The Injustice of Inherited Wealth

HEN THOMAS PIKETTY PUBLISHED CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (2013) more than one review of the book pointed out that the very near future of extreme inequality he invoked was ‘Jane Austen all over again’. This was more than metaphor: Piketty repeatedly returns to the fictional world of Austen, explaining that novelists like her ‘grasped the hidden contours of wealth and its inevitable implications for the lives of men and women’; that they described the effects of inequality ‘with a verisimilitude and evocative power that no statistical or theoretical analysis can match’ (Piketty 2). It certainly was surprising that this dense magisterial tome of dry economic analysis would be published to such acclaim and become a best-seller; it was even more of a surprise that it would contain an abundance of references to popular culture and literature and in particular the 19th century novels of Henry James, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac and Leo Tolstoy.