Thomas Piketty

Capital and Ideology runs past a thousand pages and argues that inequality is never a matter of economics alone: every unequal society tells itself a story about why the arrangement is just, and Thomas Piketty compares those stories across slave societies, colonial empires, the Indian caste order and modern social democracies. Arthur Goldhammer translated it for Harvard University Press in 2020, a year after the French edition. It ends in proposals: a steeply graduated tax on wealth and inheritance, a capital endowment paid to every young adult, and worker representation on company boards, a programme he calls participatory socialism. Piketty was born in 1971 and teaches at the Paris School of Economics and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, having already reached a wide readership with Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2013. Economists who accept his measurements of concentration often part company with him at the remedies.