The “Piketty Bubble” Is More Than Hot Air

When does an interesting intellectual development turn into a fad, devoid of any real content? In Thursday’s Financial Times, the columnist Robert Shrimsley presents an amusing taxonomy of what he calls “the Piketty bubble—a social and economic phenomenon that arises when everyone who considers themselves to be anybody feels the need to talk about a new book by French economist Thomas Piketty.”

As one of the first people to write a lengthy review of “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” as well as a quick guide, in charts, to the story, I may have played a small part in initiating the Piketty phenomenon, which has now extended well beyond what anybody, the author and his publisher included, could have expected. For weeks now, the dense, seven-hundred-page tome has been at or near the top of the Amazon best-seller list. At one point, as orders hugely exceeded the initial print run from Harvard University Press, it sold out online. The digital version was still available for download. But Shrimsley notes that the print copy is especially prized, “as even those who know they will never read it want it on their bookcase.”

...read more