisis was reaching a full blaze, offering all its own lessons, all over the world, in pandemic inequality. If Capital was diagnostic, Piketty’s follow-up, Capital and Ideology, mixes history and polemic - case studies from modern Sweden and Soviet Russia alongside a genuine political program to help mitigate, at least, the cruelest inequities highlighted in his first book. Back in 2014, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers called Piketty a “rock star,” then spent most of the rest of the decade arguing with him. It’s not every day an academic economist gets a turn like this. six months later, was the biggest best seller Harvard University Press had ever published (despite being nearly 700 dense pages long) it managed to smuggle an abstract equation into quasi-pop discourse ( r>g, Piketty’s shorthand for the fact that the returns to capital have been greater than the growth of the economy as a whole) and is now the subject of a surprisingly light documentary of the same name (in which Piketty stars). Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which came out in France in 2013 and in the U.S.

If Bernie Sanders is the politician Occupy Wall Street dreamed of, Thomas Piketty is the closest thing we’ve gotten to the great theoretician of our era of inequality (and the populism and political dysfunction it has produced).

Capital book by thomas piketty