By Peter Galuszka
Call it “The Anti-Baconomics.”
Thomas Piketty, a French economist, is turning conventional, conservative economic thinking on its head. Goodbye to the idea that all boats rise in capitalism. What we are seeing instead is a dangerous concentration of 21st century wealth in the hands of an ever-smaller elite.
This is Piketty’s message in his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (a 700-pager on my reading list) that caught Europe by storm last year and is now a best-seller in this country.
Unlike convention wisdom, the thesis from this thinker from the Paris School of Economics is that Marx was wrong about capitalism self-destructing but so is Nobel Prize winner Simon Kuznets who posited a few decades ago that the inequality gap inevitably grows smaller with economic growth. Just the opposite, it turns out.
“One of the great divisive forces at work today,” Pinketty has said, “is what I call meritocratic extremism. This is the conflict between billionaires, whose income comes from property and assets, such as a Saudi prince, and super-managers. Neither of these categories makes or produces anything but their wealth, which is really a super-wealth that has broken away from the everyday reality of the market, which determines how most ordinary people live.”
This is why, perhaps, middle class families struggle to see declining disposable income while others who do not produce wealth but slice it and dice, like hedge fund managers or managers of huge corporations, are safe with their unsinkable portfolios. It is the same in just about any country, capitalist or no, from the U.S., to Spain, to China, to India to Russia.
If this continue continues unabated, as it probably will, you will see increasing social unrest as the 21st century wears on.
It seems interesting that Piketty who is in this 40s, came up of this relatively free from the residual Marxist thinking, or Keynesian for that matter, that did lurk in the background of many college economics intro courses. The Frenchman seems to be viewing things through a new prism of what has actually been happening over the past five decades when the middle class dream started evaporating and hard work, sacrifice and productivity simply no longer mattered.
If you read one of the books published a few years back by a prominent blogger here, you get the same-old Reaganomics of trickle down topped with a sauce of the Protestant worth ethic masquerading as agnosticism.
What’s the upshot of Piketty? It seems to be taxes, taxes and more taxes. In other words, it is time to start considering redistributing wealth from the elite back to their societies. The question seems to be “Why not? The elite didn’t really earn it anyway.”
Read meat for conservatives. The right-wing media has launched an anti-Piketty counterattack which is healthy and predictable. But he has a few things going for him. Given his youth, he represents the fresh views of up-and-coming thought leaders. And their thoughts are hardly the conventional all-boats-rise sophistry. Watch as the debate becomes stronger.
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