The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class

by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

Thomas Piketty argues in his runaway 2014 hit Capital in the Twenty-first Century that the period of relative equality between World War I and the early 1970s was an anomalous period of capitalism. Using detailed data from countries around the world across a 200-year period, Piketty makes a compelling case that for the years between 1914 and 1973, a series of government policies and global crises flattened out the gap between rich and poor and prevented the rich from getting greater returns on capital. Piketty believes that the inequality that is so profound in the current day is actually inherent to capitalism’s basic structure, and that the six-decade stretch of greater income equality observed in the middle of the twentieth century is not to occur again.

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