The job of holding up a mirror to the world can be a frustrating one. When the news is persistently bad, when the mirror highlights more wrinkles than we want to face up to, it is easy enough to find excuses— we are about to turn the corner, there is no other way to go, efficiency demands this, think of all the other good things that are happening, and the evergreen favorite, the data is wrong.
Chasing down each of these narratives and slaying them takes stubbornness and hard work. Over the last twenty-five years, Thomas Piketty has been leading this fight, first by himself, then with Emmanuel Saez, Facundo Alvaredo, and the late Sir Tony Atkinson and, increasingly, with a growing team of collaborators, culminating in the World Inequality Lab.
