[sake]

Piketty also did good job in providing proof that the discourse Marx's capital started is still relevant today: wealth keeps concentrating and that will undermine the whole premise of democracy.

“When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.” ― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

This outcome is probably clear to anyone who has been paying attention, but the power of Piketty's book is in the way it lays out mathematical proof using pile of historical data as evidence.

The response to Piketty's book from ideological opposition have ranged from "So what?" to more valid attempts at asking theoretical questions about the validity of r > g, but nothing exactly that comes close to debunking the core thesis.

[coldtea]

It's difficult to get people to appreciate Piketty's book when their jobs depend on not appreciating it...