How to end the billionaire raj? Thomas Piketty back with 1,200-page guide

The book is a sequel to 'Capital in the 21st Century,' which has sold more than 2.5 million copies in 40 languages since 2013, according to its publisher.

Thomas Piketty’s last blockbuster helped put inequality at the center of economic debates. Now he’s back with an even longer treatise that explains how governments should fix it –- by upending capitalism.

The French edition of “Capital and Ideology,’’ weighing in at 1,232 pages, comes out on Thursday (English speakers will have to wait till next year for a translation). It’s a sequel to “Capital in the 21st Century,’’ which has sold more than 2.5 million copies in 40 languages since 2013, according to its publisher.

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Nobody can be sure how many of that book’s buyers actually got through all 900-something pages. But its impact has been undeniable.

Six years on, there are more politicians pledging to redress the skewed distribution of income and wealth. (One of them, US presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, worked with two former Piketty aides to design a wealth-tax proposal.)

And it’s become common to hear inequality described as an urgent problem by billionaires like Warren Buffett and Ray Dalio.

All that suggests policy makers and investors would do well to acquaint themselves with Piketty’s latest thoughts -- which sound pretty radical.

Sacred property

“The time has come to exit this phase of making property sacred, to go beyond capitalism,’’ the economist told French magazine L’Obs.

Piketty says he’s improved as a writer. “If you read one of them, read this one,’’ he told L’Obs.

And he says his new book addresses two shortcomings of the last one, which was too focused on Western economies, and didn’t give enough space to the political ideologies that lie behind inequality.

“Capital and Ideology’’ ranges across time and geography, with analysis of colonial, slave-owning and communist economies, and references to India, China and Brazil.

“In this book I will try to convince the reader that the lessons of history can be leaned upon to define a more demanding norm of justice and equality,” he writes, in an extract from the new book published by Le Monde newspaper.