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.