Thomas Piketty: evaluation

Transcript context

…When I read Braudel, it strikes me there’s something quite conservative about the argument. I don’t mean politically conservative, but I mean literally conservative — the sense of long structures stretching through decades or even centuries. Do you share that with him? Or do you think, in some way, you deviate that makes you more politically radical? You’re right. I don’t know if this makes me more politically radical. You’re perfectly right that one big difference between the work I’ve been doing and the work people like Braudel or Labrousse were doing is that I had to deal a lot with the 20th century, whereas these people were working a lot on previous centuries — 18th century, 19th century, or even before in the case of Braudel. Working on 20th-century data and, in particular, the enormous reduction of income inequality during the 20th century led me to a different kind of perspective and a different kind of thinking and issue. To be very precise, the political dimension is so much more important and, in a way, unavoidable and impossible to escape when you study the 20th century. When you study the 18th century or 19th century, or maybe you can have this Marxist or economic perspective stressing the long-run evolution, these deterministic economic forces. When you study the 20th century, politics is everywhere: World War I and World War II, the Great Depression, the creation of social security systems, the development of progressive taxation, decolonization, end of apartheid. Politics is everywhere if you want to understand the evolution of inequality. I would say it’s also, to some extent, the same for the 19th century and the end of the 18th century. I talk about the French Revolution and the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue. I think the history of equality or inequality cannot just be an economic history. It has to be a political history because, if you want to account for what you see, if you want to explain what you see, it’s political processes — sometimes revolution, sometimes tax reform, sometimes political confrontation of all sorts — play a major role. I had to develop this perspective, and indeed, this is a big difference with the Annales school. You know, the Annales school, in a way, did not disappear before reaching the 20th century. They were not confronted with the same kind of issues that I was confronted with just because I write later than them with data covering the more recent period, so I had to develop a different perspective and a different kind of interpretation. Yes, tracing the role of politics and political institution, fiscal institution, social institution, and the like. As you know, there’s a competing longue durée tradition — if you look at the work of Greg Clark and Neil Cummins — on surnames. They take data from England, from Sweden. There’s one paper where they have almost eight centuries of data, I think, and social status is more heritable than height. A given status relationship has persistence for 15 or 20 generations. What do you think of that work? Do you think it’s a perspective that contrasts to yours and shows it’s really very hard to redistribute what really matters in society?…

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