Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century: An Overview

Grantham George ()
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Grantham George: Department of Economics, McGill University, 24 Chemin Bates, Apt 201, Montreal, QC, Canada H2V 1A8

Basic Income Studies, 2015, vol. 10, issue 1, 7-28

Abstract: Thomas Piketty’s capitalism in the twenty-first century is arguably the most significant book in empirical economics since Simon Kuznets’s Modern Economic Growth (1966) and, on a theoretical plane, since Keynes’s General Theory (1936). Like Kuznets’s masterpiece, this massive report on long-term trends in shares of income and wealth in the top decile and centile percent of their distribution quantifies a crucial and until now underreported dimension of aggregate economic performance. Like Keynes’s, it raises fundamental questions about economics conceived as a science uniquely concerned with the allocation of scarce resources regardless of how the resources are distributed among individuals. Piketty’s study focuses on that distribution, and in particular the share of the 10% of individuals who currently own 50–60% of private wealth in western societies and take home 35–50% of the national income (Piketty, 2014, pp. 247–249). The findings are new.

Keywords: capital; twenty-first century; empirical economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1515/bis-2015-0019

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