Piketty on Capitalism and Inequality: A Radical Economics Perspective

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century has focused attention on the dramatic rise in economic inequality that has occurred in the United States and Europe over the past four decades. This paper argues that his account of the mechanisms that determine the distribution of income and wealth in a capitalist economy is unconvincing, for it rests on a tautology and on a spurious hypothesis about how the savings rate, the growth rate, and the capital/income ratio are connected.