21/8/2014: Thomas Piketty: Powerful Questions, Questionable Answers
This is an unedited version of my article for the Village magazine, August-September 2014 Thomas Piketty's " Capital in the Twenty First Century " (Harvard University Press, 2014) has ignited both public and professional debates around economic theory of income and wealth distribution not seen since the days of the Interwar period a century ago when applied Marxism collided with the laissez faire economics. To give the credit due to the author and his book, this attention is deserved. Like Marx's opus, Pikkety's volume is sizeable enough to provoke an instantaneous submission of the readers to its perceived academic (meticulously factual and theoretically all-encompassing) virtues. Like "Das Kapital", "Capital in the Twenty First Century" is impenetrable to anyone unequipped with an advanced degree in political economy and understanding of economic theory. Like Marx's tome, Piketty's work is an attempted herald of a New Revolution; the...