Don't be fooled: America is still headed for an aristocratic dystopia

A National Review writer says he found a fatal flaw in Thomas Piketty's income inequality opus. He hasn't.

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One key difference between today and the Gilded Age is the extent to which income inequality is driven by wages. Back in those days, you needed a huge amount of wealth to attain a huge income, but today, having the right job can also do the trick.

Jim Manzi at The National Review thinks this deep-sixes Thomas Piketty's theory of economic history. He argues that Piketty's main thesis is that top managers have been gaming the compensation system, and therefore confiscatory taxes can be imposed on them without damaging the economy. When it comes to the U.S., the rest of the book, he says, "is just a sound and light show." Manzi then attacks every aspect of this reconstructed case to show that supermanagers are being unfairly maligned.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.