Thomas Piketty’s Crusade Against Inequality

Part I of this chapter includes a summary of Piketty’s bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century—a passionate, impressive, and wide-ranging historical analysis of the growing gap between the wealthy and the rest. In it, he argues that the gap will further widen—the Kuznets curve is wrong. The gap is not just widening; the wealthy benefit disproportionally—they got richer by the day. The system is based on neoliberal notions about freeing up the market and keeping government small, so as to promote growth, of which everybody, it was thought, would benefit. Liberalism had promoted equal opportunities, rather than redistribution of income and wealth. But it did not work. Part II describes Piketty’s inspiration, elaborated in his Capital and Ideology, which is summarized. Piketty hopes to see participatory socialism emerging. Apart from Rawls and Sen, Piketty inspirators are roughly same as Mazzucato’s: Arendt, Keynes, and Polanyi.