Who’s the most talked about French economist in your social circle? It’s Thomas Piketty, of course!
Thomas Piketty is the world’s one current celebrity economist and the best-selling author of Capital in the Twenty-first Century, a weighty analysis of wealth accumulation and economic growth since the Industrial Revolution. The book was published in France last year, but it’s socialist message wasn’t met with as much hoopla as it was when the English translation came out this year. Because the French are already used to talking about wealth inequality, but that’s an uncomfortable subject for most Americans. So I’ve heard.
In any case, Piketty is now the most famous French economist since Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and his admirers tend to talk about Piketty as being as important as Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes.
Piketty’s analysis is supposedly groundbreaking, at least in the world of academics. What’s more amazing about it is that it wound up on the bestseller list. How many people read economics books, for cryin’ out loud?
It’s easy to suspect it’s one of those books nobody wants to read, but everybody wants to have read it. I don’t plan on reading it, but since I read all about it, I tried to summarize his thesis in the Who2 biography of Thomas Piketty.