# Capital in the Twenty-First Century [[Thomas Piketty]]'s data-driven landmark on wealth concentration: two centuries of income and wealth records across twenty countries, distilled into one inequality engine — **r > g**. When the return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy (the historical norm), inherited wealth compounds faster than earned income, and society drifts toward patrimonial capitalism. Published in French in 2013 (Éditions du Seuil); the 2014 Goldhammer translation for Harvard became a global phenomenon. ## The Argument The egalitarian mid-twentieth century — the period American politics treats as normal — was the anomaly, produced by capital destruction (two wars, depression), confiscatory top tax rates, and exceptional growth. Absent those forces, the nineteenth-century pattern reasserts itself: dynastic fortunes, rentier elites, and a politics dominated by inherited capital. Piketty's remedy, a global progressive wealth tax, matters less for the vault than his diagnosis: rising inequality is the system working as built, not a malfunction. ## RWKB Relevance The empirical backbone under the vault's [[Plutocracy]]/[[Oligarchy]] and dynastic-wealth threads (Scaife-Mellon, Olin, Koch infrastructure are r > g case studies converting compounding capital into political power). Counter-canon to the free-market shelf's growth-lifts-all-boats premise.