Half of England, a Guardian report tells us, is owned by less than 1% of the population. That sounds, on the face of the matter, like a justification of the Marxist view of the concentration of capital – and, for that matter, of Thomas Piketty’s argument, in Capital in the 21st Century, that inequalities are increasingly likely to be concentrated in the hands of wealthy individuals. But the figures for land ownership in England don’t quite show that. The largest group of landowners are still the aristocracy and gentry, fundamentally a pre-capitalist source of inequality still accounting for 30% of the land. 17% of the land is owned by ‘new’ money, oligarchs and capitalists. But 29% is owned by corporates, institutions, public authorities and organisations. The central weakness of Piketty’s analysis is its failure to engage with ownership that isn’t in the hands of private individuals. Organisations and other non-human entities have an advantage over human beings; once their wealth is concentrated, it will either remain or it will pass to other non-human owners. In the long term, this, rather than the hands of private individuals, is where wealth will be concentrated.