Thomas Piketty: belief

Transcript context

…But that’s a clustering effect within France. France is much poorer than Switzerland. Could not France bring Swiss prosperity to — This is not comparable in size. I don’t think it makes sense. Again, if you want to compare a region of about 5 million,10 million inhabitants — which is the size of Switzerland — you find many other regions with comparable GDP per capita all across Europe. There are many good things with Switzerland, by the way. I think the local democratic system has lots of good aspects to it. The education system has . . . I think there’s a lot to learn from each of these experiments. The US has a much smaller government than Sweden or Denmark or France, but I think there’s a lot to learn historically from the US, including in terms of equality. And I think the enormous educational advance that was there in the US in the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century is key to understanding many of the issues I refer to. The case of Norway shows that you can also have a very generous welfare state, and that certainly does not prevent you from being prosperous. Look, at the level of Europe, we have 27 countries in the European Union. If you look in terms of tax-to-GDP ratio, the countries with the lowest tax-to-GDP ratio are Bulgaria and Romania. The countries with the highest tax-to-GDP ratio are Denmark and Sweden. If it was enough, in order to become rich, to have a small government, Bulgaria and Romania would be richer than Denmark and Sweden. We know that things are more complicated, and it depends on what you do with your tax revenue. If you use it well, then it’s of use from this evidence that this is complementary with high prosperity. You’ve been awarded a Legion of Honor. You turned that down, if I understand correctly, on the grounds that you don’t trust, or don’t want, government handing out status. If you do not entirely trust governments to hand out status, why trust them so much to redistribute all this wealth? What’s the political economy constraint on that wealth redistribution process where you say, “Look, this isn’t going to go the way I want it to go”?…

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