In this episode of pplpod, we profile Thomas Piketty, the influential French economist and professor at the Paris School of Economics and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. We dive into the massive success of his 2013 bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which utilized 250 years of economic data to argue that the rate of return on capital persistently outpaces economic growth.

We explore Piketty’s warning about the rise of "patrimonial capitalism," a system where a few families control the majority of wealth, and his proposed solution: a progressive global tax on wealth. Beyond the numbers, we look at Piketty’s political analysis, including his concept of the "Brahmin Left"—the idea that left-wing parties have become dominated by highly educated elites while losing working-class voters.

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