How Thomas Piketty found politics

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Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images A decade ago this April, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English with Harvard University Press. It would sell more than two million copies and become one of the most iconic books of our young millennium. The year after its publication, the term “inequality” made its first appearance on the website of the World Economic Forum, and has not moved since. References to inequality have now become a routine, almost reflexive part of political commentary. Whether Piketty was more cause or symptom seems less important than the question of what kind...