Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” was published on March 10, 2014, the day after the first episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” aired on Fox and its sister networks.

The fact that both men have captured the public imagination at the same time is at least partly due to that simple fact. There’s also the matter of professional ripeness, behind the appearance of fresh fame: Piketty had been around for some time, publishing papers and collaborating on constructing the Top Incomes database along with Emmanuel Saez, but he’d never published anything remotely as sweeping as “Capital” before. Similarly, Tyson had long been a prominent science communicator as well as astrophysicist, appearing as a guest on numerous shows, including both “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” as well as hosting PBS’s “Nova ScienceNow.” But he’d never hosted a commercial TV show before.

Yet, the two men’s sudden popularity is rooted in some deeper similarities as well — an empirical hunger, and a desire to think big in shaping the future, are two that come readily to mind. These are both long-standing features of American culture, exemplified by figures like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver, Luther Burbank, just to name a few. But both these cultural appetites have been repeatedly stifled in 21st-century America. The Bush administration was infamous for its disdain for the empirical, as encapsulated in this famous passage from Ron Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide [later identified as Karl Rove] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

But the Obama administration has been disappointing as well, in part for pussyfooting on some empirical matters, but more broadly for its failure to truly think big, to match the soaring rhetoric of Obama’s first presidential campaign. For an example of what’s been missing under Obama, let’s go back to Oct. 20, 2008, shortly after the financial crisis hit, when George Soros appeared on Bill Moyer’s Journal, and articulated the logic for a sweeping Green New Deal:

GEORGE SOROS: You see, for the last 25 years the world economy, the motor of the world economy that has been driving it was consumption by the American consumer who has been spending more than he has been saving…. So that motor is now switched off. It’s finished. It’s run out of — can’t continue. You need a new motor. And we have a big problem. Global warming. It requires big investment. And that could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come.

BILL MOYERS: Putting more money in, building infrastructure, converting to green technology.

GEORGE SOROS: Instead of consuming, building an electricity grid, saving on energy, rewiring the houses, adjusting your lifestyle where energy has got to cost more until it you introduce those new things. So it will be painful. But at least we will survive and not cook.

There were some furtive, disconnected gestures in this direction under Obama, such as talk of “green jobs” that quickly disappeared with a bogus scandal that led to Van Jones’ resignation, for example — a clear indication of just how shallow this commitment was. But the overwhelming emphasis on “shovel-ready” projects in the stimulus bill was always ill-suited to the magnitude of need, much less the need for developing new, specifically green projects to fund.

It’s long been well understood that for all the good it did, the New Deal’s spending levels were insufficient to restore the economy to full employment; only World War II did that. Soros articulated what many others recognized: that the need to save us from global warming represented a World War II-size challenge that could be turned to a similar advantage, if only we had the vision and leadership to do so. The hunger for that vision and leadership is with us still — along with the still-unmet challenges — which is part of why Piketty and Tyson have struck such a deep chord in public consciousness.

But in addition to a hunger for empiricism and thinking big, there’s a third hunger that Piketty and Tyson speak to — a hunger for meaning, for a big-picture story that helps us collectively make sense of our lives. In Piketty’s case, this comes from his insight that capitalism does not just naturally evolve to a state of broader general prosperity, as many optimistically came to believe in the early post-World War II era (when it temporarily seemed to be happening); but rather that political choices are necessary to shape the rules to make broad prosperity possible. This means that we have collective agency in shaping our shared future — a message that resonates historically with Tom Paine’s declaration that “we have the power to begin the world anew.”

In Tyson’s case, the big-picture story is that science itself can give meaning to our lives, because the hunger to know is built into who we are. “Kids are never the problem,” Tyson explained in one Ask Me Anything session. “They are born scientists.”

More expansively, Tyson put the big-picture story like this:

Yes, the universe had a beginning. Yes, the universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnace within high-mass stars. We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out — and we have only just begun.

If this sounds almost quasi-religious, you’re right. And that’s really the deepest terror that conservatives have when encountering Tyson, and the whole sweep of scientific discovery he articulates. (William James, who was a graduate student when Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published, had a similar view of our place in the universe. Consequently, he reframed the analytical truths of math and philosophy as a sort of backdoor empiricism: What our brains perceive as necessary truths reflects the empirical influence of how they evolved.) It’s one thing if science confirms our predetermined religious dogmas, but quite another if it challenges them. Yet, it’s worst of all for religious dogmatists if it threatens to replace those dogmas by providing its own sense of meaning, order and purpose in the universe. And that’s just what Tyson is suggesting.

Indeed, open-mindedness lies at the heart of what both Piketty and Tyson are up to. “My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer,” Tyson said. It’s a profoundly anti-dogmatic view, though well in keeping with mystical traditions of all faiths. As for Piketty, a similar spirit is reflected in the data openness that’s an integral part of his work, which makes it particularly easy for others to criticize it — as has happened with the Financial Times recently. Lest there be any doubt, here are the first two paragraphs of his initial response to FT’s criticism:

I am happy to see that FT journalists are using the excel files that I have put on line! I would very much appreciate if you could publish this response along with your piece.

Let me first say that the reason why I put all excel files on line, including all the detailed excel formulas about data constructions and adjustments, is precisely because I want to promote an open and transparent debate about these important and sensitive measurement issues (if there was anything to hide, any “fat finger problem”, why would I put everything on line?).