What does Piketty say about inequality?
To Piketty, history is a battle of ideas. Every unequal society, he says, creates an ideology to justify inequality – that allows the rich to fall asleep in their townhouses while the homeless freeze outside. He recounts the justifications that recur throughout history: “The wealth will trickle down”.
How does Piketty define ideology?
Piketty argues that there is a cyclical tendency for ideology to defend inequality, and for inequality to feed ideology. Ideology involves a “range of contradictory discourses”, which create a “dominant narrative”. These narratives lead to rules. The rules bolster inequality, and inequality generates more ideology.
What is inequality Piketty?
I define “inequality regime” as the justification [used] for the structure of inequality and also the institutions — the legal system, the educational system, the fiscal system — that help sustain a certain level of equality or inequality in a given society.
How does Piketty define wealth?
A country’s wealth:income ratio is simply the value of all the financial assets owned by its citizens against the country’s gross domestic product. Piketty’s big empirical achievement is constructing time series data about wealth:income ratios for different countries over the long term.
What are some of Thomas Piketty’s conclusions about a way forward as it pertains to the concentration of capital?
Piketty’s argument is that, in an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice.
What was the case of Thomas Piketty in France?
It also renewed attention in France to a domestic violence case: In 2009, Piketty’s former romantic partner Aurélie Filippetti, then a Socialist member of the French Parliament who later became minister of culture, filed a complaint against him, which was withdrawn after he apologized for having made her “suffer violence.”
What kind of wealth tax does Thomas Piketty want?
It proposes strong remedies. Piketty wants to slap wealth taxes of 90 per cent on any assets over $1 billion, and waxes nostalgic about the postwar decades when British and American top marginal income-tax rates were over 80 per cent. Much of Piketty’s information comes from the World Inequality Database (WID), which he created with colleagues.
How big is Piketty’s new book Global Inequality?
A t just over 1,100 pages, Piketty’s new book surpasses Capital in the Twenty-First Century in size and scope by a considerable extent; it is, in many ways, a far more ambitious work in both its range and its politics. For one thing, he expands his analysis of inequality beyond the major Western economies that constituted much of his earlier focus.
Why did Thomas Piketty become a radical economist?
In an era when technology platforms are arguably concentrating wealth in the hands of a diminishing number of people in the Valley, Piketty’s advocacy of much higher taxes has attracted the attention of both progressives and radicals around the world.