A century of growing inequality, as the gap rapidly widens between those who have assets and those who don’t: that’s the grim prediction of French economist Thomas Piketty, whose new work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is being hailed as this decade’s key economics tome. In the recent debates about inequality, wealth has often been…

Thomas Piketty’s new book ‘Capital in the Twenty First Century’ has been making waves overseas: it’s number one on Amazon, and has been lauded as a book that will transform how we think about society and do economics – by Paul Krugman, no less. So far, there’s not been much attention on how it will…

Income inequality isn’t the real issue: what matters is social mobility, the ability that people have to move out of poverty. That, at least, is the line that some commentators are taking in response to the irrefutable evidence of widening income gaps, both here in New Zealand and elsewhere. The most fundamental problem with this…