Economics | Aotearoa New Zealand Non-Fiction

Few books have had the global impact of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. An overnight bestseller, Piketty's assessment that inherited wealth will always grow faster, on average, than earned wealth has energised debate. Hailed as 'bigger than Marx' (The Economist) or dismissed as 'medieval' (Wall Street Journal), the book is widely acknowledged as having significant economic and political implications.

Collected in this BWB Text are responses to this phenomenon from a diverse range of New Zealand economists and commentators. These voices speak independently to the relevance of Piketty's conclusions. Is New Zealand faced with a one-way future of rising inequality? Does redistribution need to focus more on wealth, rather than just income? Was the post-war Great Convergence merely an aberration and is our society doomed to regress into a new Gilded Age?

Author Biography: 
Geoff Bertram - Research Associate, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
Simon Chapple - Senior Research Fellow in the Dunedin Multi-disciplinary Health and Development Research Unit, University of Otago
Donal Curtin - Economics consultant and blogger
Brian Easton - Independent scholar
Max Harris - Rhodes Scholar, University of Oxford
Tim Hazledine - Professor of Economics, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Auckland
Bernard Hickey - Financial journalist and editor
Prue Hyman - former Associate Professor of Economics and Gender and Women's Studies at Victoria University of Wellington
Hautahi Kingi - Ph.D. student, Department of Economics, Cornell University
Gareth Morgan - Businessman, economist and philanthropist
Matt Nolan - Economist and Ph.D. student, School of Economics and Finance, Victoria University of Wellington
Max Rashbrooke - Freelance journalist and writer
Susan St John - Associate Professor, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Auckland and economics spokesperson for the Child Poverty Action Group
Robert Wade - Professor of Political Economy at the London School of Economics
Cathy Wylie - Chief Researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research