Thomas Piketty, professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and author of
Capital in the 21st Century (Harvard University Press, 2014), will deliver the keynote address at the joint meeting of the Business History Conference and the European
Business History Association, to be held in Miami, Florida, on June
24-27, 2015. His area of study is ideally suited to the theme of the meeting, which will be
“Inequalities: Winners and Losers in Business.” According to the publisher's blurb,
Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality—the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth—today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values.
Piketty's work has become the object of widespread commentary, some of which we have chronicled on
The Exchange. For further information about the BHC/EBHA 2015 meeting, please see the
meeting website.
