Indeed, it sounds very interesting. His point that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the distribution of income and/or wealth - it's a policy choice - is encouraging (unless you're in the 1%). I'm going to get the book.
Piketty is in Prospect's list of 50 top world thinkers this year. Along with several other French economists, including Esther Duflo. (Christine Lagarde is also classed as an economist, but I think she is a lawyer).
Here's an article by Edward Luce from yesterday's FT on inequality and democracy (for the 1%!):
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c8fe32c2-b5cb-11e3-a1bd-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=uk#axzz2xX7Y7STF'Is inequality bad for US democracy? Not according to the US Supreme Court. In the next few weeks America’s apex court is likely to remove what remains of post-Watergate limits on campaign finance.
In 2010 it did away with the biggest restriction by giving corporations the same rights to free speech as people. Now it looks set to scrap ceilings on what individuals can give to candidates and parties. In a less unequal society, the downside would be limited. But in an economy where the top 1 per cent of the population owns more than a third of national wealth, it corrodes the republic from which such riches sprung. People fret about America’s 1 per cent economy. They should worry more about its 1 per cent democracy.'Here's an article from the Guardian referring to IMF research suggesting that inequality can be a drag on growth.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/feb/26/imf-inequality-economic-growthAttached is the IMF paper. It is rather more measured than the Guardian article might indicate, suggesting that even if inequality is negatively correlated with growth, it does not necessarily follow that redistribution will be good for growth. It depends on the policy mix. These are the main findings:
First, more unequal societies tend to redistribute more. It is thus important in understanding the growth-inequality relationship to distinguish between market and net inequality.
Second, lower net inequality is robustly correlated with faster and more durable growth, for a given level of redistribution. These results are highly supportive of our earlier work.
And third, redistribution appears generally benign in terms of its impact on growth; only in extreme cases is there some evidence that it may have direct negative effects on growth.
Thus the combined direct and indirect effects of redistribution—including the growth effects of the resulting lower inequality—are on average pro-growth.
While we should be cognizant of the inherent limitations of the data set and of cross-country regression analysis more generally, we should be careful not to assume that there is a big tradeoff between redistribution and growth. The best available macroeconomic data do not support that conclusion.
