Austen, Balzac and the “dismal science”

I’m about halfway through a light summer read—French economist Thomas Piketty’sCapital in the Twenty-FirstCentury, which so far has been thoroughly accessible and engaging.

Piketty’s surprise bestseller, which in 577 heavily footnoted pages analyzes centuries of data, is an important new assessment of economic growth, capital formation, wealth and income distribution. As you might expect for a book with a nod to Karl Marx’sDas Kapital in its title, the bookhas been praised by liberals and atta...