the Twenty-First Century1

Piketty’s book is an important book, not only for its huge success and the lively and engaging style of its author, but for its powerful and controversial contents. It is no wonder that it has raised the interest of other famous economists such as Krugman, Stiglitz and Milanovic2, but also the attention of the media and the general public. The book begins with the statement of the goal of putting distribution again at the centre of the economic agenda. This is followed by a brief, but well written, introduction on classical authors such as Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, and also more modern classics such as Simon Kuznets, as well as the author’s critique of Kuznets’s famous income distribution curve. The first part of the book presents the main concepts used in Piketty’s analysis. There are the definitions of income, product and capital. The latter is defined in a very broad sense, comprising both real and financial capital, and it is actually more akin to the concept of wealth than to the concept of capital used in standard macro-economic theory. National capital is a stock value, and it is the sum of private and public capital or of domestic and net external capital