A capital review …

… Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, review - Telegraph.

In essence, the principal weakness of the book is that the carefully assembled data do not live up to Piketty’s rhetoric about the nature of capitalism. Take, for example, his fascinating statistics on the changing shares of total wealth owned by the top one per cent of the population over the past 200 years in four countries: Britain, France, Sweden and the United States. Consider the history in France. At the beginning of the 19th century, the top one per cent owned about 50 per cent of total wealth – certainly extreme concentration. That proportion remained roughly constant until 1890. The share then rose to 60 per cent by 1910, but by 1920 this had been completely reversed by the destruction of the First World War. The share of the top one per cent then declined precipitously to around 20 per cent by 1970, from which point it has risen slightly. The result is that the share of the top one per cent is markedly lower today than 200 years ago.