Inequality after Piketty

This chapter provides a detailed, critical but generally very favourable account of the two huge and extremely impressive books on inequality by Thomas Piketty. It begins with a discussion of the literature on wage-led growth and on the causes and macroeconomic consequences of wage theft. The two following sections deal with Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2014) and his Capital and Ideology (2020), noting the very significant changes in his theoretical and policy thinking that are evident in the later book, which culminates in a new and very convincing commitment to participatory socialism. I think that Piketty is correct in his conclusion that capitalism is no longer capable of significant reform, but he continues to say very little about the ethical questions raised by growing inequality, and so I conclude by assessing the analysis of ethical questions provided by Michael Schneider’s Distribution of Wealth (Schneider ,2004; Schneider, Pottenger and King, 2016), which complements Piketty’s outstanding work on this vital issue.