Capital in the Twenty‐First Century by T homas P iketty

The success of Piketty's book can be explained by several factors. A first factor is the contrast between his defense of a reasonably egalitarian and meritocratic vision of society, shared by European and American readers, and his convincing argument that that meritocracy system is under serious threat. The radically shocking nature of his arguments is coupled with the vast amount of empirical proof he has put forward to support them. Second, a remarkable clarity of expression underlies a simple theoretical approach to interpreting a panorama of data (allowing him to deliver a careful and well‐documented discussion of statistics, without sacrificing readability, something that is often sadly lacking in the cryptic mathematical computations that economists are typically known for). And, to illustrate his points, the author presents a variety of insightful literary references taken from nineteenth century romantic novels. Last but not least, his ambitious scope is noteworthy, dealing with cross‐country distributions of wealth and income, across broad swaths of time, through a cross‐disciplinary lens of economics, history and sociology.