In his book, Thomas Piketty describes how strong inequality in the USA fueled the rise of Donald Trump. A redistribution program is not very popular in the USA.
(Photo: Reuters)
Munich The goal of equality is an eminently political factor, albeit a delicate one. Too much “equality” – as in ordinary, planned-economy socialism – leads to signs of paralysis, just like too little “equality” in a plutocracy that makes the rich ever richer.
The French economist Thomas Piketty has already presented a number of thick tomes on this subject, loaded with data series as “provisional constructions”. They were hotly debated in specialist circles, especially “Capital in the 21st Century”, but little read by the general public.
That’s why he has now published a volume with “A Brief History of Equality”, the title of which is based on “A Brief History of Humanity” by bestseller king Yuval Noah Harari and is intended to get him out of the ivory tower and into the social movement.
This is “Piketty for Beginners”, which also looks at slavery, CO2 emissions and women’s rights and once again presents its empirical findings very clearly. According to this, in the western states in the past two centuries things have gotten better with income and wealth equality, more “egalitarian” than in 1900 or 1950, but since 1980 the differences between those up there and those down there have also become more pronounced.
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The author traces this back to Thatcherism and the American clone of Reaganism. The poor have cash and bank deposits, the rich have businesses and real estate.
The French author won the Business Book Prize 2022 with his book “A Brief History of Equality”.
(Photo: Reuters)
Unlike in Europe, in the US the danger of dichotomy is manifested in a brutal form, which favored the rise of the anti-globalist, anti-liberal Donald Trump. Piketty cites a plethora of line and bar charts proving that while the top 10 percent of US citizens own 72 percent of private property (Europe 56 percent), the bottom 50 percent own only 2 percent (Europe 6 percent). And yet, in the United States, Trumpism is more likely than a redistribution program such as that offered by Bernie Sanders.
Should the left-wing Democrat Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) actually run for a US presidential election, she could make extensive use of Piketty. He has gone from being an empiricist to a cheerleader. His book is intended to be a guide to correcting the plutocratic, post-colonial system that allows free export of capital and tax profits that have been manipulated in financial havens.
When it comes to equality, it’s more about “the call to continue the fight on the basis of solid historical knowledge,” says Piketty. He never tires of calling for progressive taxes and strong social systems, as well as an “inheritance for all” in the case of the estate of the well-off thanks to progressive rates for income and wealth taxes.
Thomas Piketty: A Brief History of Equality.
CH Beck
Munich 2022
264 pages
25 euros
He openly advocates a democratic, decentralized, federal, self-governing socialism (a bit like Ota Šik’s). And Piketty praises the “trente glorieuses”, the years between 1950 and 1980, when the USA, France, Germany and Sweden were more socially democratized before the neoliberal wave he hated swept the country. This history of equality fits in with the literature of precisely that “trente glorieuses”.
Another question is what a Piketty policy, if seriously considered, could actually achieve at the moment. The author affirms market forces, but his system destroys incentives and increases the risk of overbureaucratization and state prepotency without the minimum probability of proper performance.
More on bureaucracy:
Nevertheless, the book is well suited as a provocation for the regulatory debate. Piketty touches the wounds of a deformed market economy that confuses welfare with shareholder value.
“Best of Piketty” is also good to read, for example when it exposes the legitimate but also bigoted postulates of equal opportunities in education. It is the program of this book to demand a “universalist sovereignism” of the citizens and to refer to Hannah Arendt.
She described it as one of the main weaknesses of Europe’s social democracy between the world wars “that it failed to internalize the need for a global policy that would be up to the challenges of a global economy”. So Olaf Scholz should also read Piketty
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