Beyond 'Capital'

Unusually for such a large and varied collection, almost all the papers are worth reading

After Piketty

The Agenda for Economics and Inequality

Edited by Heather Boushey, J Bradford Delong & Marshall Steinbaum Routledge

Harvard University Press

678 pages; Rs 1,099

In the three eventful years since Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century — abbreviated in the book under review as C21 — was published, responses to his work have been of four kinds. There is, first, the rapturous: Suggesting that C21 has somehow broken the mould for economics, and forced it to concentrate on questions of inequality. Second, there is the dismayed: That C21 is path-breaking, but it has been ignored. Third, there is the outraged: That