'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' by Thomas Piketty, reviewed | The New Republic

'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' by Thomas Piketty, reviewed | The New Republic: If already existing agglomerations of wealth tend to grow faster than incomes from work, it is likely that the role of inherited wealth in society will increase relative to that of recently earned and therefore more merit-based fortunes. Needless to say, the fact that the aggregate of wage incomes grows only at a relatively slow rate does not exclude the possibility that outstandingly successful innovators, managers, entrepreneurs, entertainers, and others can accumulate large amounts of wealth in a lifetime and join the ranks of the rentiers. But a slower rate of growth certainly makes such success stories less likely. There will be more to say about this. Yet the arithmetic suggests that the concentration of wealth and its ability to grow will favor an increasing weight of inheritance as compared with talent.