Piketty on capitalism: worth getting excited about?

The excitement over Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, feels somewhat strange as few people I know have been able to actually get hold of a copy (the LSE’s campus bookshop – of all places- has none for sale and there’s a two-week wait on Amazon…). But reviews I‘ve seen of the book, both hostile and positive, agree on a number of things which make me suspect the hype is justified for once: