ABSTRACT
The defining feature of America today is its extreme inequality of income, and especially income from labor. While America is historically unique because of its extreme inequality of labor income relative to any other country, even that inequality pales in terms of American wealth inequality. The possible conclusion is that potentially destabilizing and unjust inequality is nearly baked into the DNA of capitalism, something that Thomas Piketty ultimately rejects as an iron law, but only with reliance on some political utopianism. Piketty's explanation of his dismal findings, the nearly perpetual triumph of divergence and thus the likelihood of perpetual growing inequality, rests on the now famous "equation" r>g, in which r is the return on capital and g is the rate of growth of the economy or national income. R>g is Piketty's economic equivalent of Einstein's e=mc2, a law so fundamental to the operation of capitalist systems that people cannot do without it.
