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The income inequality hypothesis rejected?

2015; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 30; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s10654-015-0084-8

1573-7284

Mauricio Avendaño, Philipp Hessel,

Social Policy and Reform Studies

Publishers know academic books are not expected to sell much at all. Last year, however, Thomas Piketty's “Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century” [1] became the exception: by May 2014, this dense 700-page book arguing that inequality is not an accident but a structural feature of capitalism, was number one in the New York Times Bestsellers non-fiction list. While it may be unsurprising to find Dale Carnegie's ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ in the list of bestsellers, it is certainly unusual for a tome about income inequality to become such a sensation. And yet, Piketty's book clearly stroked a raw nerve with the public: if inequality continues to rise by the rate observed over recent decades, Piketty argues, we will soon reach higher levels of inequality than those observed in nineteenth century Europe. This is not only a problem in its own right, but such levels of inequality may jeopardize the future of democracy [1, 2].