Piketty also published analyses of historical trends in income and wealth inequality across most developed countries, a project undertaken with several prominent international collaborators, including the distinguished British economist Professor Anthony Atkinson. Their finding that since the mid-1970s the “one percent” in the United States had received an ever-growing share of the national income was seized on by academics and commentators - and later provided the basis for the political slogans of the Occupy movement.

Piketty first came to prominence with his collaborator Professor Emmanuel Saez during the mid-2000s when they published several carefully researched studies of income inequality in the United States.

Meanwhile, the response to the crisis in Europe has suggested that Brussels now operates as an arm of finance capital and that monetary union is more likely to prove the undertaker of European social democracy than its savior. FEC, which subsequent judgments have further entrenched. In 2010, the United States Supreme Court sealed the union of corporate money and politics in Citizens United v. The seemingly plutocratic response to the crisis has become the focus of angry attacks by protesters on both left and right, but their criticisms have had little practical effect, even while subsequent events have confirmed their fears.

The reading public’s appetite for his economic treatise seems motivated by a growing unease about economic inequality and an anxiety that the “Great Recession,” which followed the financial crisis of 2008, defines a new economic normal. The past year has seen the surprising ascent of French economist Thomas Piketty to “rock star” status.

Thomas piketty capitalism