The recent swell of media attention around French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has propelled it to the New York Times’ bestseller list and the #1 spot on Amazon. An ambitious examination of income inequality, Piketty’s work illuminates the mechanisms that allow wealth to concentrate in the top 1% of society. He argues that when the rate of return on existing capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, the wealth of the rich will accumulate faster than that of the rest of society, exacerbating inequality and heralding in a new Gilded Age.

Though Piketty’s book has been the subject of a robust discussion between journalists and pundits, how does it stack up before a Nobel Prize winning economist? In his review of the book for The New Republic, Robert Solow—the 1987 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and the Russell Sage Foundation’s Robert S. Merton Scholar—says that Piketty’s theory on inequality is right. Calling Piketty’s paradigm the “rich-get-richer dynamic,” Solow describes the book as a “new and powerful contribution to an old topic.” Piketty’s theory, Solow further notes, also portends that not only will the rich get richer across the board, but inherited wealth in society will increase faster than that of recently earned (and therefore more merit-based) fortunes.

Yet, even if the majority of people agree that economic inequality is steadily worsening, how can governments take action to narrow the chasm between rich and poor? The solution, according to Piketty, is a global progressive income tax. But since such a goal is largely unrealistic, he proposes an alternative of an annual regional wealth tax in an area the size of Europe or the United States—0 percent on fortunes below one million euros, 1 percent on fortunes between one and five million euros, and 2 percent above five million euros. Though Solow agrees with Piketty’s assessment, he is pessimistic about the chances of such a tax being implemented in the U.S. “On this side of the Atlantic,” he writes, “there would seem to be no serious prospect of such an outcome.”

Click here to read the review in full at The New Republic.