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Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2014

Per H. Hansen
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Rarely does a relatively unknown professor of economics publish a book that sells more than 200,000 copies in a few months. When critics accuse the same economist of being normative, political, of manipulating data, of misunderstanding basic economic theory, and of wanting to impoverish everyone, surely it must be because he is on to something. Other commentators, perhaps a bit prematurely, are claiming that his book is the economics book that will define twenty-first-century debate.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Business History Review , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2014 , pp. 583 - 591
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2014 

References

1 Piketty, Thomas and Saez, Emmanuel, “Inequality in the Long Run,” Science 344, no. 6186 (2014): 838–43CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

2 Andrew Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry, Inequality and Unsustainable Growth: Two Sides of the Same Coin? IMF Staff Discussion Note, SDN/11/08 (Washington, D.C., 8 Apr. 2011); and Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos G. Tsangarides, Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth, IMF Staff Discussion Note, SDN14/02 (Washington, D.C., Feb. 2014).

3 “For Richer, for Poorer,” Special Report: The World Economy, The Economist 13 Oct. 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21564414, accessed 6 July 2014.

4 Robert E. Lucas, “The Industrial Revolution: Past and Future,” 2003 Annual Report Essay, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=3333, accessed 5 July 2014.

5 Quoted from Robert Wade, “From Global Imbalances to Global Reorganizations,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 33, no. 4 (2009): 539–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, specifically 552.

6 Mankiw, Gregory N., “Defending the One Percent,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3 (2013): 21–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See, in particular, Kuznets, Simon, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” American Economic Review 45, no. 1 (1955): 1–28Google Scholar.

8 For Chris Giles's original critique, see Financial Times: http://blogs.ft.com/money-supply/2014/05/23/data-problems-with-capital-in-the-21st-century/; and for Piketty's response, see http://blogs.ft.com/money-supply/2014/05/30/capital-in-the-21st-century-a-response/. Finally, see the Economist's discussion here: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21603022-latest-controversy-around-thomas-pikettys-blockbuster-book-concerns-its (all accessed 7 July 2014).

9 McCloskey, Donald, “The Rhetoric of Economics,” Journal of Economic Literature 21, no. 2 (1983): 481–517Google Scholar.

10 See, for instance, Stefan Homburg, “Critical Remarks on Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Discussion Paper no. 530, Institute of Public Economics, Leibniz University of Hannover, April 2014; Guillaume Allègre and Xavier Timbeau, “The Critique of Capital in the Twenty-First Century: In Search of the Macroeconomic Foundations of Inequality,” Working Paper 2014-10, OFCE, Sciences-Po, Paris, May 2014, http://www.ofce.sciences-po.fr/pdf/dtravail/WP2014-10.pdf. Also, see Summers, Lawrence H., “The Inequality Puzzle,” Democracy 33 (Summer 2014): http://www.democracyjournal.org/33/the-inequality-puzzle.php.Google Scholar

11 Laird, Pamela, Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006)Google Scholar.

12 Hansen, Per H., “From Finance Capitalism to Financialization: A Cultural and Narrative Perspective on 150 Years of Financial History,” forthcoming in Enterprise & Society 15, no. 4 (2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hansen, Per H., “Making Sense of Financial Crisis and Scandal: A Danish Bank Failure in the Era of Finance Capitalism,” Enterprise & Society 13, no. 4 (2012): 672–706CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hansen, Per H., “Business History: A Cultural and Narrative Approach,” Business History Review 86 (Winter 2012): 693–717CrossRefGoogle Scholar.