thomas piketty capitalism in the 21st century

'Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years.' 'The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries.

'It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year-and maybe of the decade.' © London School of Economics and Political Science 2014.Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Awardįinalist, National Book Critics Circle Award 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