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4.26 AVERAGE
4.26 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
informative
medium-paced
Required much attention, I hope I read it again when I have more to give it
informative
medium-paced
It’s a very good book. Really well written. My main problem is that he is too negative about “the communist experiment”—every time communism is mentioned he has to add a word such as “disaster” in there—and not as negative about capitalism and liberalism: especially noteworthy as I read this during the second Trump term
A fantastic analysis of the history of inequality and some proposals on how society can restructure politically and economically to overcome the inequality based challenges of today.
The history of inequality: Piketty frames slavery as the ultimate form of inequality along a spectrum. The history of the end of slavery was fascinating. For example, in the UK, because the government was so beholden to property owners, owning slaves was seen as an investment like any other, and when slavery was overturned, slaveowners/investors were remunerated extensively, at a massive cost to the UK government. We also see echos of this as colonialism was rolled back: The colonizers would extensively charge the colonized as a (often crippling) fee for their freedom.
Proprietarianism: I don't know if this is a term that Piketty made up, but it's the philosophical stance that private property is a sacred right. Piketty goes through multiple examples that show the philosophical absurdity of the reification of private property. Remunerating slaveowners is one example. Another is the example of land as private property: at some arbitrary point someone stuck a stick in the ground and said "this is my land" and we've somehow all agreed to that claim ever since.
Highly progressive taxes and economic growth: on multiple occasions, Piketty points toward the UK and US during the 1950s-1980s when the highest marginal tax rates were 80-90%. During these periods, both countries saw their highest GDP growth rates. Piketty fails to acknowledge that other factors were likely at play here (such as the beginning phases of globalization), but I think the fact that Sweden's GDP growth over the past decade has been comparable to the US's at least proves that higher marginal tax rates don't negatively impact GDP growth.
Taxing Capital: Piketty picks up where he left off in Capital in the 21st century and provides more detail on how a capital tax could practically be implemented. This would require trans-national treaties to avoid the current "race to the bottom" of small European states (e.g. Ireland and Luxembourg). It would also require a ledger of individuals' capital, including through financial instruments like investments. Piketty proposes redistributing this money to younger citizens to give them more economic opportunities, which is relevant as we're seeing a growing income and wealth gap between ages today.
Carbon Taxes: Piketty briefly discusses creating marginal tax rates on carbon emissions, with a potential ceiling to individual emission allotment. His historical analysis shows that current attempts to implement carbon taxes reflect initial attempts (in the early 20th century) to introduce income tax: they are highly regressive. This is why we saw the yellow vest protests in France. Taxes were introduced on petrol and diesel, but not on airplane travel which the wealthy disproportionately consume.
Populism, immigration, and inequality: Piketty opines that increased inequality since the 1980's is the primary cause of the modern rise in populism and anti-immigration sentiment. I disagree with him less here. Take, for example, the rising tide against immigrants in Canada. This stems primarily from an emerging housing shortage, not inequality per-se. Sweden is another good example: it has one of the lowest post-tax income inequalities, but anti-immigrant sentiment exploded in the country after the refugee influx of 2015. I don't fully agree that decreasing inequality would directly contribute to pro-immigration sentiment, or even necessarily decrease nationalism, but I don't have strong evidence for this stance, so Piketty could be right.
As he notes, it's impossible to agree with all his points in this book, but this is definitely an interesting set of ideas and historical analyses that serve as a great starting point on how to restructure the world economy in the years to come.
The history of inequality: Piketty frames slavery as the ultimate form of inequality along a spectrum. The history of the end of slavery was fascinating. For example, in the UK, because the government was so beholden to property owners, owning slaves was seen as an investment like any other, and when slavery was overturned, slaveowners/investors were remunerated extensively, at a massive cost to the UK government. We also see echos of this as colonialism was rolled back: The colonizers would extensively charge the colonized as a (often crippling) fee for their freedom.
Proprietarianism: I don't know if this is a term that Piketty made up, but it's the philosophical stance that private property is a sacred right. Piketty goes through multiple examples that show the philosophical absurdity of the reification of private property. Remunerating slaveowners is one example. Another is the example of land as private property: at some arbitrary point someone stuck a stick in the ground and said "this is my land" and we've somehow all agreed to that claim ever since.
Highly progressive taxes and economic growth: on multiple occasions, Piketty points toward the UK and US during the 1950s-1980s when the highest marginal tax rates were 80-90%. During these periods, both countries saw their highest GDP growth rates. Piketty fails to acknowledge that other factors were likely at play here (such as the beginning phases of globalization), but I think the fact that Sweden's GDP growth over the past decade has been comparable to the US's at least proves that higher marginal tax rates don't negatively impact GDP growth.
Taxing Capital: Piketty picks up where he left off in Capital in the 21st century and provides more detail on how a capital tax could practically be implemented. This would require trans-national treaties to avoid the current "race to the bottom" of small European states (e.g. Ireland and Luxembourg). It would also require a ledger of individuals' capital, including through financial instruments like investments. Piketty proposes redistributing this money to younger citizens to give them more economic opportunities, which is relevant as we're seeing a growing income and wealth gap between ages today.
Carbon Taxes: Piketty briefly discusses creating marginal tax rates on carbon emissions, with a potential ceiling to individual emission allotment. His historical analysis shows that current attempts to implement carbon taxes reflect initial attempts (in the early 20th century) to introduce income tax: they are highly regressive. This is why we saw the yellow vest protests in France. Taxes were introduced on petrol and diesel, but not on airplane travel which the wealthy disproportionately consume.
Populism, immigration, and inequality: Piketty opines that increased inequality since the 1980's is the primary cause of the modern rise in populism and anti-immigration sentiment. I disagree with him less here. Take, for example, the rising tide against immigrants in Canada. This stems primarily from an emerging housing shortage, not inequality per-se. Sweden is another good example: it has one of the lowest post-tax income inequalities, but anti-immigrant sentiment exploded in the country after the refugee influx of 2015. I don't fully agree that decreasing inequality would directly contribute to pro-immigration sentiment, or even necessarily decrease nationalism, but I don't have strong evidence for this stance, so Piketty could be right.
As he notes, it's impossible to agree with all his points in this book, but this is definitely an interesting set of ideas and historical analyses that serve as a great starting point on how to restructure the world economy in the years to come.
This is a 1000-page tome published in 2019, gracefully followed by Piketty’s 2021 “revision notes” in the form of A Brief History of Equality. Owing to the subject (global inequality) and the author (a French public intellectual), much ink has been spilled reviewing the book already. Why, then, add another to the myriad of voices four years after its original publication?
My ambition is not to use the time that has passed to judge the academic impacts of the book and the papers closely associated with it, such as the literature on the “Brahmin left” and “Merchant right.” Nor am I particularly qualified to judge the obvious challenges of economic history which may be raised against Piketty’s interpretation of the data, where they may exist (as with the relationship between marginal tax rates and growth in the 20th century).
The present goal is also not to contextualise Piketty’s argument within the recent and looming developments in Brazil and India, respectively - two countries which play important roles in the book. Not because such a project would be without merit, but because they hint at a more general rift in Piketty’s work that ought to be addressed first.
In a nutshell, the reservations system - preserving educational and other resources for historically disadvantaged Indians - increasingly seems like something that will be weaponized across the political field. At the same time, it is this very system that Piketty spends a long time describing and commending, suggesting ways in which it may serve as an inspiration elsewhere.
Now, it bears explicit note that there are undoubtedly strengths to this approach. Firstly, I maintain that understanding the ways in which our institutions and modes of thinking are historically contingent is an obvious good. This clearly expands on the other sections of the book which draw a general genealogy of the “trifunctional society.” Secondly, centering the perspectives and experiences of non-Western societies with longer histories of multicultural coexistence is obviously not without merit.
Yet we must turn back to the reservations. What does the fact that their increasingly intense alternating use as both carrot and stick have to do with Piketty’s overall approach? After all, affirmative action as a principle seems to be taking a beating the world over, not the least in the United States. What makes the reservations case important is, in my opinion, precisely the fact that so much time is spent discussing it without seriously dealing with grave ideational threats to its existence and purpose. This, I eventually realised, was not an isolated incident. Instead, it fits right into a pattern of thought which lines the book from start to finish. One which I finally understood thanks to a footnote on page 1007.
The footnote in question comes during a discussion of carbon emission taxes, with Piketty suggesting the idea of a “true progressive tax” - which would eventually require the centralised accounting and evaluation of every single purchase by all of the world’s citizens. He recognizes this is a pretty tall ask: “[...] the idea of using credit card data does raise serious privacy issues,” footnote number 93 reads, “[I]n my view, however, it is strange not to consider the possibility of developing procedures for making use of such information in a controlled way.” Until I read those words, there was a recurring experience with the book where often it felt like Piketty evaded answering the (to me, at least) obvious retorts that opponents of his stance and recommendations might raise.
Having read them, however, I felt I finally understood the rhetorical strategy Piketty implicitly based his approach on. It is one familiar from political debates of all sizes - attempt to stake your position as the reasonable one, so that your opponent is forced into defending the unreasonable - a fool’s errand, sooner or later. Whether or not this strategy can succeed, however, crucially hinges on the participants and the audience having a broad overlap of the criteria by which this reasonableness is evaluated. And while Piketty may have hope - as indicated also in his sections pushing back against the trope of the inherently nativist “disadvantaged classes” - that this is the case, I would be careful against concluding that just yet.
Despite having “Ideology” in its title, the book deals with the subject in a rather flat way. At the outset, Piketty provides a shortlist of six ideological “categories:” proprietarian, social-democratic, communist, trifunctional, slaveist, and colonialist. While the latter four and their internal tensions serve mainly as the propulsion of the first three sections of the book, by the final section we arrive at the finalists of (neo-)proprietarian and social-democratic ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Surpassing the propertarian ideology born of the political and social revolutions of the tail end of the 18th century, then - just as was done to the other obsolete categories - serves as the key challenge for Piketty.
Helpfully, the glossary provides a streamlined definition of the proprietarian ideology. It is described as the “ideology of ownership society, based on the sacralization of property rights.” In the narrative of the book, it is described as being all but destroyed over the course of the 20th century, re-emerging as neo-proprietarianism with the same developments that might be described by others as the “neoliberal turn,” with a key role played in both by laissez-faire capitalism. Although Piketty describes these developments with some detail, he never drills down into what the key distinctions - if any - are between proprietarianism and its “updated” form.
He attributes neo-proprietarianism’s rise to the writings of Hayek and the circumstances created by the fall of the Soviet Union. But the most concrete example of where the new differs from the old is in the structure of income inequality, with the explosion of executive pay well-known to those familiar with Piketty’s arguments. Simply put, while on the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries income inequality was prominent primarily in capital income, today we find sharp spikes even in labour income as we travel from income decile to income decile. Later in the book, Piketty also adds that neo-proprietarianism is distinguishable by its recourse to the dogma of meritocracy, noting that “[...] it has become increasingly common to blame the poor for their poverty. This is one of the principal distinctive features of today’s inequality regime.” This, to me, seems an insufficient definition of the ideology which is to be subjected to question and demasking as unreasonable.
Ideologies as often understood are clusters of (varyingly prioritised) political concepts. These represent values which are in their essence contestable, which provides the lifeblood for ideological competition in the first place. In this view, it is clear that for both versions of proprietarianism, the protection of property rights represents a core belief. Granted, some aspect of meritocracy, which may be traced to the proto-conservative belief in a natural hierarchy and organic societal function, would likely take up a privileged position as well. Yet what is the remainder of the conceptual space and how is it understood?
This is not a banal argument. Even staying within the milieu of the New Right, nobody would deny the differences between libertarianism and neoconservatism on the subject of welfare programmes, for example. If the goal is to reveal the internal logic of neo-proprietarianism to show that it is inconsistent and unsustainable, surely one must actually be able to orient oneself in that internal logic to a greater degree. Only by knowing what is important and meaningful to people (or else they would not need convincing to abandon the ideology) can the task be begun of addressing these concerns and showing they may be better served - more truthfully realised - otherwise.
Piketty pays significant attention to the question of borders - the delineation of political communities. This is no insignificant matter, especially in the context of recent years, where the second half of the 2010s in Europe and North America was spent under a deluge of nativist opportunists, with their rhetoric moreover becoming a significant export commodity. However, while I don't disagree that this is a critical issue, I would not consider it as unique as the final chapters of the book make it out to be. The issue, I think, boils down precisely to the mid-level concepts and understandings engendered in the neo-propertarian ideology: Who are We, who counts as the Other, and what is the relationship between these two? These are big questions, no doubt. But they are clustered and tied to other concepts - what can a human “deserve” in the 21st century? And who owes it to them?
Unless we see neo-proprietarianism as an ideology - a network of concepts given a certain meaning and tied together by a narrative, though inherently vulnerable to redefinition, I don’t think it is realistic to expect that we can show its current state to be unreasonable. In other words, taking us back to that footnote: Piketty fails to appreciate the extent to which the concepts of “privacy” or “freedom,” central to many people’s conception of politics, might be threatened by suggestions such as tracking the nature of their every single economic transaction. It is not any false consciousness which leads them to support the existing ideational framework, but rather their fear of grave damage to their understanding of a well-ordered society.
What makes this all the more unfortunate is that Piketty is elsewhere very pragmatic about the strategy necessary to, in his words, “[establish a just society] on the basis of participatory socialism and social federalism.” He explicitly and repeatedly notes the need for coalition-building as the precondition for the realisation of a new egalitarian turn in politics. Yet how exactly a sustainable coalition might be built if we fail to appreciate the lineage of concepts and their meanings is the question left gnawing at a careful reader. The historical narrative Piketty so gracefully weaves leaves no doubt about the fact that dominant ideologies can be superseded. But while Piketty does essentially boil his recommendations down to three broad aspects, he remains murky on how exactly we get people to care about and support these goals.
Ultimately this is an unavoidable outcome of his generalisation of the neo-proprietarian “category” of ideologies. Because without dealing with concrete ideologies and their respective value networks, it is impossible to craft meaningful persuasive strategies. A frontal assault on the concept of private property is doomed to failure if one fails to account for why private property is so important to the people at hand - it might to them be a token of their past achievements, a mark of their freedom, or any number of other genuinely important roles.
This, more than anything, seems like a blindspot of an otherwise well-researched and well-intentioned, carefully laid out argument. In this book, ideologies exist not as bundles of beliefs which are given importance and coherence by daily practice and discourse, but as world-historic spirits which have a declared but unexplained link to events and ideas. Not as an oversight, or in order not to extend an already respectably long tome, but because the author seems to believe that ultimately this is just a minor hiccup that will be dealt with as it comes up. And this, I think, is a shame for readers regardless of how much they personally agree with Piketty’s priors, interpretations, and conclusions. Because the same ambition and breadth demonstrated in this book, applied to that question, would be interesting reading indeed.
My ambition is not to use the time that has passed to judge the academic impacts of the book and the papers closely associated with it, such as the literature on the “Brahmin left” and “Merchant right.” Nor am I particularly qualified to judge the obvious challenges of economic history which may be raised against Piketty’s interpretation of the data, where they may exist (as with the relationship between marginal tax rates and growth in the 20th century).
The present goal is also not to contextualise Piketty’s argument within the recent and looming developments in Brazil and India, respectively - two countries which play important roles in the book. Not because such a project would be without merit, but because they hint at a more general rift in Piketty’s work that ought to be addressed first.
In a nutshell, the reservations system - preserving educational and other resources for historically disadvantaged Indians - increasingly seems like something that will be weaponized across the political field. At the same time, it is this very system that Piketty spends a long time describing and commending, suggesting ways in which it may serve as an inspiration elsewhere.
Now, it bears explicit note that there are undoubtedly strengths to this approach. Firstly, I maintain that understanding the ways in which our institutions and modes of thinking are historically contingent is an obvious good. This clearly expands on the other sections of the book which draw a general genealogy of the “trifunctional society.” Secondly, centering the perspectives and experiences of non-Western societies with longer histories of multicultural coexistence is obviously not without merit.
Yet we must turn back to the reservations. What does the fact that their increasingly intense alternating use as both carrot and stick have to do with Piketty’s overall approach? After all, affirmative action as a principle seems to be taking a beating the world over, not the least in the United States. What makes the reservations case important is, in my opinion, precisely the fact that so much time is spent discussing it without seriously dealing with grave ideational threats to its existence and purpose. This, I eventually realised, was not an isolated incident. Instead, it fits right into a pattern of thought which lines the book from start to finish. One which I finally understood thanks to a footnote on page 1007.
The footnote in question comes during a discussion of carbon emission taxes, with Piketty suggesting the idea of a “true progressive tax” - which would eventually require the centralised accounting and evaluation of every single purchase by all of the world’s citizens. He recognizes this is a pretty tall ask: “[...] the idea of using credit card data does raise serious privacy issues,” footnote number 93 reads, “[I]n my view, however, it is strange not to consider the possibility of developing procedures for making use of such information in a controlled way.” Until I read those words, there was a recurring experience with the book where often it felt like Piketty evaded answering the (to me, at least) obvious retorts that opponents of his stance and recommendations might raise.
Having read them, however, I felt I finally understood the rhetorical strategy Piketty implicitly based his approach on. It is one familiar from political debates of all sizes - attempt to stake your position as the reasonable one, so that your opponent is forced into defending the unreasonable - a fool’s errand, sooner or later. Whether or not this strategy can succeed, however, crucially hinges on the participants and the audience having a broad overlap of the criteria by which this reasonableness is evaluated. And while Piketty may have hope - as indicated also in his sections pushing back against the trope of the inherently nativist “disadvantaged classes” - that this is the case, I would be careful against concluding that just yet.
Despite having “Ideology” in its title, the book deals with the subject in a rather flat way. At the outset, Piketty provides a shortlist of six ideological “categories:” proprietarian, social-democratic, communist, trifunctional, slaveist, and colonialist. While the latter four and their internal tensions serve mainly as the propulsion of the first three sections of the book, by the final section we arrive at the finalists of (neo-)proprietarian and social-democratic ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Surpassing the propertarian ideology born of the political and social revolutions of the tail end of the 18th century, then - just as was done to the other obsolete categories - serves as the key challenge for Piketty.
Helpfully, the glossary provides a streamlined definition of the proprietarian ideology. It is described as the “ideology of ownership society, based on the sacralization of property rights.” In the narrative of the book, it is described as being all but destroyed over the course of the 20th century, re-emerging as neo-proprietarianism with the same developments that might be described by others as the “neoliberal turn,” with a key role played in both by laissez-faire capitalism. Although Piketty describes these developments with some detail, he never drills down into what the key distinctions - if any - are between proprietarianism and its “updated” form.
He attributes neo-proprietarianism’s rise to the writings of Hayek and the circumstances created by the fall of the Soviet Union. But the most concrete example of where the new differs from the old is in the structure of income inequality, with the explosion of executive pay well-known to those familiar with Piketty’s arguments. Simply put, while on the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries income inequality was prominent primarily in capital income, today we find sharp spikes even in labour income as we travel from income decile to income decile. Later in the book, Piketty also adds that neo-proprietarianism is distinguishable by its recourse to the dogma of meritocracy, noting that “[...] it has become increasingly common to blame the poor for their poverty. This is one of the principal distinctive features of today’s inequality regime.” This, to me, seems an insufficient definition of the ideology which is to be subjected to question and demasking as unreasonable.
Ideologies as often understood are clusters of (varyingly prioritised) political concepts. These represent values which are in their essence contestable, which provides the lifeblood for ideological competition in the first place. In this view, it is clear that for both versions of proprietarianism, the protection of property rights represents a core belief. Granted, some aspect of meritocracy, which may be traced to the proto-conservative belief in a natural hierarchy and organic societal function, would likely take up a privileged position as well. Yet what is the remainder of the conceptual space and how is it understood?
This is not a banal argument. Even staying within the milieu of the New Right, nobody would deny the differences between libertarianism and neoconservatism on the subject of welfare programmes, for example. If the goal is to reveal the internal logic of neo-proprietarianism to show that it is inconsistent and unsustainable, surely one must actually be able to orient oneself in that internal logic to a greater degree. Only by knowing what is important and meaningful to people (or else they would not need convincing to abandon the ideology) can the task be begun of addressing these concerns and showing they may be better served - more truthfully realised - otherwise.
Piketty pays significant attention to the question of borders - the delineation of political communities. This is no insignificant matter, especially in the context of recent years, where the second half of the 2010s in Europe and North America was spent under a deluge of nativist opportunists, with their rhetoric moreover becoming a significant export commodity. However, while I don't disagree that this is a critical issue, I would not consider it as unique as the final chapters of the book make it out to be. The issue, I think, boils down precisely to the mid-level concepts and understandings engendered in the neo-propertarian ideology: Who are We, who counts as the Other, and what is the relationship between these two? These are big questions, no doubt. But they are clustered and tied to other concepts - what can a human “deserve” in the 21st century? And who owes it to them?
Unless we see neo-proprietarianism as an ideology - a network of concepts given a certain meaning and tied together by a narrative, though inherently vulnerable to redefinition, I don’t think it is realistic to expect that we can show its current state to be unreasonable. In other words, taking us back to that footnote: Piketty fails to appreciate the extent to which the concepts of “privacy” or “freedom,” central to many people’s conception of politics, might be threatened by suggestions such as tracking the nature of their every single economic transaction. It is not any false consciousness which leads them to support the existing ideational framework, but rather their fear of grave damage to their understanding of a well-ordered society.
What makes this all the more unfortunate is that Piketty is elsewhere very pragmatic about the strategy necessary to, in his words, “[establish a just society] on the basis of participatory socialism and social federalism.” He explicitly and repeatedly notes the need for coalition-building as the precondition for the realisation of a new egalitarian turn in politics. Yet how exactly a sustainable coalition might be built if we fail to appreciate the lineage of concepts and their meanings is the question left gnawing at a careful reader. The historical narrative Piketty so gracefully weaves leaves no doubt about the fact that dominant ideologies can be superseded. But while Piketty does essentially boil his recommendations down to three broad aspects, he remains murky on how exactly we get people to care about and support these goals.
Ultimately this is an unavoidable outcome of his generalisation of the neo-proprietarian “category” of ideologies. Because without dealing with concrete ideologies and their respective value networks, it is impossible to craft meaningful persuasive strategies. A frontal assault on the concept of private property is doomed to failure if one fails to account for why private property is so important to the people at hand - it might to them be a token of their past achievements, a mark of their freedom, or any number of other genuinely important roles.
This, more than anything, seems like a blindspot of an otherwise well-researched and well-intentioned, carefully laid out argument. In this book, ideologies exist not as bundles of beliefs which are given importance and coherence by daily practice and discourse, but as world-historic spirits which have a declared but unexplained link to events and ideas. Not as an oversight, or in order not to extend an already respectably long tome, but because the author seems to believe that ultimately this is just a minor hiccup that will be dealt with as it comes up. And this, I think, is a shame for readers regardless of how much they personally agree with Piketty’s priors, interpretations, and conclusions. Because the same ambition and breadth demonstrated in this book, applied to that question, would be interesting reading indeed.
challenging
slow-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
medium-paced
A very detailed and exhaustive study. I'll have to try to get through it again to retain more of it!
Don't let the page count (or, in my case, the length of the audiobook) turn you off from this book, because it is better and more important than Capital in the 21st Century. Much of this book is standard political science combined with economic data, making it a great example of political economy, which we really should call all economics. The main point of the book underlines this: There is nothing inevitable about capitalism nor the type of capitalism we live in today--despite what neoclassical economics and neoliberal politicians tell us. The way societies are organised are always an outcome of political choices. A sociologist would add that actions have unintended consequences, but in the main, the argument is exceptionally well outlined and backed with data. Piketty tries to expand his horizons from the Anglo-European sphere and does succeed to an extent, although the rather long historical sections on India and China will no doubt bore some readers looking for the economics 'hard data' here. Despite the breadth, Piketty always keeps the reader on track by plentiful reminders about the issues at hand. That's why the audiobook version works as well. Where I don't necessarily share his enthusiasm, is the future of the European Union and/or democratic socialist federalism (as he calls it). It is difficult to see how in our current juncture, where fascism is not just a historical anomaly, but everyday politics, something like this could realistically be accomplished. But I liked the message of hope, anyway. We cannot stop working towards that better future, despite the grim situation.