Foreign Policy Magazine

The Tyranny of Property

FIGURING, PERHAPS, THAT READERS MIGHT BY NOW have summoned the time and energy to read his previous world-shattering bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the superstar French economist Thomas Piketty is back with an even bigger, even more imposing encore—one that shares much of the good, and some of the bad, with its predecessor.

If you liked Capital, you’ll probably like the new doorstopper, which came out in French last year and recently hit the shelves in English. Piketty makes the same data-driven arguments about wealth and inequality as before, though on a much broader canvas, and prescribes similar if even more pie-in-the-sky solutions.

In , Piketty seeks to do a couple of things he didn’t in the previous book: better explain why and how inequality persists and why even more radical solutions

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