Indeed for some, not having read it was a badge of pride. Say what you like about the theory, the argument went, you had to thank him for the numbers.Īt this point you didn't need to read it to have an opinion about it. But at first even they heaped praise on Thomas Piketty for casting fresh light on inequality – an area where the official statistics are notoriously weak. Writing a bestselling economics book is usually a good way to make other economists hate you. This was the "Piketty as rockstar" phase, when the book was an "improbable hit" and people wrote breathless articles about the modern successor to Marx who could crunch the numbers but also quote Balzac, The Simpsons and The West Wing. We hadn't had anything like that in ages. At first it was important because it was a big book on a big subject: a book of grand ambition about inequality, written not by the latest "thinker" but a respected academic economist with real numbers to go with his theory. But the reasons for its importance have changed in the months since it was published.
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