Capital in the Twenty - First Century
— Thomas Piketty
EN
Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the spread of knowledge have enabled us to avoid inequality on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not changed the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality - the tendency of the returns to capital to exceed the rate of economic growth - now threatens to generate extreme inequalities that fuel discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty argues, and can do so again.