C.R. does a workman like job in his essay NIMBY’s in the twenty-first century of Piketty Bashing, briefly sharing the stage with other ‘Left Wing’ intellectual celebrities:  ‘… Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s leather-jacket wearing finance minister, Naomi Klein and Russell Brand…’  although in a more muted tone, with Mr.Matthew Rognlie acting as economic wunderkind, who challenges a portion of Piketty’s complex analysis of contemporary inequality. But please note this unsurprising last paragraph of C.R.’s essay:

Just how inconvenient Mr Rognlie’s argument is for Mr Piketty’s overarching narrative is a matter of perspective. The latter certainly did not make housing wealth the central theme of his bestselling book. But a story in which a privileged elite uses its political power (albeit through the planning system) to create economic rents for the few fits Mr Piketty’s argument to a tee. Well-off homeowners may for the moment be more responsible for rising wealth inequality than top-hatted capitalists or famous hedge-fund managers. But their NIMBYism is a very Piketty-like phenomenon.

Note the role reversal from the ‘… top-hatted capitalists or famous hedge-fund managers’,   characters straight out of the comics of several generations ago,  to ‘well-off  homeowners’ who now become the main protagonist/enemy in this episode of The Piketty Melodrama.

Almost Marx