In Balzac’s novel Le père Goriot (1834-35), the impoverished young nobleman Rastignac is confronted with a dilemma by the cynical convict Vautrin: should he work and study hard to become a lawyer, only to earn a mediocre income, or should he seduce an eligible heiress and lay his hands on an inheritance sufficient to pay him an income worth ten times as much? Rastignac mulls the path of seduction until he is asked to bump off a brother who stands inconveniently between the heiress and her fortune. Murder is a step too far, even for a social climber.
Rastignac’s dilemma is one of the literary vignettes that enliven the most remarkable work of economics in recent years, if not decades: the French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. It was first published last year in France, and its appearance in English this spring (Belknap/Harvard, £29.95) has caused an intellectual sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. It has been called “one of the watershed books in economic thinking”, a “magisterial treatise on capitalism’s inherent dynamics” and a “bold attempt to pick up where Marx left off and correct what he got wrong”. The American Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman has described it as “epic”, with a “sweeping vision”, while Jacob Hacker – the Yale political scientist credited with coining the term “predistribution” – has compared Piketty to de Tocqueville.
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