Last month the Financial Times chose Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," a study of the underlying dynamics of inequality, as its Business Book of the Year.
The honor rather understates the book's impact. Forget "business book." "Capital" was the nonfiction publishing sensation of the year, and maybe of the decade or more. When has a work of its kind ever been so rapturously received?
Yet what a perplexing phenomenon this was. Now that the acclaim and the subsequent backlash have subsided, the Year of Piketty seems worth another moment's reflection.