Capital in the Twenty-First Century

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 yearand maybe of the decade. -- Paul Krugman * New York Times * The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat. * The Economist * Pikettys 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. -- Steven Pearlstein * Washington Post * Piketty has written an extraordinarily important bookIn its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy. -- Martin Wolf * Financial Times * A sweeping account of rising inequalityPiketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore. -- John Cassidy * New Yorker * Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years. -- Timothy Shenk * The Nation * At a time when the concentration of wealth and income in the hands of a few has resurfaced as a central political issue, Piketty doesnt just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single framePiketty has transformed our economic discourse; well never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to. -- Paul Krugman * New York Review of Books * The most remarkable work of economics in recent years, if not decadesThe discipline of economics, Piketty argues, remains trapped in a juvenile passion for mathematics, divorced from history and its sister social sciences. His work aims to change that. -- Nick Pearce * New Statesman * MagnificentEven though it is a work more concerned with the past 200 years, its no coincidence that the full title of Pikettys book is Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Its ambition is to shape debates about the next two centuries, not the past two. And in that it may succeed. -- Christopher Croke * The Australian * Pikettys ground-breaking work on the historical evolution of income distribution is impressiveOne of the best economic books in decades. -- Paul Sweeney * Irish Times * [Piketty] is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generationHe demonstrates that there is no reason to believe that capitalism can ever solve the problem of inequality, which he insists is getting worse rather than better. From the banking crisis of 2008 to the Occupy movement of 2011, this much has been intuited by ordinary people. The singular significance of his book is that it proves scientifically that this intuition is correct. This is why his book has crossed over into the mainstreamit says what many people have already been thinking. -- Andrew Hussey * The Observer * The strength of Pikettys book is his close attention to the different sources of inequality, the massive documentation underpinning his history and conclusions, and his impressive culls from sociology and literature, which exhibit the richness of political economy compared to its thin mathematical successor that has attained such prominenceA timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes. -- Robert Skidelsky * Prospect * A monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come. In the way it is written and the importance of the questions it asks, it is a book the classic authors of economics could have written if they lived today and had access to the vas

Thomas Piketty is Professor at cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Paris School of Economics and Codirector of the World Inequality Lab.