It is not uncommon nowadays (except

It is not uncommon nowadays (except within the academic heartlands of ‘mainstream’ economics) to find one or other of these components in place. It remains depressingly rare to find both. The pressing socio-political crisis manifested and then intensified by the financial crisis has, however, at least pushed closer to the forefront of the public imagination the nature and consequences of extreme inequality. Two symptoms of this have been the Occupy movement and the growing public attention paid to the excoriating critique of inequality undertaken by Richard Wilkinson and his colleagues. A third has appeared more recently: the improbable success of Thomas Piketty’s widely discussed and celebrated Capital in the Twenty-first Century, published in French in 2013 and translated into English in 2014.