The three faces of Thomas Piketty

Reflections on a No.1 bestseller.

I have read Thomas Piketty’s acclaimed book three times and my reaction has been different each time, due in part to the various times and places of my reading. The first reading was on my Kindle on a plane trip to Johannesburg and my reaction was positive. The mania driving the Piketty ‘bubble’ was nearing its peak and I, like so many others, was captured by Piketty’s persuasive rhetoric. The second reading was on the return trip to Australia some two weeks later. That time my reaction was negative. Having just spent two weeks in a country with one of the most unequal income distributions in the world it occurred to me that the author of this wealthy nation-centric book had absolutely no understanding of poornation poverty, in particular, or global inequality more generally. The third reading was at a more leisurely pace at my desk in Canberra. This time I was armed with a hard copy of his book, internet access to the online appendices on Piketty’s website and some of the reviews of his book. By now the ‘bubble’ had burst. Early rave reviews by Nobel Prize-winning economists were now replaced with tales of ‘fundamental errors’ in his statistical data and logical flaws in his theoretical argument. As the voices of these inequality deniers began to reach full volume I realised that it was time for me to take a more dispassionate approach to the book. Perhaps there was something that this book has to teach anthropologists about the principles that govern the distribution of income among the top 1%, and the next 9%, in rich countries?