Piketty2020hupextracts

 usa JOEL SAGET/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES From reviews of Capital in the Twenty-First Century THOMAS “The most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade.” PIKETTY CAPITAL —PAUL K R U G MAN , New York Times “Piketty’s economic analysis and historical proofs are breathtaking. R EI CH , Guardian R “A book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.” C A P I T A L AND IDEOLOGY —J OHN CAS S I DY, New Yorker THOMAS PIKETTY’S bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First “[Piketty] is now the most talked-about economist on the planet.” AND Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In —RAN A FO R O O H AR , Time this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revo- IDEOLOGY lutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and his- tory. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow poli- Early acclaim for Capital and Ideology tics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.

“Thomas Piketty’s magisterial global and connected history takes us on a whirl- Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. wind journey across the world during the past 500 years to show how shifting Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs T HOM A S P I K E T T Y is Director of Studies at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Professor at the ideas and politics have shaped a wide variety of inequality regimes. Fully em- bracing the power of historical analysis, Capital and Ideology emboldens us to reimagine what is possible today. Enormously rich in argument and evidence, this tour de force by one of the most influential thinkers of our age is a must-read R that depend on choices.

Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, com- munism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of bil- THOMAS Paris School of Economics. He is the author of Capital for anyone grappling with the dilemmas of our present. He concludes that the great driver of human in the Twenty-First Century. —SVEN BECKERT, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the sa- “A book of remarkable clarity and dynamism.

Drawing lessons from a breathtak- cralization of property rights or the pursuit of stability. ing survey of different historical experiences, it teaches us that nothing is inevi- The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that table, that there exist a whole range of possibilities between hypercapitalism and progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction PIKETTY the disasters of the communist experience. It’s up to us to make our future. Let’s against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, roll up our sleeves.” intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the —EST HER DUFLO, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences dead-end politics of identity.

Once we understand this, we can begin to envision “Might become even more politically influential than. Capital in the Twenty- a more balanced approach to economics and politics.” Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a sys- —SI MON K U PER , Financial Times tem founded on an ideology of equality, social proper- THE BELKNAP PRESS OF Author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller ty, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Capital in the Twenty-First Century Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indis- pensable books of our time, a work that not only will hup.edu help us understand the world, but will change it. T RA N S LAT E D B Y A RT H U R G O L D H A M M E R JACKET DESIGN: GRACIELA GALUP PikettyUS_jacket_final.indd All Pages 12/4/19 3:39 PM CAPITAL AND IDEOLOGY R Thomas Piketty Translated by Arthur Goldhammer The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Mas­s a­c hu­s etts London, ­E ngland —-1 2020 —0 —+1 514-81779_ch00_2P.indd 3 11/13/19 8:55 PM Copyright © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College First published in French as Capital et idéologie Copyright © 2019 Éditions du Seuil, 2019 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­ic­ a First printing Design by Dean Bornstein Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data -1— 0— +1— 514-81779_ch00_2P.indd 4 11/13/19 8:55 PM Contents Preface and Acknowl­edgments ​.

In­equality Regimes in History 1. Ternary Socie­ties: Trifunctional In­equality ​. ​51 ­ rders: Power and Property ​. Eu­ro­pean Socie­ties of O 3. The Invention of Owner­ship Socie­ties ​.

Owner­ship Socie­ties: The Case of France ​. Owner­ship Socie­ties: Eu­ro­pean Trajectories ​. Slave and Colonial Socie­ties 6. Slave Socie­ties: Extreme In­equality ​.

Colonial Socie­ties: Diversity and Domination ​. Ternary Socie­ties and Colonialism: The Case of India ​. Ternary Socie­ties and Colonialism: Eurasian Trajectories ​. The ­Great Transformation of the Twentieth C ­ entury 10.

The Crisis of Owner­ship Socie­ties ​. Social-­Democratic Socie­ties: Incomplete Equality ​. Communist and Postcommunist Socie­ties ​. Hypercapitalism: Between Modernity and Archaism ​.

Rethinking the Dimensions of Po­liti­cal Conflict 14. Borders and Property: The Construction of Equality ​. Brahmin Left: New Euro-­American Cleavages ​. Social Nativism: The Postcolonial Identitarian Trap ​.

Ele­ments for a Participatory Socialism for the Twenty-­First ­Century ​. ​1043 Contents in Detail ​. 1045 ­ ables and Illustrations ​. ​1059 List of T Index ​.indd 5 11/13/19 8:55 PM -1— 0— +1— 514-81779_ch00_2P.indd 6 11/13/19 8:55 PM Preface and Acknowl­edgments This book is in large part a sequel to Capital in the Twenty-­First C ­ entury (French edition, 2013; En­glish, 2014), but it can be read in­de­pen­dently. Like the previous work, it is the culmination of a collective effort in the sense that it would never have seen the light of day without the help and support of nu- merous friends and colleagues. I am of course solely responsible for the inter- pretations and analyses developed in the pages that follow, but by myself I would never have been able to assem­ble the historical sources on which this research rests.

I rely in par­tic­u­lar on the data collected in the World In­equality Database (http://­WID​. This proj­ect represents the combined effort of more than a hundred researchers in more than eighty countries around the world. It is currently the largest database available for the historical study of income and wealth in­equality both between and within countries. For the purposes of this book I have also collected numerous other sources and documents concerning periods, countries, and aspects of in­equality not well covered by WID.world, including, for example, data on pre­industrial and colonial socie­ ties; on inequalities of education, gender, race, religion, and status; and also on religious beliefs, po­liti­cal attitudes, and electoral be­hav­ior.

Only the principal references are cited in the text and footnotes. Readers interested in detailed information regarding the ­whole range of historical sources, bibliographic references, and methods used in this book are urged to consult the online technical appendix at http://­piketty​. Interested readers w ­ ill also find in the online appendix many graphs and data series not included in the text due to space limitations. I sometimes refer to ­these sources in the footnotes.

The glossary at the end of this book contains definitions for several terms that may be unfamiliar to readers, which are marked with an asterisk in the text. I am particularly grateful to Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Em- manuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, with whom I codirected the WID.world proj­ect and the World In­equality Lab at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California at Berkeley. Out of this joint venture came the recent World In­equality Report 2018 (http://­wir2018​.w ­ orld), of which I —-1 make abundant use in this book. I also wish to thank the institutions that —0 vii —+1 514-81779_ch00_2P.indd 7 11/13/19 8:55 PM viii.

Preface and Acknowl­e dgments made this proj­ect pos­si­ble, first and foremost the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), where I have taught since 2000—­one of the few institutions in the world where social scientists of all stripes can listen to and exchange ideas with one another. I also wish to thank the École Normale Su- périeure and all the other institutions that joined forces in 2007 to create the Paris School of Economics, which I hope w ­ ill contribute to the development of the economics of the twenty-­first c­ entury, an economics that is at once po­ liti­cal and historical, multipolar and multidisciplinary. For their invaluable assistance I also wish to thank Lydia Assouad, Abhijit Banerjee, Adam Barbé, Charlotte Bartels, Erik Bengtsson, Asma Benhenda, Yonatan Berman, Nitin Bharti, Thomas Blanchet, Cécile Bonneau, Manon Bouju, Jérôme Bourdieu, Antoine Bozio, Cameron Campbell, Guillaume Carré, Guilhem Cassan, Amélie Chelly, Bijia Chen, Denis Cogneau, Léo Czajka, Anne-­Laure Delatte, Mauricio De Rosa, Richard Dewever, Mark Dincecco, Esther Duflo, Luis Estevez-­Bauluz, Ignacio Flores, Juliette Fournier, Bertrand Garbinti, Amory Gethin, Jonathan Goupille-­Lebret, Yajna Govind, Julien Grenet, Jean-­Yves Grenier, Malka Guillot, Pierre-­Cyrille Hautcoeur, Stéphanie Hennette, Simon Henochsberg, Cheuk Ting Hung, Thanasak Jemmama, Francesca Jensenius, Fabian Kosse, Attila Lindner, Noam Maggor, Clara Martinez Toledano, Ewan McGaughey, Cyril Milhaud, Eric Monnet, Marc Morgan, Mathilde Munoz, Alix Myczkowski, Delphine Nougayrede, Filip Novokmet, Katharina Pistor, Gilles Postel-­Vinay, Jean-­Laurent Rosen- thal, Nina Rousille, Guillaume Sacriste, Aurélie Sotura, Alessandro Stanziani, Blaise Truong-­Loï, Antoine Vauchez, Sebastien Veg, Marlous van Waijenburg, Richard Von Glahn, Daniel Waldenström, Li Yang, Tom Zawisza, and Roxane Zighed as well as all my friends and colleagues at the Centre François-­Simiand d’Histoire Économique et Sociale and the Centre de Recherches Historiques of the EHESS and the Paris School of Economics. I also owe special thanks to Arthur Goldhammer.

Every time I go through the pages of the English version of Capital in the Twenty-First Century or Capital and Ideology, I realize how fortunate I was to have Art as my translator. Without his help, I would never have been able to communicate with English-speaking readers with the same precision and elegance. This book has also benefited from the numerous debates and discussions in which I have had the good fortune to participate since the publication of Capital in the Twenty-­First ­Century. I spent much of 2014–2016 traveling around the -1— world, meeting readers, researchers, dissenters, and citizens e­ ager to join the de- 0— bate.

I participated in hundreds of discussions about my book and the questions +1— 514-81779_ch00_2P.indd 8 11/13/19 8:55 PM Preface and Acknowl­e dgments. ix it raised. From t­ hese many encounters I learned an im­mense amount, which has helped me to delve deeper into the historical dynamics of in­equality. Among the many shortcomings of my previous book, two deserve special mention.

First, that work focused too exclusively on the historical experience of the wealthy countries of the world (in Western Eu­rope, North Amer­i­ca, and Japan). This was due in part to the difficulty of accessing historical sources adequate for the study of other countries and regions. It was nevertheless a choice that sharply restricted my focus and thinking. Second, the e­ arlier book tended to treat the po­liti­cal and ideological changes associated with in­ equality and re­distribution as a sort of black box.

I did propose a number of hypotheses concerning, for example, changes in po­liti­cal ideas and attitudes in regard to in­equality and private property as a result of the two world wars of the twentieth c­ entury, economic crises, and the communist challenge, but I never tackled head-on the question of how inegalitarian ideologies evolved. In this new work I attempt to do this much more explic­itly by examining the question in a much broader temporal, spatial, and comparative perspective.