Monday Briefing: A Piketty Primer

A personal take on economics from Ian Stewart, Deloitte's Chief Economist in the UK.

• One of the surprise entries to the New York Times best seller list is a dense 700-page tome on economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Written by the French economist Thomas Piketty, it offers a sweeping critique of capitalism, which echoes the original Das Kapital, published by Karl Marx in 1867. Like Marx, Piketty foresees a crisis of capitalism driven by the competing interests of labour and capital.
• Piketty argues that capitalism has an inherent tendency to create greater inequality and backs up this view with an impressive array of data. The book has created a buzz among journalists, economists and policymakers, and, in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, his message seems to resonate with a wider public.