“A historically unprecedented situation”
Thomas Piketty and Rising Inequality
“With all due respect to the ‘dismal science,’ this doesn’t happen often,” the Guardian journalist Stuart Jeffries wrote in a piece published on June 17, 2014. “Hundreds of people are queueing round the block for an economics lecture on a lovely summer’s evening in London. And those are the people who have successfully booked seats. There’s another queue of shiftylooking people hoping for return tickets and steeling themselves for disappointment.”1 The speaker at the Peacock Theater, just off the Aldwych, was Thomas Piketty, a forty-three-year-old professor at the Paris School of Economics who had recently published a seven-hundred-page book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in which he traced the long-term dynamics of inequality and warned that the prospect of recent trends continuing was “potentially terrifying.”2
Piketty’s book met the moment. The Global Financial Crisis and Occupy Wall Street’s denunciations of “the 1 percent” were still on people’s minds. Although the protest encampment at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan only remained in place for about two months in the fall of 2011, it came to symbolize widespread outrage about rising inequality and the privileges accorded to the financial sector and the uberwealthy. Occupy movements sprang up in other cities and countries, and even mainstream politicians responded to the concerns that the protesters raised. In a December 2013 speech, President Barack Obama described “dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility” as “the defining challenge of our time.”3 After an obscure German publisher put out Marx’s Capital in
27