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.

Keep Reading : Business Standard

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.

Explained: The rise of India's new billionaires and the fall of the old

A new breed of self-made entrepreneurs is vaulting into the ranks of the wealthy, offsetting billions lost by debt-burdened industrialists and members of the country's old dynasties.

India is going through one of the greatest periods of wealth creation -- and destruction -- all at the same time.

A new breed of self-made entrepreneurs is vaulting into the ranks of the wealthy, offsetting billions lost by debt-burdened industrialists and members of the country’s old dynasties. The changes are set to help India’s ultra-rich population grow at the world’s fastest pace.

It’s a shift shaped partly by a debt-fueled expansion that left businesses from power generation to airlines with $190 billion in soured loans.

Over the past few years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has cracked down on delinquent borrowers, and India’s banks moved to seize their assets, a dramatic change for a country where the wealthy once enjoyed almost complete protection.

While old business clans continue to dominate India’s rich lists, a tenfold expansion in its economy since its opening in the 1990s has spawned new tycoons in fields like technology.

The number of billionaires in India more than doubled to 119 between 2013 and 2018, according to Knight Frank. And the country will lead the global growth in ultrahigh net worth individuals, with its numbers rising 39 percent to 2,697 by 2023, the researcher estimates.

"The business environment has improved over the years," said Charles Dhanaraj, a professor at the Fox School of Business at Temple University in Philadelphia.

"The availability of venture capital and private equity has changed the opportunity space for promising businesses. So we should see more of these startups and scaleups in the coming years."

Business Standard