You are asserting that there is broad academic agreement that Piketty's major points still stand, but that is far from true -- in fact they never stood under se

You are asserting that there is broad academic agreement that Piketty's major points still stand, but that is far from true -- in fact they never stood under serious scrutiny at all. Outside of simply describing tautalogies, his major point is that inequality is rising because the rate of return on capital is exceeding the economy's growth rate, from which he makes a logical leap that inequality will increase inexorably without intervention. This point fails to consider that people spend some (and sometimes a lot) of their earnings from capital, which dissipates their wealth back into the economy. Historical data show that wealth does not end up growing faster than income because of the effect of spending the wealth (you have to spend basically none of it to maintain a growth rate that is greater than GDP). A good number of serious academics have raised this and other points. His book is best understood as a popular argument for specific political ends, and since it gives a veneer of academic seriousness to those ends it has been popular.