Has Thomas Piketty met his match?

I feel a certain disappointment with myself at the moment. On the big question of the day, ‘How worried should we be about inequality?’, I find myself miserably unable to give a simple answer. In the last few months, I’ve had a chance to speak to two notable economists on the topic, representing opposite extremes of the argument — both arguing their case so well that I can’t disagree with either.

On one side of the debate, I got to interview the man of the moment, Thomas Piketty, author of the much talked-about Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In fairness, it was not much an interview: it was something of a struggle for him to summarise his 669-page book in the five minutes we allotted to him on the Today programme (I let the interview overrun by a minute). But no one doubts that he has shaken and stirred the left into a new agitation over inequality this year.

Then, on the other side, I spent an evening with a woman who cares less about inequality than almost anyone I’ve met, the American economic historian Deirdre McCloskey (you can hear the interview on Radio 4’s Analysis at 8.30 p.m. on Monday). She is in the midst of writing a series of four books on what she calls the Bourgeois Era, the period following the 17th century that contained both the industrial revolution and a jump in incomes in western countries of at least 1,500 per cent.

It is a pity that we recorded the interview with Professor McCloskey just before Professor Piketty hit the bestseller charts, so I didn’t even think to ask her about him. It’s even more of a pity that we didn’t get them into the same room, because the contrast between the two couldn’t be greater. Piketty, the radical one, is dry.