Thomas Piketty is causing quite a stir in the political economy world. Those of you who, like me, have braved his 700-page tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, will know the column inches devoted to his detractors exceed the length of his book by a fair margin. But his arguments matter because they have put the political economy of inequality back at the centre of national political debate. And this I think can only be a good thing as we approach the 2015 election.