Piketty Misreads Austen
Thomas Piketty’s best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) uses literary references to reinforce its main theme, and from the outset he says that nineteenth-century novels are helpful in understanding relative wealth in those times and ours. Together with Balzac’s work, he claims, “the novels of Jane Austen . . . paint striking portraits of the distribution of wealth in Britain . . .