thomas piketty capitalism in the 21st century

What makes this French economist’s conclusions worth global notice? The short answer is that Piketty and his research team amassed a mountain of data, much of it going back centuries, suggesting that the concentration of wealth in ever-fewer hands is not an anomaly or a recent development. (Watch Piketty’s TED Talk: New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century.) That’s no small feat for a chart-heavy doorstop on “the dismal science” of economics.Ī fair portion of the book’s notoriety was due to its subject matter: wealth distribution, an intensely political topic if ever there was one. © London School of Economics and Political Science 2014.When Thomas Piketty’s “ Capital in the Twenty-first Century” was published earlier this year, it was something of a sensation. The examples of housing policy and the regulation, and failure to regulate, financial markets are used to illustrate these points.Ĭapital inequality political science institutions. Even if the fact of capital accumulation may respond to an economic logic, the process is embedded in a very political logic. In a sense capital itself - the central concept of the book - is almost meaningless without proper consideration of its political foundations. Although Capital's principal message is that 'capital is back' and that without political interventions active political interventions will continue to grow, a political economy perspective would suggest another rather more fundamental critique: the very economic forces Piketty describes are embedded in institutional arrangements which can only be properly understood as political phenomena. It develops this argument by first assessing and critiquing the changing nature of political science and its account of contemporary capitalism, and then suggesting how Piketty's thesis can be complemented, extended and challenged by focusing on the ways in which politics and collective action shape the economy and the distribution of income and wealth. This article argues that political science has an essential contribution to make to this debate, and that Piketty's important and powerful book lacks a clear political theory. Thomas Piketty's imposing volume has brought serious economics firmly into the mainstream of public debate on inequality, yet political science has been mostly absent from this debate.

Thomas piketty capitalism in the 21st century