A New Zealand perspective on Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty first Century’

Abstract

During much of the second half of the 20th century the disappearance of distributional questions from the mainstream economic literature created little disquiet, because the experience of the period seemed consistent with the notion that market economies could combine growth and reasonable equality, without needing anything more than the normatively-driven apparatus of the welfare state to redistribute income at the margin in favour of the less fortunate. But now political economy is back. Thomas Piketty (2014) has breathed new life into the proposition that capitalism shares with other economic systems an inherent tendency for wealth and power to become concentrated in the hands of a narrow elite, and for the resulting inequality to become entrenched through inheritance.