The rich are the same as you and I. Members of the top 1 percent make most of their money from paychecks, just like the rest of us. But the very, very rich—the 1 percent of the 1 percent—are different. They make most of their money from investments and inheritances. A kind of perpetual plutocracy was the norm for most of world history, and it’s staging a comeback, according to Thomas Piketty, the author of the influential new economic tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Who are the new plutocrats, and how did they get to the top of the world?

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