The Piketty Phenomenon: New Zealand Perspectives

Description

Few books have had the global impact of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. An overnight bestseller, Piketty's assessment that inherited wealth will always grow faster, on average, than earned wealth has energised debate. Hailed as 'bigger than Marx' (The Economist) or dismissed as 'medieval' (Wall Street Journal), the book is widely acknowledged as having significant economic and political implications.Collected in this BWB Text are responses to this phenomenon from a diverse range of New Zealand economists and commentators. These voices speak independently to the relevance of Piketty's conclusions. Is New Zealand faced with a one-way future of rising inequality? Does redistribution need to focus more on wealth, rather than just income? Was the post-war Great Convergence merely an aberration and is our society doomed to regress into a new Gilded Age?

Geoff Bertram - Research Associate, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of WellingtonSimon Chapple - Senior Research Fellow in the Dunedin Multi-disciplinary Health and Development Research Unit, University of OtagoDonal Curtin - Economics consultant and bloggerBrian Easton - Independent scholarMax Harris - Rhodes Scholar, University of OxfordTim Hazledine - Professor of Economics, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of AucklandBernard Hickey - Financial journalist and editorPrue Hyman - former Associate Professor of Economics and Gender and Women's Studies at Victoria University of WellingtonHautahi Kingi - Ph.D. student, Department of Economics, Cornell UniversityGareth Morgan - Businessman, economist and philanthropistMatt Nolan - Economist and Ph.D. student, School of Economics and Finance, Victoria University of WellingtonMax Rashbrooke - Freelance journalist and writerSusan St John - Associate Professor, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Auckland and economics spokesperson for the Child Poverty Action GroupRobert Wade - Professor of Political Economy at the London School of EconomicsCathy Wylie - Chief Researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research