‘Crisis of confidence will come back again and again,’ says Thomas Piketty

 Acclaimed French economist warns of risks if eurozone countries do not demonstrate that they want to stay together

By Xenia Kounalaki

He's treated like a rock star wherever he goes to lecture. His book "Capital in the 21st Century," a study on income and wealth inequality from the 18th century to the present, recently translated into Greek (Polis editions), has been compared to Karl Marx's "Das Capital" and Nobel Prize-winning American economist Paul Krugman has claimed that French economist Thomas Piketty has changed our economic discourse. "We'll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to," Krugman wrote in a rave review of the book. At the same time, Piketty's "Capital" drew scathing criticism, especially from the Financial Times. Chris Giles, the economics editor of the British paper, headed a campaign to deconstruct Piketty's work, identifying "unexplained errors" in the data he used to prove his thesis. Nonetheless a few months later the FT named "Capital in the 21st Century" the "2014 business book of the year."

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