a multiple coronation on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

On the left-hand side was a column entitled "The Piketty Phenomenon", by David Brooks, the paper's sensible-conservative-in-residence. Running down the right of the page was an Olympian blast from the Nobel prize-winning liberal economist Paul Krugman with the headline "The Piketty Panic", arguing that conservative economic doctrines that were ruining America had finally been put to the scientific sword.

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One way and another, there is simply no escape from the man, and in the process every national stereotype has been turned on its head. Where are all those "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"? Instead, Piketty is being hailed, by the left at least, as the Frenchman mostexpert on – and sympathetic to – the United States since Lafayette and De Tocqueville some two centuries ago. The potential impact of his work is being compared by admirers to Karl Marx's Das Kapital or John Maynard Keynes's General Theory.

The central thesis of Capital in the 21st Century is that, left to its own devices, the capitalist system will increase the gap between rich and poor, as it always has done. Since the dawn of the industrial era, in countries such as Britain, France and the US, the return on investment and capital has been greater than the return on labour. According to Piketty, the mid-20th century, when these trends reversed, was an aberration, as two world wars and the Great Depression destroyed many great fortunes, and