Piketty's Plight and the Global Future

Book excerpt: Presents a revolutionary challenge to Thomas Piketty and others attempting to come to grips with the problem of income inequality. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty rightly takes contemporary economics to task for its preoccupation with “petty mathematical problems.” Yet despite his massive appeal to data, Piketty, like Galbraith, Mankiw, and others, is insufficiently radical to the extent that he remains trapped in muddled descriptive categories, haunted by flaws in selecting and ordering the significant data. This “is like a physicist searching data for traces of the Higgs particle without eyes laden with the standard model." McShane’s text provides an inviting glimpse of a fresh context, a new paradigm, a precise heuristic.