You know, maybe you think that the inequalities of the current day are much worse than people had been expecting. The sections on Soviet and socialist experience can only be called “delusional.” In his account, if only a few political decisions had gone the other way, the USSR might have ended up on a path similar to that of Norway (p.603 and thereabouts). Nor does “The United States is a remarkably successful innovator, let’s see what we can learn from that.” Or even “Raising wages is more important than merely limiting inequality.” Those seems to be banished thoughts in the Piketty intellectual universe.Ĥ. The sentence “Real wages are much higher in America than in Western Europe” does not come easily to his pen. For instance, Sweden (among other countries) seems to have fairly extreme wealth inequality.ģ. Piketty also calls for “participatory socialism” (p.592), a dubious doctrine not to be confused with say Nordic social democracy. I can think of a less naive explanation of Soviet attitudes toward the private sector. If one began by authorizing private ownership of small businesses, would one be able to set limits? Most important was the fear of not knowing where to stop. Criminalizing carters and food peddlers to the point of incarcerating them may seem absurd, but there was a certain logic to the policy. To return to the Soviet attitude toward poverty, it is important to try to understand why the government took such a radical stance against all forms of private ownership of the means of production, no matter how small. Many of those parts remain interesting, but it also becomes clear that Piketty is “out to lunch,” to wit (p.591):

At some point the book veers into partisan issues such as the wealth tax.

You can evaluate that material without reference to any particular set of political views.Ģ. of this book is a carefully done history of the accumulation and sometimes dissipation of wealth and property. This book is more than 1000 pp., here are my impressions:ġ.

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty