EQUALITY IS A STRUGGLE

A gathering of the noted economist’s columns for the French daily Le Monde.

“We­ can’t effectively address­ today’s social and climate challenges if we ­don’t start by taxing the wealthiest in a clear and significant way.” So writes Piketty, who has made a distinguished career of explicating the whys and wherefores of inequality and its multiple causes. Much of Piketty’s writing here digs into that project, and it’s a credit to Le Monde’s readership that they’re not afraid of tables and hard data. Yet Piketty also writes with admirable clarity about several ideas that are key to his extended argument—and, in at least a sense, these columns forge a single argument in favor of democratic socialism. He observes, in that regard, that the unprecedented prosperity of the 20th century came about precisely because the “hyperconcentration of ownership and class privileges that characterized European societies before 1914” had been broken, with massive investments in human capital and decommodification of the social marketplace. Given the rise of Trumpism and its congeners worldwide, Piketty counters that those values should be restored, and by nobody better than the European states that showed the way in the first place, emphasizing “parliamentary democracy, the social state, and investment in the future.” Voilà: We come full circle to taxing the rich in order to fund health care, education, welfare, and states that observe “the rule of law and democratic pluralism.” Admittedly, Piketty writes, those states are mostly European, whose social economy is far ahead of that of the U.S. There’s some inside baseball—or perhaps soccer—here in Piketty’s essays on and against the Macron government and like causes, but most of these pieces will be intelligible to American readers without much background in contemporary French politics.

Piketty’s science is rarely dismal, and his outlook for a social democratic future is lucid and refreshingly optimistic.