Piketty’s Book and Macro Models of Wealth Inequality
Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is, in the author’s own words, a book about the history of the distribution of income and wealth. Among other interesting and important facts, the book quantifies the evolution of wealth inequality and wealth concentration over time and across a number of countries. Wealth is highly concentrated, and its distribution is skewed with a long right tail; a small number of very rich individuals hold a large share of total wealth in the economy.