10 years on, Thomas Piketty’s magnum opus is just as prescient — especially in Australia

A decade ago this month, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was released in English (a few months after the French version). It would go on to sell more than 2 million copies, becoming the most popular economics book of its eponymous century so far.

Piketty argued that rising inequality was an intractable feature of capitalism. His famous equation r>g summarised reams of data showing the returns derived by capital owners — think rents enjoyed by landlords, dividends paid out to shareholders — are usually greater than overall economic growth, unless the latter is especially high.