To be perfectly clear from the outset, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is brilliant. It is a must read for anyone who cares about economic and social issues. Piketty lays bare the dirty secret of just how concentrated the ownership of wealth has become and paints a terrifying picture of how much more concentrated it will inexorably become in the near future, unless something radical—as radical as the upheaval of World War I—occurs to derail it.

Piketty notes quite correctly that “Intellectual and political debate about the distribution of wealth has long been based on an abundance of prejudice and a paucity of fact.” He then proceeds to pile on facts—enough to drown an elephant—demonstrating beyond any doubt that the concentration of wealth and income in modern economies is today at an all-time high and that unless something dramatic happens in the next few decades it will grow steadily more extreme. Did you know that the share of national income of the top 1% in the US has more than doubled since 1970? That the share of the top one-thousandth has quintupled? That in France, the country where the best data exists, inherited wealth (rather than wealth earned through personal effort) comprised two-thirds of all private capital in 2010—and that if better data were available for the US the proportion here would probably be even higher? You will once you read this book.

Piketty also puts his facts in context. While he cites recent Federal Reserve figures indicating that the top decile of Americans own 72% of our wealth, with the bottom half claiming only 2%, he observes that this is based on self-reporting, which for tax and other reasons underestimates the largest fortunes.

Piketty’s projections, based on inexorable demographic logic, are even more frightening than his facts. Here’s one to grab attention: barring another cataclysm, approximately one-sixth of the children born in this decade will inherit more wealth than the bottom half of the population will earn in an entire lifetime.

Another distressing point Piketty drives home is that the extremely wealthy tend to earn even greater yields than the moderately wealthy. A hardworking, frugal professional may realistically expect to be able to sock away a couple of million dollars in a 401(k) plan, insurance policies, and appreciated real estate by the end of a working career; but the rate of return that nest egg will earn is far less than what a billionaire, aided by the sharpest minds on Wall Street and access to hedging strategies that make high-risk, high yield investments more attractive, can earn.

Among the many forces driving the tendency toward concentration are lower birth rates in more technologically advanced societies, which Piketty shows tend to exacerbate the influence of capital accumulated in previous generations. He also notes the importance of the lack of political questioning of concentration: “If inequalities are seen as justified, say because they seem to be a consequence of a choice by the rich to work harder or more efficiently than the poor, or because preventing the rich from earning more would inevitably harm the worst-off members of society, then it is perfectly possible for the concentration of income to set new historical records.”

And yet, I would give Piketty’s magnum opus a B, not an A. If it takes a surgeon 100 steps to perform a successful heart transplant and he or she gets 99 of them right, the patient still dies.

Piketty implicitly assumes that concentration of wealth is bad, without explaining why. Question: assuming that availability and price levels for the goods and services you want are the same either way, would you rather make $50,000 a year in a society with a relatively even distribution of wealth or $60,000 a year in a society with a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1%? Many people would prefer the latter and accuse those who disagree of the sin of envy—but Piketty never bothers to pose the question. He simply presumes that concentration itself is an evil, without considering whether it has a positive or negative impact on the lives of ordinary people.

My hunch (and it’s only that) is that this is a false dichotomy. I suspect that a society with a more even distribution of wealth would have higher levels of economic activity—and thus higher demand for labor, meaning higher wages—than one with the extreme wealth concentration we see today and will see even more of tomorrow. I would speculate further that the principal reason why the massive fiscal and monetary stimulus to the economy since 2008 has produced such paltry growth is precisely because so much of our wealth is now held by so few. The people who own the capital get most of the benefit of the stimulus, but they don’t want to buy much more than they already have. The people who desperately want to acquire more consumer goods and services own virtually no income-producing capital and thus get little benefit from the stimulus.

I suspect all this—but I don’t have the data or the expertise to prove it. Piketty does, but he doesn’t use it. Instead, he prattles on about his proposed one-fell-swoop solution to the concentration problem: a global tax on capital. Just have every country choose to impose a graduated tax on the value of privately held capital, and soon the ownership of that capital will begin to disperse.

Of course, all the tax rates need to be the same, or notoriously fluid capital will gravitate toward the lower-tax jurisdictions. Heaven forbid that one country—even a small, backwards one—should decide not to play at all. I would love to know in advance what that country would be—so I could open a Ferrari dealership there.

A global tax on capital will happen sometime after we figure out how to get eight-year-old boys to keep their shoes tied, and after Aesop’s mice figure out how to put that bell on the cat. Even Piketty admits that “A global tax on capital is a utopian idea. It is hard to imagine the nations of the world agreeing on any such thing anytime soon.” He then piles on thousands of more words about what a wonderful idea it is.

Even if imposing a global tax on capital were a realistic option, it would make little sense as a tax policy. Piketty himself devotes careful attention, in one of his most interesting chapters, to the incredibly high wages being paid to managers of large corporations and why they make no business sense at all. The United States today, according to Piketty, has “a record level of inequality of income from labor (probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world, including societies in which skill disparities were extremely large).”

His argument that they are being paid more for having good luck (especially in the financial sector, which does not produce any goods or services at all) than for having great skill is amply supported by his data. And what would a capital tax do to this inequality of income from labor? Nothing at all.

Moreover, a capital tax as described by Piketty would penalize holders of great wealth even in years when they suffered losses. Suppose a billionaire decided ten years ago to invest in the Ukraine, or northern Nigeria, or Syria, or wherever the next location is where the local economy is devastated by combat. Maybe his or her overall wealth drops 10 percent as a result of that unlucky choice. That wouldn’t faze Piketty a bit—he would impose the same tax on capital holdings regardless of whether they rose or fell in value during the year.

It would make far more sense simply to impose a more progressive tax on income, from whatever source it is derived. If I were king, money or other value received as inheritance would be taxed exactly the same as money or other value received from wages, dividends, or capital gains. It’s all green, and all spendable. But Piketty doesn’t go there.

The fact is, though, that a progressive global tax on anything, whether just on capital or on all income, just isn’t going to happen. Piketty does acknowledge, more than once, how fluid capital is, and how easily it can transfer from a high-tax jurisdiction to a lower-tax jurisdiction. He then blithely ignores his own caution by saying that if it can’t be a global tax, then maybe just a tax in the European Union or maybe just in his home country of France. The truth is, at the first hint that such a tax might actually be in the works, capital would begin to gravitate out of the EU and toward the US, or Brazil, or Japan, or any of a dozen other places.

The earth has sea levels rising at an alarming rate, threatening to cause trillions of dollars of damage in coastal areas, where most of the population of the world happens to live. Nearly every scientist who has examined the data agrees this is happening. Can the nations of the world get together to do something about this? They cannot. Whenever they try, each major country tries to one-up the others to gain a competitive advantage, so in the end nothing happens. If we can’t get together to fight a peril as common to all as global warming, how are we supposed to get together to fight wealth concentration, which many politicians (who’ve been handsomely paid for by billionaires) will insist is not really a “problem” at all? Senator Russell Long, the longtime chairman of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, used to regale audiences with the tax lobbyist’s refrain: “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.” If it’s possible to be amused from the grave, Long will be having a real belly laugh over the idea of a global tax on capital.

Piketty never says what governments will use the proceeds of the capital tax for. One can guess that he means them to use the proceeds for more social welfare programs and for education—academics always love spending more money on education—but one has to guess, because Piketty never tips his hand. It is difficult enough to raise taxes when there is a compelling need for the funds, e.g., fighting a war; but to raise taxes simply so that those taxed will have less money, as Piketty demands, is a tough sell.

Piketty destroys the myth that governments can inflate their way out of wealth concentration. Inflation definitely creates winners and losers from a wealth-share standpoint but does not necessarily flatten the distribution curve. Smart investors are usually able to stay ahead of inflation by making careful choices; the losers are those who have savings but not up-to-the-minute smarts, e.g., unsophisticated elderly people who live off their savings.

The value of deficit spending is another myth Piketty shatters beyond repair. Governments do have to pay their bills; and if tax receipts are insufficient to cover those bills, they have to borrow money. From whom do they borrow? From the wealthy. To whom do they pay interest, using future tax collections from wealthy and non-wealthy alike? To the wealthy. The federal debt has risen by some $7 trillion during the Obama years. If you assume an average interest rate of 3% over time, that’s an extra $200 billion per year, every year, that will be transferred out of the pockets of ordinary taxpayers and into the pockets of the super-rich, for as far as the eye can see. As Piketty puts it, “From the standpoint of people with the means to lend to the government, it is obviously far more advantageous to lend to the state and receive interest on the loan for decades than to pay taxes without compensation.”

Does this mean we should just give up and resign ourselves to the bleak future of ever-increasing concentration which Piketty demonstrates will inevitably occur without a major course correction? Not at all. It just means we have to be smart and not try to solve the problem with a tool we know will not work. Piketty himself hints about “the development of new forms of property and democratic control of capital,” without deigning to tell us what they might be. But this is where we need to head. There are in fact innovative methods of corporate finance that build capital ownership of traditional for-profit corporations into ordinary people, rather than the wealthy. The investment banker Louis Kelso (1913-1991) was a leading thinker (and doer) along these lines, whose ideas have been put into practice by providing billions of dollars of capital ownership spread among hundreds of thousands of working people—largely in America, but elsewhere as well. The Kelso Institute (www.kelsoinstitute.org) keeps alive his vision; for a short introduction, you can also check out my article “A Humanist Economics” in the March/April 2015 The Humanist Magazine (http://thehumanist.com/magazine/march-april-2015/features/a-humanist-economics).

Edmund Burke wrote that “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” But it’s as possible to be trapped by history as to learn from it, to assume that the only arrows in our quiver are arrows, not bullets or laser death rays. Piketty sees in his historical data an era of high taxes on capital that coincides with an era of lower wealth concentration and says “Aha! The solution must be to have high taxes on capital.” We’d be better off if those moved by his worrisome forecasts conclude that “We have to find a better way to skin this cat.”