A little less than two centuries later, Piketty is tempted to reformulate the declaration as follows: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of the struggle of ideologies and the quest for justice. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” wrote famously Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848. So, get ready to learn why inequality is not a natural economic phenomenon, and prepare to discover how political elites have tried to naturalize it throughout history so they could benefit from it. The book offers “an economic, social, intellectual, and political history of inequality regimes, that is, a history of the systems by which inequality is justified and structured.” “In large part a sequel to ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century,’” Piketty’s equally monumental “Capital and Ideology” weighs in at about 1,100 pages and picks up where its predecessor left off. For this book is less a work of economic analysis than a bizarre ideological screed.In 2013, the French economist Thomas Piketty released “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” a 700-page doorstopper that made him an academic “rock star.” Immensely researched and widely praised, the book piled graph upon graph to demonstrate that capitalism inexorably increases inequality and that – unless the trend is checked by a welfarist government – social instability may be the inevitable outcome of this seemingly innocuous tendency. Piketty's data-and there are reasons for skepticism, given the author's own caveats and the fact that many early statistics are based on extremely limited samples of estate tax records and dubious extrapolation-is ultimately of little consequence. He presents a blizzard of data about income distribution in many countries, claiming to show that inequality has widened dramatically in recent decades and will soon get dangerously worse. Piketty's dense exploration of the history of wages and wealth over the past three centuries. 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' is Mr.

The way to do this is to eliminate high incomes and to reduce existing wealth through taxation. There is, he thinks, a moral illegitimacy to virtually any accumulation of wealth, and it is a matter of justice that such inequality be eradicated in our economy. But he does not like how it allocates income. Thomas Piketty likes capitalism because it efficiently allocates resources.

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