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A New York Times #1 Bestseller
An Amazon #1 Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Sunday Times Bestseller
Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the British Academy Medal
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award


"It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year-and maybe of the decade."
-Paul Krugman, New York Times

"The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat."
-The Economist

"Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years."
-Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post

"Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book...In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy."
-Martin Wolf, Financial Times

"A sweeping account of rising inequality...Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore."
-John Cassidy, New Yorker

"Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years."
-Timothy Shenk, The Nation Piketty's book has been a smash because many people are worried about the slow rate of growth in the developed economies since the financial crisis. Many are also worried about rising inequality. Capital seems to offer an elegant way to explain both...He deserves huge credit for illuminating the distribution of income and wealth. -- Stephanie Flanders * The Guardian * Piketty's great achievement, and one possible reason for the enthusiastic reception of his book, is his effective empirical demonstration of a fact long denied by neoclassical economics and its champions throughout the world: markets, when left to their own devices, do not provide individuals with rewards that are proportional to their efforts and contributions towards producing goods and services, nor do they ensure the most optimal distribution of those goods and services. Instead, they tend to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, giving rise to what Piketty calls a system of 'patrimonial' capitalism in which a few major players derive disproportionate benefit simply by virtue of possessing high amounts of capital... As a work of economic history, and a source of data, it effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality, reward effort and innovation, and deliver the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people. At a point in time where slogans about the 1 per cent vs the 99pc abound, this book provides conclusive evidence in support of the idea that the modern-world economy is one that is inherently unjust and exploitative. -- Hassan Javid * Dawn * [A] seminal work on capitalism. -- Madan Sabnavis * Financial Express * Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century is arguably the most important popular economics book in recent memory. It will take its place among other classics in the field that have survived changing theoretical and political fashions, such as its namesake by Karl Marx (Das Kapital, 1867) or other ambitiously titled books such as John Maynard Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion about the economic landscape will have to read Piketty. -- Kate Bahn * Women's Review of Books * Belief in markets may be crumbling but as platoons of mercenaries, lawyers, accountants and management consultants continue to plunder the world's resources on behalf of unaccountable corporations, the tipping point has not yet been reached. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows how privateers use privatization, debt creation and capital inflation as a mechanism for rent extraction, with catastrophic consequences for public services. -- Allyson Pollock * Times Higher Education * Monumental...Translated beautifully by Arthur Goldhammer, [Capital in the Twenty-First Century]...smashed into the intellectual world with incredible force...But beyond the media phenomenon, how much substance was there? The answer is: a considerable amount. The book is important, first and foremost, because it brings together a vast trove of research by Piketty and others on the evolution of income and wealth over two centuries. One also has to admire the way Piketty marshals the data to create a sweeping historical narrative, in a style reminiscent of the great thinkers of the 19th century. -- Ben Chu * The Independent * The fundamental theme on the differences between returns to capital and returns to labor is one that Piketty has brought, quite properly, to the center of policy discussions. -- Stephen L. Carter * Bloomberg View * Marx believed that free markets produce inequality, social division and violence. Piketty appears to side with Marx, but this is deceptive. When Piketty talks about 'capital,' he means the kind of investments held by today's leisured rentier class whose money is tied up in property and pensions. Piketty argues that a free market overloaded with this kind of capital may or may not lead to anger and alienation, but it will certainly act like lumpy blockages in the smooth running of the economy. Piketty only wants the economy to work better. -- Nicholas Blincoe * The Telegraph * The year's most popular and controversial book. -- Roland White * Sunday Times * This book is the key to understanding how the automatic accumulation and concentration of wealth poses a threat to the peaceful economies in which entrepreneurs prosper. -- Geoffrey James * Inc. * This was the blockbuster success of 2014 and was named the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. Despite the controversies surrounding it, the book throws much light upon one of the most important questions in economics: what determines the distribution of income and wealth. With an abundance of data and some simple and powerful theories, Piketty has made an immensely important contribution to the public debate. -- Martin Wolf * Financial Times * Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics. -- Paul Mason * The Observer * The best business book on economics of the year. -- Daniel Gross * strategy+business * Very readable and often slyly witty...Piketty does economics in a new way; or more accurately, he returns to an older way. He still uses formal economic theory but regards economics as a sub-discipline of social science, alongside history, sociology, anthropology and political science and prefers to characterize his work as political economy rather than economic science. Piketty draws wonderfully upon the novels of Jane Austen and Honore de Balzac to portray the gross inequality of 19th-century societies. He argues that the degree of inequality is not just the product of economic forces; it is also the product of politics, including the tax, expenditure and regulatory decisions of government, and the discourse of justification of inequality...Piketty starts in the 19th century and examines the three eras. He wants to understand the longue dure e of capitalism, as did the pioneers of political economy such as Malthus, Ricardo and Marx. And like them, he places the distributional question--the distribution of pre-tax income and the distribution of wealth--at the heart of economic analysis. This approach, which is both empirical and historical, is much needed if we are to understand income inequality and more generally to understand how capitalist economies operate. The ahistorical perspective of he

Capital in the Twenty-First Century