Piketty has long been engaged in a heroic and commendable attempt to bring history and economics into dialogue with each other, and to show how the result can address extremely urgent public policy problems, in particular, the rising inequality within countries and its implications for national political cohesion or solidarity. This volume follows Piketty’s monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), and it is even longer (and heavier). The earlier work had a simple message, buttressed by massive statistical work originally focused on France but then extended to a relatively few additional countries. It could be summed up in three characters—r>g. Because the rate of return on capital exceeded the long-run growth rate, capital’s share of income underwent a steady increase. Piketty did not invoke only statistics; he also made frequent references to literature, especially Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot (Paris, 1835).
The new...