Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, writes in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that we haven’t just gone back to 19th-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics & International Affairs at Princeton, and New York Times columnist, smartly unpacks the statistical evidence here: http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/16/paul-krugman-why-we%E2%80%99re-in-a-new-gilded-age/
Piketty ends Capital in the Twenty-First Century with a call to arms — a call, in particular, for wealth taxes, global if possible, to restrain the growing power of inherited wealth. It’s easy to be cynical about the prospects for anything of the kind. But surely Piketty’s masterly diagnosis of where we are and where we’re heading makes such a thing considerably more likely.
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