At least that’s my reading of the latest survey run by the University of Chicago’s Initiative on Global Markets. I’ve written before about their Economic Experts panel, which is intended to be broadly representative of opinion among elite academic economists. The panel includes liberal and conservative economists, and different subspecialties are represented, as are most of the nation’s leading economics departments. The panel provides a useful barometer of the views of mainstream economists, although the voices of heterodox schools of thought — where Mr. Piketty is both more popular and more polarizing — are effectively excluded.

The expert economists were asked whether “the most powerful force pushing toward greater wealth inequality in the U.S. since the 1970s is the gap between the after-tax return on capital and the economic growth rate.” To translate, does the T-shirt slogan “r>g” explain why wealth has become more unequally distributed?

Of 34 respondents, only Hilary Hoynes of the University of California, Berkeley, agreed with the claim. A further 18 percent of the economists were uncertain. The clear majority either disagreed (59 percent) or strongly disagreed (21 percent). (Those who “did not answer” or had “no opinion” were not counted in our percentages.)

But this isn’t really a serious criticism of Mr. Piketty’s scholarship. If surveyed, it is likely that he would have joined the majority view in disagreeing with the claim the survey asked about. In Mr. Piketty’s telling, rising incomes among the super-rich are responsible for the recent rise in wealth inequality.