By now, nearly everyone has heard of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by the French economist Thomas Piketty. That book, to say nothing of Piketty himself, has become a phenomenon unrivaled in at least the last half-century of U.S. political discourse. The book arrives at a moment when the economics profession, in large part driven by Piketty’s earlier body of work (co-authored with his frequent collaborators Emmanuel Saez and Peter Diamond), has finally started to allow discussions of economic inequality to tiptoe back into polite conversation.
The book’s seismic impa
