Just over two years ago, in April 2014, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English and took the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Piketty’s book struck a nerve, helping to disseminate several ideas—among them that capitalism doesn’t automatically generate a reasonable or equitable distribution of income and that paying attention to the wealthiest 1% is necessary to understanding politics. Piketty focused on the concentration of wealth in 19th and 20th century France, the U.K., and the United States, places where the most data was available for those periods. But if Piketty had been—instead of an economist—a reporter working to understand the world that extremes of inequality have made today, he wouldn’t have looked at those rich countries. He might well have chosen to focus on Brazil, as Alex Cuadros has done in his new book Brazillionaires. -- THE REPUBLIC.COM 08/01/2016