Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is a bona fide phenomenon. Other books on economics have been best sellers, but Mr. Piketty’s contribution is serious, discourse-changing scholarship in a way most best sellers aren’t ... what’s really new about Capital is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved ... Still, it has been amazing to watch conservatives, one after another, denounce Mr. Piketty as a Marxist. Even Mr. Pethokoukis, who is more sophisticated than the rest, calls Capital a work of 'soft Marxism,' which only makes sense if the mere mention of unequal wealth makes you a Marxist ... Money still talks ... Still, ideas matter too, shaping both how we talk about society and, eventually, what we do. And the Piketty panic shows that the right has run out of ideas.

That capitalism is unfair has been said before. But it is the way Thomas Piketty says it – subtly but with relentless logic – that has sent rightwing economics into a frenzy, both here and in the US ... Many of the book's 700 pages are spent marshalling the evidence that 21st-century capitalism is on a one-way journey towards inequality – unless we do something ... If Piketty is right, there are big political implications, and the beauty of the book is that he never refrains from drawing them ... The book's terms and explanations are utterly simple; with a myriad of historical data, Piketty reduces the story of capitalism to a clear narrative arc. To challenge his argument you have to reject the premises of it, not the working out ... Piketty has...placed an unexploded bomb within mainstream, classical economics ... You would expect the Wall Street Journal to dissent, but the power of Piketty's work is that it also challenges the narrative of the centre-left under globalisation, which believed upskilling the workforce, combined with mild redistribution, would promote social justice. This, Piketty demonstrates, is mistaken. All that social democracy and liberalism can produce, with their current policies, is the oligarch's yacht co-existing with the food bank for ever.

French economist Thomas Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book ... The result is a work of vast historical scope, grounded in exhaustive fact-based research, and suffused with literary references. It is both normative and political. Piketty rejects theorising ungrounded in data ... the book is built on a 15-year programme of empirical research conducted in conjunction with other scholars. Its result is a transformation of what we know about the evolution of income and wealth...over the past three centuries in leading high-income countries. That makes it an enthralling economic, social and political history ... Yet the book also has clear weaknesses. The most important is that it does not deal with why soaring inequality – while more than adequately demonstrated – matters. Essentially, Piketty simply assumes that it does.

This is a VIB – very important book. Nearly everyone agrees about that ... Uncovering and bringing together this data for the US and a handful of other countries using tax returns is a major achievement, which some say merits a Nobel prize on its own ... Many people are worried about the slow rate of growth in the developed economies since the financial crisis in 2008. Many are also worried about rising inequality. At first glance, Capital seems to offer an elegant way to explain both. But, by [Piketty's] own admission, the world is a lot more complicated than talk of a 'central contradiction to capitalism' might suggest. So is the relationship between capital accumulation and growth ... Piketty deserves huge credit for kickstarting a debate about inequality and illuminating the distribution of income and wealth. But when it comes to the forces driving growth and wealth accumulation in our modern economy what he has probably done most to bring out into the open is our collective ignorance and confusion.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21 Century is simultaneously ambitious and modest. The book is ambitious because Piketty sets out to tell a high-level history of the global economy and to outline a fresh theory of where we are heading. It’s the sort of grand intellectual enterprise that was common in the 19 century, but has become a rarity in our era of more specialised scholarship. But Capital’s also modest because Piketty wants to put economics, his own discipline, back in its place ... Perhaps the greatest contribution of this book is the data it brings to the table. Piketty throws a spotlight on the very wealthiest and those with the chunkiest incomes and puts these patterns in a long historical context. This is important because it tells the story of our time: huge wealth and huge incomes are now concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people ... Piketty has been extensively critiqued, but no one quibbles with his data.

In terms of accessibility...the book is handsomely written and translated, with a flowing prose in which Piketty liberally marshalls literary references, from Honore de Balzac to Jane Austen, to illustrate his arguments, the text does become rather repetitive and congested with too many asides and caveats. This minor quibble aside, however, there is no reason why thegeneral reader cannot appreciate the intellectual delights on offer ... Of course, that this is hardly news; rather, what gives the book’s intellectual thrust its potent freshness is not so much its arguments or conclusions, but the fact that Piketty has analysed data going back to the year 1700 and 'proved' that inequality is reaching extreme, dangerous and unjust levels, particularly when it comes to the top 1% and, even more so, the top 0.1% of the global population ... Piketty mentions that in previous centuries extreme inequality of wealth was almost considered as an acceptable condition of civilisation...In significant measure, this is still the case today, except that the division is now global: people in rich countries live lives of luxury – despite the financial crash – at the expense of poor countries and their cheap labour. And yet, this question of cheap labour in poor countries is one that Piketty does not address at all, surely the weakest point of an otherwise solid argument ... That caveat aside, however, Piketty deserves huge credit for an epic and groundbreaking study of national inequalities, which deserves to be read by everyone.

Because this is a book of great scope and ambition, one can see why it has attracted attention. For all those people who would like to have a big idea but can’t think of one, Piketty has given hope that there is a fundamental weakness in capitalism. And after so many breathless accounts of the recent financial crisis, a wide-ranging historical analysis of the distribution of the fruits of economic growth is a pleasant surprise ... Nevertheless, the claims made for Piketty’s book are exaggerated ... In essence, the principal weakness of the book is that the carefully assembled data do not live up to Piketty’s rhetoric about the nature of capitalism ... Inequality does matter, and measures to reduce it have a proper place in economic policy. But by promoting efficiency and raising living standards, a market economy has proved its worth. To argue that inequality is the fundamental weakness of modern capitalism, while ignoring capitalism’s achievements, may excite the well-heeled intellectual salons of Paris and New York, but most of us recognise that a market economy has served us well by creating growth and reducing poverty.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is an intelligent, ambitious and above all informative treatment of the problem. This accounts for much of the unusual excitement surrounding a lengthy, often dry economic tract. But there’s something else to the ‘Piketty bubble’: he is one of the very few contemporary economists eager to revive the old-fashioned spirit of political economy ...[a] lengthy, thorough and generally lucid book ... A clear and sometimes sarcastically witty writer...Piketty is both presenting scholarly findings before colleagues and urging political reform on an educated public ... nothing about the book is more impressive than the range and richness of its statistical information ... The book is more exciting considered as a failure than as a triumph. Piketty has bid a lingering goodbye to the latter-day marginalism of mainstream economics but has not yet arrived at the reconstructed political economy foreseen at the outset. His theoretical reach fumbles where his statistical grasp is sure, and he leaves intact the questions of economic value, distributive justice and capitalist dynamics that he raises.

...this is a serious book ... It is also a long book: 577 pages of closely printed text and seventy-seven pages of notes ... The English translation by Arthur Goldhammer reads very well ... Piketty’s strategy is to start with a panoramic reading of the data across space and time, and then work out from there. He and a group of associates...have labored hard to compile an enormous database that is still being extended and refined. It provides the empirical foundation for Piketty’s argument.This is Piketty’s main point, and his new and powerful contribution to an old topic: as long as the rate of return exceeds the rate of growth, the income and wealth of the rich will grow faster than the typical income from work ... The mechanism is a little more complicated than Piketty’s book lets on.

Piketty’s work heralds the return of political economy as the centerpiece of economic analysis and, along with it, the historical perspective such an analysis demands ... The twin pillars of Piketty’s return to political economy are articulated as a pair of twin needs: the need for big data and for the long view. Zeitgeist or conjuncture, take your pick: Capital in the Twenty-First Century is central to it ... Cards on the table: I am totally sympathetic to Piketty’s work, even if it has the effect of empirically demonstrating something most of us already know – namely, that economic inequality is not a natural affliction but a historical consequence. And it is interesting to note how quickly his work has become orthodoxy for an ecumenical left. In his recent Alan Saunders Memorial Lecture devoted to the history of liberty, the philosopher Philip Pettit casually dropped an ‘as we now know from Piketty …’ into his talk, endorsing the view that inequality is an economic phenomenon that demands a political solution. What I am ambivalent about here is the rhetorical significance of this ‘we now know’. In other words, it is striking how quickly the political imperative can become the empirical told-you-so. And whether one is sympathetic to the imperative is irrelevant. It seems that one duty of the historian is to remain vigilant in maintaining that the relationship between the political imperative and the empirical told-you-so is fraught at best.

The book’s success has a lot to do with being about the right subject at the right time. Inequality has suddenly become a fevered topic, especially in America. Having for years dismissed the gaps between the haves and have-nots as a European obsession, Americans, stung by the excesses of Wall Street, are suddenly talking about the rich and redistribution. Hence the attraction of a book which argues that growing wealth concentration is inherent to capitalism and recommends a global tax on wealth as the progressive solution ... But if Mr Piketty does set the tone of debate on inequality, the world will be the poorer for it. For like its 19th-century namesake, Capital contains some marvellous scholarship, but as a guide to action, is deeply flawed ... Mr Piketty’s focus on soaking the rich smacks of socialist ideology, not scholarship. That may explain why Capital is a bestseller. But it is a poor blueprint for action.

A French academic serves up a long, rigorous critique, dense with historical data, of American-style predatory capitalism—and offers remedies that Karl Marx might applaud ... The author’s data is unassailable. His policy recommendations are considerably more controversial, including his call for a global tax on wealth. From start to finish, the discussion is written in plainspoken prose that, though punctuated by formulas, also draws on a wide range of cultural references ... Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high—and is only bound to grow worse.

Piketty makes his case with three centuries' worth of economic data from around the world organized in a trove of detailed but lucid tables and graphs. This is a serious, meaty economic treatise, but Piketty's prose (in Goldhammer's deft translation) is wonderfully readable and engaging, and illuminates the human reality behind the econometric stats—especially in his explorations of the role of capital in the novels of Jane Austen and Balzac. Full of insights but free of dogma, this is a seminal examination of how entrenched wealth and intractable inequality continue to shape the economy.