Exclusive Montage: Outbreak! Piketty Contagion Affecting Media Nationwide!

Thomas Piketty: The French economist US liberals love (BBC)

If you want to mingle with the educated elite this weekend, you need to know a little bit about French economist Thomas Piketty and his surprise best-selling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Mr Piketty uses tax data from a variety of Western countries to tackle the question of income inequality in today's society. He focuses in particular on the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite few - the much-talked-about "one percent".

Here's how New York Times columnist Paul Krugman describes Mr Piketty's "big idea" in the New York Review of Books:

We haven't just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we're also on a path back to "patrimonial capitalism," in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.