The Most Important Book Ever Is All Wrong

It's hard to think of another book on economics published in the past several decades that's been praised as lavishly as Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." The adulation tells you something, though not mainly about the book's qualities. Its defects, in my view, are greater than its strengths -- but the rapturous reception proves that the book, one way or another, meets a need.

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times calls it "extraordinarily important." Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Review of Books, says it's "truly superb" and "awesome." Branko Milanovic, a noted authority on global income disparities, calls it "one of the watershed books in economic thinking." Even John Cassidy, in a relatively balanced appraisal for the New Yorker, says "Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore."