Capital And Ideology

"Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology surveys global inequality over the last few hundred years. Its first half is history backed up by inequality accounting. We’re taken through medieval Europe, slave and colonial societies, through Asia to reach the present, where the top 1% acquired 27% of global income growth between 1980 and 2018. Piketty’s later chapters describe policies and shifting political coalitions that could explain this rise in inequality. Charts show left-wing parties in the U.S. and Europe becoming parties for people with higher education and, increasingly, higher income. This reversal of postwar class coalitions, Piketty argues, is to blame."