ABSTRACT
Economic laws and market rules and outcomes reflect not only abstract laws of supply and demand, or factors intrinsic to purely economic arrangements, but social mores, cultural values, and political power. In different societies, with different histories and power elites, market economies, or any other type of economy, will operate by different rules with different outcomes. Piketty argues that to understand economies, people need to reconstruct the study of economics. The new discipline he suggests people need is "political economy", which is not new at all but a resurrection of the tradition of the preprofessional great theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Political economy blends the study of politics with the study of economy, as they are inseparable. Piketty also argues that in addition to politics, people must study history, culture, and sociology to get a grasp of how economies operate.
