Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Three centuries of tax records showing that concentrated inherited wealth is the default, not the exception.
Piketty and his collaborators assembled three centuries of tax records across several countries, and the data carries the argument: when the return on capital exceeds growth, inherited wealth compounds faster than earned income, and concentration is the default rather than the exception. The twentieth century’s compression was the anomaly, produced by war and policy. A dense book that became a bestseller because the evidence was hard to wave away.
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George Monbiot
You can take Piketty’s argument a little further and say that patrimonial capital breeds patrimonial politics. It creates a class of people who cannot ordinarily be displaced by democracy because they are able to buy their way back into power through our unreformed political-funding arrangements, the use of dark money, funding think-tanks, social media astroturfing, and sock puppetry.
Interview · September 2017
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