EQUALITY

Noted political economist meets noted political philosopher in this discussion of inequality and its cures.

First, the good news from French political economist Piketty: Inequality is at lower levels than it was a century ago in most places. That, he hastens to add, “is less true in the US, but even in the US it is true as compared to 100 years ago.” In conversation with Sandel at the Paris School of Economics in May 2024, Piketty does most of the talking, though Sandel certainly holds his own. That conversation could not be more timely, for in it the two diagnose what led to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election: Obama’s bailout of the banks in the 2008 crash “dashed the high hopes for a revival of progressive or social democratic politics that his candidacy had inspired,” while formerly Democratic strongholds that went over to Donald Trump in 2016 did so as a measurable reaction to loss of jobs to China. The alienation of the working class remains firm. Says Piketty, “You cannot just blame the right-wing populists, blame their ‘deplorable’ voters, their deplorable leaders”: no, he holds, the Democrats abandoned their core in favor of urban elites, and the winning argument is about jobs, not identitarian politics. Sandel and Piketty kick around some interesting leveling mechanisms, including the thought that elite universities should admit top-level students into a pool from which, say, two thousand entries enter any given school by lottery, eliminating at least some built-in inequalities. Sandel goes on to note that while only some 38% of Americans have four-year college degrees, almost no one in Congress lacks one, meaning the working class is essentially unrepresented politically. They have a fix, and it’s both surprising, intriguing, and worth trying.

A conversation between two very smart people, well worth listening in on.