Review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

ABSTRACT

The importance of Piketty’s book is due to its “social-democrat reformist” inspiration. People all around the world know that capitalism is not working well and that it is now facing catastrophe. But they do not yet have the will to change it. This is exactly the core of Piketty’s book. On the one hand, he criticizes the social inequalities of capitalism. He stresses the fact that with capitalist globalization, inequalities and the power of capital are growing. He presents a massive quantity of global statistics to prove this. On the other hand, he is still in favor of capitalism and he thinks that capitalist globalization is the future of societies. He doesn’t say a word about the capitalist structure, based on basic inequalities between capitalists and workers. His proposals to counterbalance capitalist inequalities are therefore chimerical.

KEYWORDS:

• Inequalities
• K/Y ratio
• capital
• capitalism
• reformism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on Contributor

Jean-Claude Delaunay was Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Paris-East (France). He is the council advisor at the Gabriel Peri Foundation, and the deputy president at the World Association for Political Economy. He specializes in economics of services, and in new trends of capitalism. His most recent book (with Quynh Delaunay) is Lire le Capitalisme, Essai sur la Société du 21ème Siècle (Read Capitalism: Essay on the 21st Century Society) (Paris: Le Temps des Cerises, 2007).

Notes

1 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty.

2 See http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2012/04/17/nous-economistes-soutenons-hollande_1686249_3232.html.