Thomas Piketty
The French economist Thomas Piketty's book, "Capital in the 21st Century," has caused quite a firestorm in the U.S. Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Review of Books, described it as "a call to arms" for those who wish "to restrain the growing power of inherited wealth." Conservative commentators have fretted about Mr. Piketty's "soft Marxism" (in the words of James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute) and the obvious allusion, in the book's title, to Marx's own "Das Kapital."
In more than 600 data-filled pages, Mr. Piketty argues that capitalism creates a vicious cycle of inequality because the rate of return on assets is higher, over the long run, than the rate of overall economic growth. This divergence, he says, threatens to turn modern society into a neo-feudal order—a scenario that he would like to avert through the imposition of a global tax on wealth (as opposed to income).
Just how radical is Mr. Piketty? In truth, not very. With his accent, easy erudition, unbuttoned shirt and thick, dark hair, he is every bit the French intellectual, but not every French intellectual is a radical. In France, honest-to-goodness actual Marxists are still at large, and the soft-spoken Mr. Piketty is hard to mistake for that sort. Perhaps that is why he hasn't had the same impact on the public debate in France as he has had in the U.S.
Mr. Piketty is a well-known public intellectual in France. He writes a column in the left-wing daily Libération and served as a top economic adviser to the Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal in the 2007 election. But his book wasn't a publishing phenomenon in Paris. In fact, most of the news stories relating to it haven't been about the book itself but about its unexpected success in the U.S.
The reason for this disparate reception is simple enough: What drives discussion and sales is controversy, and the idea that capitalism produces ever-increasing inequality and fundamentally corrodes the social order is controversial in the U.S. In France, it is the opposite of controversial—it is Gospel. Truly, no one is a prophet in his own land.
There is probably another reason why Mr. Piketty isn't as influential in France as he could be: He is a serious thinker. It is said that France is singular for its love of public intellectuals, but it might be more accurate to say that it is in love with its love of public intellectuals. In reality, many of France's most prominent public intellectuals today are lightweights, opining on things about which they know very little.
In France, many famous economists sell books and appear on TV talk shows. What most of them have in common is the lack of a degree in economics or of any peer-reviewed publications in economics. I myself am no economist—but I have been introduced as one on a French news program. Mr. Piketty is an outstanding academic economist, which, in France, hurts his credibility as an economist.
It is an amusing reminder of the differences between France and the U.S. that, while Mr. Piketty's views put him well to the left on the American political spectrum, in France, he has sometimes sounded like a conservative. He opposed the last Socialist government's signature policy, the globally infamous 35-hour workweek, and he called for cutting payroll taxes. At bottom, Mr. Piketty remains that most familiar of characters in the policy debate: a neoliberal economist who sees many virtues in market forces but favors government redistribution to smooth out some of the market's excesses.
In Parisian circles, it is said that Mr. Piketty is contemptuous of François Hollande, France's Socialist president, and views him as a shallow opportunist. Some whisper that the enmity is also due to the reportedly tense relationship between Mr. Hollande and his culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti, who was once Mr. Piketty's partner. In the Byzantine world of France's Socialist Party, intrigue and sex almost always seem to go together.
Some in the small world of respected French economists say that Mr. Piketty is best understood through his personal history. He grew up in a working-class family, with parents who had been active in the radical Trotskyite party Lutte Ouvrière (Workers' Struggle). After graduating from a public high school at 16, he earned admission to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the most selective of France's hyper-selective grandes écoles. At 22, he received his Ph.D., winning the French Economics Association's award for the best thesis of the year. His subject: the redistribution of wealth.
Mr. Piketty is, in short, that increasingly rare thing: a pure product of the French meritocracy, the working-class child who went to public school, worked his way to an elite school and ended up in prestigious government service (he co-founded and led the government-run Paris School of Economics). This is the model that built France's postwar revival but now stands broken.
No doubt, as Mr. Piketty ascended through the ranks of the French élite, he couldn't help noticing that most of the people around him had parents and grandparents (and in many cases, great-great-great-great-grandparents) who had been much more privileged than his own. And so he went to work trying to bring together what his leftist cultural background told him and what he found in the models and empirical findings of economics.
Mr. Piketty is right about some things and wrong about others, but his worldview is hardly radical. It could even be embraced by someone on the right who is troubled by inequality and worries that enormous differences in wealth, if left unchecked, could undermine the social order. Indeed, for all the huffing and puffing about Mr. Piketty's supposedly revolutionary ideas, that conservative insight might be his most lasting contribution to the American debate.
—Mr. Gobry is a writer and entrepreneur based in Paris.
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