Thomas Piketty Faces Trial by Peers

Thomas Piketty broke out of the pack of faceless economists in 2014 with an unlikely bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which argued that capitalism accentuates inequality. He was recently presented France’s highest award, the Légion d’honneur (though he promptly turned it down). This weekend, though, Piketty faces a trial conducted by some of the world’s top academic economists—his peers. And from the looks of it, they won’t be going easy. Presiding over the session is N. Gregory Mankiw, a conservative economist at Harvard University who was a chief economic adviser to President George W. Bush.