Lawrence Summers has written an excellent article on the current economics rock star Picketty. http://www.democracyjournal.org/33/the-inequality-puzzle.php?page=all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty The Frenchman earned his PhD when he was 22 and became a professor at MIT at 22. He now heads an institute he spurred in France. Picketty probably will get Nobel Prize for his monumental work in wealth inequality studies. I haven't yet read his 700-page highly acclaimed recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century . Lawrence says " His argument is that capital or wealth grows at the rate of return to capital, a rate that normally exceeds the economic growth rate. Thus, economies will tend to have ever-increasing ratios of wealth to income, barring huge disturbances like wars and depressions. Since wealth is highly concentrated, it follows that inequality will tend to increase without bound until a policy change is introduced or some kind of catastrophe inte