A New York Times #1 Bestseller
An Amazon #1 Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Sunday Times Bestseller
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the British Academy Medal
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.

Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified 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 returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.

A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: 04/15/2014
ISBN: 9780674430006
Pages: 704
Weight: 2.66lbs
Size: 9.59h x 6.60w x 1.86d
Award: Kirkus Prize - Finalist
Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Finalist
Award: PROSE - Winner
Award: PROSE - Winner
Award: PROSE - Winner

Review Citations: New Yorker (The) 03/31/2014 pg. 69
New York Review of Books 05/08/2014 pg. 15
Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2014
Entertainment Weekly 05/16/2014 pg. 71
Choice 08/01/2014
Publishers Weekly 11/03/2014
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/03/2014 pg. 38
Christian Century 11/12/2014 pg. 42
LJ Best Books of Year 12/01/2014 pg. 32
Kirkus Best Nonfiction 12/01/2014 pg. 40