Inside the Polish Leader's Big Bet on Piketty

It's not often that a banker turned conservative politician approvingly quotes Thomas Piketty, but that is exactly what Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki did during an interview this week in Warsaw. A similar tension lies at the heart of his government's economic push in Poland: reasonable strategy roiled by leftist impulses.

The economic creed of Morawiecki -- and that of the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) -- is based on the idea that Poland needs to replace a development model that's too dependent on foreign investment. In laying out his vision, Morawiecki quotes the work of economists Andreas Noelke and Arjan Vliegenthart, whose typology of capitalism flavors didn't include a fitting definition for the eastern European model until they came up with "Dependent Market Economies." He also mentions the concept of "foreign-owned countries" that came up in a paper Piketty co-authored with Filip Novokmet and Gabriel Zucman last year.