Thomas Piketty’s “Nature, Culture and Inequality,” weighing in at a slim 82 pages, packs quite a wallop for its size. Originally presented as a series of lectures, this “comparative and historical and perspective’ (the book’s subtitle) is the perfect introduction to Piketty’s pioneering work.
Piketty came to international notice a decade ago with his much heftier “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which tapped centuries of economic data to show how the uneven distributions of returns on capital have greatly aggravated wealth inequality.
“Nature, Culture, and Inequality” reprises, in part, some of the same argument but offers even more thoughts on a wider range of equity issues that face us in the present. In addition to income and wealth, Piketty comments as well on gender and political inequality, summarizing where we are, the trends that brought us to our present, and what we might expect in the future.
Piketty first dispenses with the common conservative claim that economic inequality is simply a law of nature. In fact, different eras and different countries have not dealt with economic inequality in the same way. Piketty offers Sweden as an example. When Sweden’s Social Democrats came to power in 1932 and held until the 1990s, Sweden reversed the favoritism it had previously shown capital and property ownership, and through tax policy and legislation moved the country toward a more equitable and socially responsible state. As Piketty puts it, Sweden has shown “that a country is never inegalitarian or egalitarian by nature.” It’s a choice.
That, of course, is precisely the lesson wealthy conservatives would rather not learn.
Piketty also makes a trenchant observation about national debt that I hadn’t thought about. As often as we worry over our national debt, I had never understood many of the ways governments can retire their debt. I knew debtors like inflation because paying back debt in devalued currency “costs” less, but as we have just seen, even a little inflation has its problems, too.
Piketty points to Germany’s experience with rampant inflation following WWI and contrasts that period with how it acted after the Second World War. When its colonial empire collapsed in 1945, the value of Germany’s property assets collapsed as well, skyrocketing its debt far beyond what it had incurred waging Hitler’s war. What did Germany do? It divided the value of its debt by 100 (a neat trick governments can perform), assessed the nation’s largest fortunes at 50% of their asset value to compensate holders of smaller assets and continued that high assessment into the 1980s. In short, Germany acted to share the responsibility for its debt among its citizens equitably and effectively.
“Nature, Culture, and Inequality” is chock full of morsels like these. Other short chapters on “Gender Inequality,” “An Uneven March Toward Equality in Europe” and “The Rise of the Welfare State” have their own. What most struck me, though, were charts like the ones on education spending over time in France, the distribution of income and wealth around the world, and on colonial assets held by countries, including the United States, prior to WWII, and how those massive assets suddenly disappeared at the war’s end. The world is still dealing with the economic and social fallout from that tectonic shift that occurred only 80 years ago.
Nor content with the past, Piketty has his eye on the future too. His last chapter, “Nature and Inequality” looks at climate change’s effect on the struggle towards economic and political equality. We all know the causes and consequences of climate change are not equally shared, and it is here again Piketty says clearly that unequal treatments are the only way to achieve equitable results. Following the logic of progressive income and estate taxes, he suggests a progressive carbon assessment that would levy a higher “tax” on the more industrialized nations.
That may seem a dream, but as Piketty proves in this short book, and as our own experience tells us, it is also a choice.
“Nature, Culture, and Inequality” by Thomas Piketty (translated by Willard Wood) [Other Press. 2023, 82 pages]
Ken Winkes is a retired teacher and high school principal living in Conway, Wash.
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2025
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