Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the 21st century" has become an international best-seller, unusual for a treatise on economics. Dr Geoff Bertram summarises it as follows - The economic logic of a capitalist market system with private wealth plus inheritance leads to a highly unequal, but stable, social order with a patrimonial rentier class at the top. Whether this social order is compatible with democracy depends on what a democratic society is prepared to tolerate. If the capitalist distributional equilibrium does not lie within the boundaries of democratic tolerance, one or the other has to give. Geoff will expand on this summary and explain why he thinks the work will earn Piketty a Nobel Prize. 

6:30pm, Monday 1 September, University of Auckland.