History Starts Now: Reflections on Piketty’s Inequality

Sympathetic as I am to Piketty’s burning desire to expose the ever-increasing inequalities in wealth and to alert the world to the difficulties associated with it, I found the reading of his recent tome, Capital and Ideology, difficult to digest. Paul Krugman notes in his review of the book in the New York Times that in part, the extent of the book (both in terms of length and cover), may reflect a lack of focus. To me, however, it was the apparent focus of the book which caused considerable ...