[url=http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/12/capitalism-isnt-working-thomas-piketty]Guardian article on a new and slightly controversial book from French economist Thomas Piketty.[/url] [quote]...Piketty is in no doubt, as he indicates in an interview in today's Observer New Review, that the current level of rising wealth inequality, set to grow still further, now imperils the very future of capitalism. He has proved it. It is a startling thesis and one extraordinarily unwelcome to those who think capitalism and inequality need each other. Capitalism requires inequality of wealth, runs this right-of-centre argument, to stimulate risk-taking and effort; governments trying to stem it with taxes on wealth, capital, inheritance and property kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Thus Messrs Cameron and Osborne faithfully champion lower inheritance taxes, refuse to reshape the council tax and boast about the business-friendly low capital gains and corporation tax regime. Piketty deploys 200 years of data to prove them wrong. Capital, he argues, is blind. Once its returns – investing in anything from buy-to-let property to a new car factory – exceed the real growth of wages and output, as historically they always have done (excepting a few periods such as 1910 to 1950), then inevitably the stock of capital will rise disproportionately faster within the overall pattern of output. Wealth inequality rises exponentially.[/quote] [url=http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X]Capital in the Twenty-First Century[/url] is pretty much on fire right now and has brought its author into the limelight. Thomas Piketty, from the Paris School of Economics, has analyzed hundreds of years of data and come to the conclusion that massive wealth inequality is very detrimental and very inevitable in our current, capitalist structures. [url=http://www.vox.com/2014/4/8/5592198/the-short-guide-to-capital-in-the-21st-century]Here is a quick guide to the book and Piketty's arguments.[/url] [url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/]Unsurprisingly, the most thorough review of the book comes from a certain left-leaning economist.[/url]