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"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" is a book by French economist Thomas Piketty. It focuses on wealth and income inequality in Europe and the US since the 18th century. It was initially published in French in 2013, with an English translation released in April 2014. The central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability. Piketty proposes a global system of progressive wealth taxes to help reduce inequality and avoid the vast majority of wealth coming under the control of a tiny minority.
The French version of the book has sold over 50,000 copies while the English version as of 24 April 2014 has sold approximately 80,000 printed copies and over 13,000 digital copies; Harvard University Press expects to sell an additional 200,000 copies. The book reached number one on The New York Times bestselling hardcover nonfiction list in the list dated May 18, 2014.

“The distribution of wealth is one of today’s most widely discussed and controversial issues. But what do we really know about its evolution over the long term? Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later stages of development to reduced inequality and greater harmony among the classes, as Simon Kuznets thought in the twentieth century? What do we really know about how wealth and income have evolved since the eighteenth century, and what lessons can we derive from that knowledge for the century now under way?
These are the questions I attempt to answer in this book.”
-- From the Introduction to Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty ( born May 7, 1971) is a French economist who works on wealth and income inequality. He is professor (directeur d'études) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and professor at the Paris School of Economics. He is the author of the best selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013),^[ which emphasizes 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. To address this problem, he proposes redistribution through a global tax on wealth.

Личен сайт: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en