Months after its release, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is still getting praised in reviews and sitting near the top of bestseller charts. If the invisibility of a system is a marker of its ideological success, this can’t be a good sign for capitalism.

It’s no surprise that people are curious about the causes of the injustice that surrounds them. Average workers’ wages in the US have fallen sizably from 2007 to 2012; in the same period, over 90 percent of all new income went to the top 1 percent; while around 46 million Americans live in poverty, the gap between corporate profits and workers’ wages has never been greater. Piketty’s conclusion that capitalism, if left unchecked, generates a concentration of wealth among a tiny minority sits well with this lived experience.

Merit or hard work, the standard justification for inequality, has little to do with our new gilded age.