The enthusiastic reception in the United States of Piketty's rigorous Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which answers the empirical spirit of the age with a welcome rush of statistics, may be a promising sign of renewal in the otherwise sedate intellectual pastures of the continent. To have made the word "redistribution" utterable again by mainstream economists is already a considerable achievement. Having offered an unignorable account of the history of inequality in capitalist democracies, Piketty believes he has identified a Band-Aid of sufficient swath–a European tax on wealth and a parliamentary chamber charged with regulating finance in the euro zone–to cover Europe's wounds.–Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk "The Nation" (5/13/2014 12:00:00 AM)