[notahacker]

The book attempts to address these in rather more detail than can be managed here, but human capital isn't likely to get you to the ranks of fabulously wealthy without the backing of VCs and their already fabulously wealthy LPs, and wealthy dynasties are generally much better at structuring their portfolios to avoid being wiped out by "creative destruction" than smaller business owners. Piketty argues that our concept of "the rich" is heavily shaped by lists which are biased towards those who create companies because their wealth is much easier to estimate than the diversified portfolios of family dynasties, and that distinguishing between the two isn't easy either (Warren Buffet, for example, is entirely self-made but has done so entirely through disproportionately successful bets on r > g rather than creating something new, and many of the entrepreneurs that have succeeded by creating and marketing something new take the eminently sensible decision to diversify those riches and become rentiers to let their fortunes continue to grow later in life). Whether he's right or wrong about the composition of the rich in general, it's pretty obvious the HN concept of the rich is skewed towards the Zuckerbergs we can aspire to emulate rather than the Koch brothers we can't.

[chakkop]

I agree with you: it is a long book, with more problems than can be enumerated and discussed here, but key amongst them is the idea that inequality--the Gini coefficient--matters above all else, and particularly matters more than the absolute improvements in living standards that we (most of us) have experienced in recent centuries. I don't think one's goal should be to enter the ranks of the 'fabulously wealthy'. Anyway, by definition, there will always be a bottom 10% or 20%.