Buy new:
£28.95£28.95
Arrives:
Tuesday, April 9
Dispatches from: Amazon Sold by: Amazon
Buy used £8.70
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Capital in the Twenty–First Century Hardcover – Illustrated, 18 Mar. 2014
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Purchase options and add-ons
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.
- ISBN-10067443000X
- ISBN-13978-0674430006
- EditionIllustrated
- PublisherHarvard University Press
- Publication date18 Mar. 2014
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions16.76 x 4.72 x 24.36 cm
- Print length704 pages
Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and PovertyDaron AcemogluPaperback£13.30 delivery
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: with The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Classics of World Literature)John Maynard Keynes CB FBA 1st Baron KeynesPaperback£12.78 delivery


The main forces for convergence are the diffusion of knowledge and investment in training and skills.Highlighted by 1,743 Kindle readers
Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.Highlighted by 1,536 Kindle readers
National income is defined as the sum of all income available to the residents of a given country in a given year, regardless of the legal classification of that income.Highlighted by 1,507 Kindle readers
Product description
Review
A big book in every sense of the word, using empirical evidence from 30 countries to describe how capitalism has evolved over the past 300 years and is now reverting to what Piketty calls the Downton Abbey world of a century ago...It is rare for economics books to fly off the shelves. Once in every generation, usually when the world has started to recover after a serious recession, there is a search for answers. Will Hutton's The State We're In was the must-buy book two decades ago just as Piketty's is today.-- "The Guardian" (5/2/2014 12:00:00 AM)
A landmark book...which brings a ton of data to bear in reaching the commonsensical conclusion that inequality has to do with more than just blind market forces at work.--George Packer "New Yorker" (3/25/2014 12:00:00 AM)
After receiving widespread attention in his native France, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has received even greater attention on this side of the Atlantic, and deservedly so. It offers a stark and depressing picture for those who believe that some combination of democratic politics and economic growth can protect us from rampant inequality.--Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage "Washington Post" (4/7/2014 12:00:00 AM)
Anyone remotely interested in economics needs to read Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.--Matthew Yglesias "Slate" (2/10/2014 12:00:00 AM)
Groundbreaking...The usefulness of economics is determined by the quality of data at our disposal. Piketty's new volume offers a fresh perspective and a wealth of newly compiled data that will go a long way in helping us understand how capitalism actually works.--Christopher Matthews "Fortune" (2/26/2014 12:00:00 AM)
It's going to be remembered as the economic tome of our era. Basically, Piketty has finally put to death, with data, the fallacies of trickle down economics...We can only hope that the politicians crafting today's economic programs will take this book to heart.--Rana Foroohar "Time" (4/23/2014 12:00:00 AM)
Magisterial...Piketty provides a sweeping, data-driven narrative about inequality trends in the United States and other Western economies over the past century or more, identifies a worrisome increase in income and wealth concentration in a small percentage of the population since 1980, and warns that this trend won't likely correct itself.--Chad Stone "U.S. News & World Report" (4/18/2014 12:00:00 AM)
Marx believed that free markets produce inequality, social division and violence. Piketty appears to side with Marx, but this is deceptive. When Piketty talks about 'capital, ' he means the kind of investments held by today's leisured rentier class whose money is tied up in property and pensions. Piketty argues that a free market overloaded with this kind of capital may or may not lead to anger and alienation, but it will certainly act like lumpy blockages in the smooth running of the economy. Piketty only wants the economy to work better.--Nicholas Blincoe "The Telegraph" (11/22/2014 12:00:00 AM)
Not since John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971 has a work of political theory been as rapturously received on the left as Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century...In this supposedly superficial and anti-intellectual age, his 690-page treatise on inequality, rich in empirical research, has resonated because it speaks to one of the central anxieties of our time: that society is becoming ever more fragmented as the very rich pull away from the rest.-- "New Statesman" (5/12/2014 12:00:00 AM)
Piketty draws on a vast store of historical data to argue that the broad dissemination of wealth that occurred during the decades following World War I was not, as economists then mistakenly believed, a natural state of capitalist equilibrium, but rather a halcyon interval between Belle Époque inequality and the rising inequality of our own era...[His] most provocative argument is that the discrepancy between the high returns to capital and much more modest overall economic growth--briefly annulled during the mid-century--ensures that the gulf between the rich (who profit from capital investments) and the middle class (who depend chiefly on income from labor) will only continue to grow.--James Traub "Foreign Policy" (4/11/2014 12:00:00 AM)
Rarely does a book come along...that completely alters the paradigm through which we frame our worldview. Thomas Piketty's magisterial study of the structure of capitalism since the 18th century, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is such a book...This book is more than a must read. It is a manual for action that provides a fresh framework for the new politics of the 21st century.--Nathan Gardels "The WorldPost" (3/24/2014 12:00:00 AM)
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century laid bare the deep structural forces that have made our brave new neoliberal economic order so dangerously topheavy and unstable.--Chris Lehmann "In These Times" (6/27/2017 12:00:00 AM)
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Harvard University Press; Illustrated edition (18 Mar. 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 704 pages
- ISBN-10 : 067443000X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0674430006
- Dimensions : 16.76 x 4.72 x 24.36 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 105,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 868 in Business & Economic History
- 1,409 in Professional Finance
- 34,934 in Society, Politics & Philosophy
- Customer reviews:
About the author

Thomas Piketty (French: [tɔˈma pikɛˈti]; born on 7 May 1971) is a French economist who works on wealth and income inequality. He is a professor (directeur d'études) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), professor at the Paris School of Economics and Centennial professor at the London School of Economics new International Inequalities Institute.
He is the author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which emphasises the themes of his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. He considers that to be a problem, and to address it, he proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Gobierno de Chile [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from United Kingdom
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
1. Throughout human history income distribution and (even more so) wealth distribution has almost inevitably been skewed very heavily toward the top. This is the result of powerful economic laws that reinforce each other.
(i) Over time, total wealth in a society tends to the ratio of the savings rate to the growth rate, which has typically resulted in wealth (=capital) of 4 to 7 times more than total income. In the US today this ratio is at 4, in Italy today it's more like 6, the same as it was in pre-1914 France, for example. The composition of capital has changed (e.g. arable land has gone from very important to totally unimportant) but not its ratio to income (as measured by GDP or GNP or GNI).
(ii) World growth has throughout history been abysmally low. It averaged 0.1% per annum between year 0 and 1700, 1.6% per annum between 1700 and today and a mere 3% per annum from 1913 to 2013. Ergo, it's a tiny denominator that's been keeping this ratio up, rather than particularly impressive savings rates. Only a smidge more than half of that growth has been per capita growth, incidentally, with the rest attributable to population growth, which cannot but stop dead in its tracks In the next fifty years due to physical, Malthusian limitations to demographics.
(iii) Wealth, once you've got it, can work for you to make you richer. So those at the top of the wealth pyramid get a leg up in staying near the top of the pyramid.
(iv) The more wealth you command, the harder it works for you because you can hire experts to manage it, get access to better ways of investing etc.
(v) The bottom 50% of society has never saved a penny anywhere, not even in 1970's Sweden, it's always and everywhere lived hand-to-mouth.
(vi) Meantime, a large chunk of wealth in history has typically been inherited.
(vii) Return on capital is higher than the rate of GDP growth, which is Piketty's famous r>g inequality. An explanation the author offers is that there needs to be some type of compensation for risk.
So, for example, from 1800 to 1900 both in the United Kingdom and in France, the top 10% of society owned 90% of the wealth (=capital) and indeed the top 1% owned comfortably more than 50% of wealth. This wealth generated itself a lot of income, a fact that ensured there was very little chance a pauper could ever work his way to the top without marrying into wealth. This top 1% of society enjoyed income equivalent to 30 times the average. This income, was in turn used to employ the staff that would supply its masters with fresh food (no refrigerators back then, remember), clothing (a very labor-intensive set of goods up until the industrial revolution), transport (somebody needed to take care of the horses!) etc. etc.
2. We are now living in the tail end of a brief interlude in history when it appeared that we had been moving away from this status quo. The first and second world war decimated the built-up capital (=wealth) of the western world if four different ways:
(i) The loss of European (mainly British and French) colonies eliminated in one fell swoop somewhere between a quarter and a third of all accumulated wealth in the west.
(ii) The taxation that became necessary to wage WWI and WWII was obviously borne by those who could pay, i.e. the rich, and it remained truly confiscatory for years after the end of conflict, with marginal rates on passive income hitting 98% in the UK, for example.
(iii) The wars themselves brought destruction of property and capital on a massive scale.
(iv) Inflation on an equally massive scale followed, which wiped out the purchasing power of nominal savings (e.g. bonds and bank deposits) of many a saver, much as the flip side of this silent confiscation was a de facto forgiveness of public debts.
So for the first time in a couple thousand years, the top 10% of the population only controls 40% to 60% of the wealth (depending on the country). The bottom 50% controls zero, as always, but there is a 40% of the population that controls some 60% to 40% of wealth (depending on the country). A middle class!
Our parents' generation inherited very little, was born into as equal a society as there has been in at least two thousand years and made something of it. Not only does it feel fully entitled to its wealth, it also believes very strongly (and justifiably) that this status was acquired in an environment of fairness and meritocracy. Moreover, these events took place against the background of an equally generation-defining struggle between the free market and communism. At the apogee of its success, our parents' generation voted in people like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and more recently George W Bush that enshrined this right to succeed and enjoy the fruits of one's success in low taxation rates on both income and capital.
3. Piketty argues that our parents are confused. It was not only the free market that contributed to the creation of a middle class. The free market has always been there. The other ingredient was the "thirty year war" that started in 1914 and ended in 1945. Now we've had peace for a good seventy years, and especially now that we have (among other things)
(i) States competing with one another to provide low taxation for corporates
(ii) Tax havens for the rich to hide their savings
(iii) Supermanagers earning 500 times what the shop-floor workers earn (as a result of the incentives offered by lower taxation rates)
...we are moving full-speed-ahead toward re-establishing the status quo of 1800-1913 and eliminating the middle class. As proof, he shows what has happened to the ratios of wealth to GDP that are approaching the Ancien Regime and Belle Epoque levels (though he does not provide any corroborating evidence from wealth distribution tables)
Having made these arguments, Piketty goes on to propose a global tax on capital, which he hopes can be one measure that will ensure we do not see the types of wealth concentration that pre-dated WWI.
I must confess that I find myself nodding in agreement with every single word of the book and then disagreeing with the conclusion. Perhaps because I don't understand why r>g. Fine, it's true for the past, but where is it written that capital can grow faster than GDP forever? Last I checked, Elon Musk's crowd were looking to mine asteroids for minerals, for which endeavor I'm very happy to warrant that E(r) = 0
Similarly, and pardon me for going technical, I really don't think that Wealth / GDP necessarily equals s / g (the saving rate divided by the growth rate) because savings can disappear if they are misinvested. What's China going to have to show for all the misinvestment going over there at the moment in ghost cities, for example? Sure, we can mark our wealth to market, but ultimately we need to be able to convert it to spending. The value of Klimts and Basquiats and Ferrari 250s is proof, if any was needed, that the super-wealthy are struggling to find something to do with their superwealth that you and I would truly covet.
Just because investment is not worthwhile if r is not much higher than g it does not mean that r must be higher than g, is my point.
More fundamentally, and Piketty himself makes this point very eloquently, some 200 years ago you needed the income to pay for the 30 servants who'd get you the fresh fruit and freshly hunted meat and fresh clothes and groomed horses if you wanted to live long, have the spare time to read and write books etc. These days, you can be in the bottom 50% of the population and enjoy all of the above (assuming a Ford Focus will do in lieu of a stable of horses), as well as decent free healthcare and education in this very bastion of inequality (according to Piketty) that is the United Kingdom. In Piketty's words, we've gone through a "tenfold increase in purchasing power." Of course there's room for improvement, but we're doing Rawls proud here.
So I remain to be convinced we need to tax capital. By all means, tax income that comes from capital, and a nice first step would be to tax it at the same marginal rate as income from labor. But to tax capital in a world that is already rather reluctant to deploy capital does not sound to me like an automatic choice. And Piketty does not offer a single word to explain what the non-bureaucratic benefits would be, beyond the re-distribution of wealth, which to me cannot be an end in itself.
Regardless, this is an UNBELIEVABLY important book. If I had not read it I would not know where to start in terms of disagreeing with its author, let's put it that way.
What we have here is as impressive a compendium of research as has ever been published by an economist. Call it Friedman and Schwartz for wealth / capital, except much better researched. The value is not in the narrative, but more than anything else in the years and years of research that went into collecting, comparing, cleaning, tabulating and interpreting data. This book is now the inevitable starting point for any discussion on the topic of wealth / capital. It is, pardon my French, a tour de force.
Finally, I thought the style of the book was totally disarming. Piketty has his views, for sure, but he never dares comingle fact and opinion, not once in 577 pages. Oh, and he sounds like a bit of a player. Never seen so many women in the acknowledgments of an Economics book.
Six stars are not enough for this book, five are downright miserly, but that's all I'm allowed to give!
The remedy suggested by the author - and readily acknowledged by him in the book as extremely difficult in an era of globalization - is redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation of the very rich.
A distillate of what I judge is the essence of the book follows:
Presently - and not only presently - there is a staggering and increasing wealth inequality in the developed world while the incomes of the large majority have stagnated.
The reason is that capital - and the wealth it generates - tends to accumulate faster than the rate of economic growth in capitalist societies. Additionally wealth not only tends to accumulate, but to become more and more concentrated at the top. To obtain an idea of the dizzying concentration of wealth at the top suffice it to cite that the capital ownership in USA presently for the top 10% stands at 70% while at the top 1% at nearly 35% while in Britain and France the corresponding figures are not substantially different.
The natural tendency of capital to accumulate and to become ever more concentrated largely explains the high degree of inequality that was witnessed in the developed world in the early part of the twentieth century. This inequality was largely reduced in the interwar years. The reason for this is that the major events of the first half of the twentieth century - the two world wars and the Great Depression - reduced capital's natural tendency to accumulate, and also destroyed large stocks of wealth. The end result was that by the time World War II was over, inequality in the developed world had reached an all-time low.
After the second world war, various political and economic measures - progressive taxation, rent control, increasing minimum wages, and expanded welfare programs - worked to redistribute this growing capital, thus preventing inequality from growing as quickly as it would become otherwise.
In the 1980s, though, the developed countries eliminated many of the measures that prevented inequality from rising according to its natural tendency. The consequence was that inequality reasserted itself in a major way, such that is nearly as extreme to-day as it was on the run up to the Great Depression. The historical evidence indicates that capital will likely continue to accumulate and become ever more concentrated, such that we will witness an even greater inequality in the future.
The author believes that the best and fairest solution to these problems would be progressive taxation applied to the wealthiest individuals. The author recognizes that in a world of financial globalization - where there is a high degree of competition for capital - it is extremely difficult to apply the appropriate tax scheme without the cooperation and coordinated effort of the international community - and this is hard to achieve.
The alternative is less savoring that is reverting to protectionism and nationalism and possibly social explosion.
Top reviews from other countries
However, the first 100, pages may be a bain to start. Keep at it and you will find the journey rewarding in the end.
Let me iterate this is not a casual reading book ... it is a serious study of the world's inequality and being quite voluminous requires significant ability to concentrate and maintain focus ...You also would need to have some understanding of basic economics to appreciate the work. Piketty, uses a lots of technical terms and rightly so perhaps, which refer to economics principles of demand and supply, r & g (rate of growth of capital vs growth of economy) at al, and lots of tables and charts. This is in that sense not a beginner's book. It's a book by an economist for economist. So don't be ashamed to skip sections of the book which are above you pay grade. There are a lot of interesting case studies, which buttress the central theme "Inequality and how money makes more money".
His proposal for Global Tax on Capital (as he himself puts it) is quite "utopian" in its construct. However it's a start, because the alternative of high tariffs and capital control is an unsatisfactory substitute.
My only advice is to not read the book from cover to cover and pick chapters which interest you. The second half of the book is really interesting. There are some good case studies, like the Havard University's $30 billion endowment and how they manage it, which are quite fascinating to read.
So don't miss those fascinating parts. To conclude I would say, Piketty has done a great job of harnessing data over several decades, curated, analysed and build a compelling case of " rising capital inequality", however, the proposed solution is quite ambitious and needs to be further fleshed out in context of global politics. Enjoy!
Reviewed in India on 3 May 2019
However, the first 100, pages may be a bain to start. Keep at it and you will find the journey rewarding in the end.
Let me iterate this is not a casual reading book ... it is a serious study of the world's inequality and being quite voluminous requires significant ability to concentrate and maintain focus ...You also would need to have some understanding of basic economics to appreciate the work. Piketty, uses a lots of technical terms and rightly so perhaps, which refer to economics principles of demand and supply, r & g (rate of growth of capital vs growth of economy) at al, and lots of tables and charts. This is in that sense not a beginner's book. It's a book by an economist for economist. So don't be ashamed to skip sections of the book which are above you pay grade. There are a lot of interesting case studies, which buttress the central theme "Inequality and how money makes more money".
His proposal for Global Tax on Capital (as he himself puts it) is quite "utopian" in its construct. However it's a start, because the alternative of high tariffs and capital control is an unsatisfactory substitute.
My only advice is to not read the book from cover to cover and pick chapters which interest you. The second half of the book is really interesting. There are some good case studies, like the Havard University's $30 billion endowment and how they manage it, which are quite fascinating to read.
So don't miss those fascinating parts. To conclude I would say, Piketty has done a great job of harnessing data over several decades, curated, analysed and build a compelling case of " rising capital inequality", however, the proposed solution is quite ambitious and needs to be further fleshed out in context of global politics. Enjoy!
Particularly, it introduces two simple laws that shows how, independently from political decision-making and when observed to a proper time-scale of decades (not years), countries undergoes same centralisation of wealth pattern.
It is interesting because also it does not inquire on centralisation of wealth respect to salaries, but to centralisation of wealth respect to return of capital invested, that explains, simply spoken, the asymmetries of "relative poverty" respect to entrepreneurial landscape, not only "labour" landscape.
What I like is that the book pose a legit question, on accessing effect of current capitalism, without assuming ethical or unethical values afore - a book that transparently shows the fingerprint of global economy and yields material for then addressing a governance of economy and seriously reflecting over risks of too much asymmetric societies, with historical examples.
A negative aspect I found it is the way it is written - it is not an easy reading book, sometimes a bit "boring" in explanations not because of the examples, but for the way the description is arranged. Maybe because the writer is not English native, nor me, and the English type is academic but hinder a fluent narrative.
However, because the topic is so amazing and the thesis so straightforward and powerful, I condone the linguistic challenge and give the information carried in this book a 5 stars!





