Share the wealth.

• Author: Thomson, James W.
• Position: National Affairs

A SPECTER is sweeping through capitalist societies not long after it was thought that the belief in the self-destructive nature of capitalism, as prophesied by Karl Marx and other doomsayers, had been buried along with the Berlin Wall and the remains of the Soviet Union. Who is this person whose writings have created such unease on Wall Street and other corridors of wealth in the capitalist world? It is the soft-spoken French economist Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century is raising hackles around the world.

The wealthy are right to be alarmed because this French intellectual--who arguably is the world's foremost authority on economic inequality--has called for higher taxes on both their income and wealth. Following the astonishing publishing success of Capital, Piketty has become a celebrity "rock star" economist--a former prodigy who rose quickly through the elite French university system, earned a Ph.D. in Economics at age 22 from the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and then accepted a faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Piketty could have remained at MIT and churned out numerous mind-numbing mathematically oriented treatises, as most of his colleagues have done, in order to climb the academic success ladder, but he had set very different goals for himself. Piketty admired French academics such as Fernand Braudel, the historian whose empirical research methods had revolutionized the study of social sciences for European scholars. This young Frenchman's ambition, as he noted in his curt dismissal of the efforts of many American economists, was to investigate real world economic issues rather than settle for the "petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves."

In his Introduction to Capital, Piketty expresses his disenchantment with academic economics: 'The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences." Piketty stated that this obsession with mathematics offers only the pretense of scientific work while neglecting the more complex issues that real life provides.

Piketty is a Frenchman to be sure, but he deftly has distanced himself from the anti-capitalist and -American attitudes that have characterized so many French intellectuals. Piketty regards the anti-capitalism of the left as laziness, and has pointed out errors made by Karl Marx in Das Kapital while drawing parallels between Marx's work, which was not completed, and his own 700-page text, which includes 75 pages of footnotes, but not his technical...