I'm Bill Moyers. It's good to have your ear. Thanks for joining us.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman of the New York Times on the return of the Gilded Age and a new

book that could change our democracy.

Pickney is telling us that we are on the road not just to a highly unequal society but to a society of an oligarchy, a society of inherited wealth.

It's a real eureka book.

You suddenly say, oh, the world is not the way I saw it.

The world, in fact, has moved on a long way the last 25 years and not in a direction you're going to like,

because we are seeing not only great disparities in income and wealth,

but we're seeing them get entrenched.

We're seeing them become inequalities that will be transferred across the generations.

We are becoming very much the kind of society we imagine we're nothing like.

Thanks for joining us.

Even in this age of hyperlinks in cyberspace, nearly six centuries after Gutenberg devised

his printing press, it's still possible for a single book to shake the foundations, rattle

cliches, up-end dogma, unnerved idyllogues, and arm everyday people with the knowledge

they need to fight back against the predatory powers that have robbed them of their birthrighted citizens.

This is such a book, Capital in the 21st century, by the French economist Thomas Piggady, the book of the season, to many, to others, the book of the decade.

Reviewers have called it a bulldozer of a book,

magisterial, seminal, definitive, a watershed. At 700 pages, it's already a bestseller.

And there isn't a single scene of seduction, not one celebrity interview, not one picture,

just graph after graph, fact on fact, drawn from two centuries

of data and embedded in prose that can suddenly explode like a supernova in the brain.

...