“Thomas Piketty is back – and more dangerous than ever,” declared Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph in September, when Capital and Ideology appeared in France. Already, the rightwing press has got in a lather about the book’s suggestion of a 90% rate of inheritance tax. With the arrival of the 1,000-page Capital and Ideology, the hype has returned.

Piketty is a brilliant and relentless anorak. Not only does he mine them from unlikely sources, such as 18th-century tax records and Burke’s Peerage, he is clearly fascinated by the mechanics of how data came to be collected in the first place. He is fixated on statistics, in particular on percentiles. In contrast to the suave rebellion of Yanis Varoufakis or the frat-boy know-alls of the Freakonomics franchise, Piketty comes across both on stage and in print as cautious and nerdish. There is nothing Marxist about Piketty’s politics, which are those of a liberal reformer, while his concept of capital is closer to an accounting category (a proxy for “wealth”) than the exploitative force that Marx saw it as.Īnd despite his unexpected celebrity, Piketty makes for an implausible rock star. Thomas Piketty’s 600-page, multi-million selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century won him both accolades, but both were wide of the mark. I t is a journalistic convention that any author who writes a doorstopper of a book with the word “capital” in the title must be the heir to Karl Marx, while any economist whose books sell in the hundreds of thousands is a “rock star”.

Capital ideology