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Thomas Piketty, "A Brief History of Equality" (Harvard UP, 2022)
00:28:56
An interview with Thomas Piketty
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Call of Duty Black Ops 7 available now. Rated M for mature. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome everyone. I'm your host, Javier Mejia from Stanford University. And today I have the great pleasure to be with Thomas Piketty. Thomas is professor at the Ecole Desiens Social and the Paris School of Economics. He's also the co director of the World Inequality Lab. He's quite famous. I know you know him, but I'm gonna signal some of his New York Times bestsellers. Capital in the 21st century and capital and Ideology. And he's the author of a recently published book by Harvard University Press called A Brief History of Equality. We're gonna be talking with him about the book and his career. Thank you very much for being here with us, Thomas.
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A
Thanks for inviting me.
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E
So you're one of the best known economists in the world, but I don't know how many people know about you before and your career before capital in the 21st century. Why don't you tell us a bit about you? What's your story? How did you end up becoming someone interested in inequality? Interested in equality from an economic history perspective. Tell us a bit about that, please.
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Yeah, you know, I've always been interested in history. And I guess, you know, I first studied mathematics in France because you know, in my country there's a strong incentive to do math when you are Good at math, but basically I was more interested in history from the beginning. So I went to economics as a way to sort of shift towards the social sciences. I did my PhD in Paris and at LSE through a European doctoral program arrangement that existed at the time. Then I was hired as an assistant professor of economics at MIT back in 1993. So this is almost 30 years ago. I was a baby, I was 22 at the time and I was doing very mathematical oriented modeling. I knew nothing at all about economics and I found it a bit strange to be hired as an assistant professor MIT as I didn't know anything. And I was very honored. I was very interested by the years I spent in the us but at the same time it puzzled me a little bit about the discipline, the fact that you could be very successful just by proving math theorem. And I think this partly contributed to my decision to shift to more historical research. I didn't want to spe all of my life proving math theorems about, I mean mathematics is beautiful, but then you should do real math and not, I think mathematics applied to economics. And most importantly I realized that you had all this historical data coming from income tax, inheritance tax for France, for many European countries, for the US all over the world, which had never been really exploited in a systematic manner. And so I started doing that now more than 20 years ago. And yeah, it became all international comparative project which we now have in the World Inequality Database, which is a very collective research project where we've been able to put together the effort of over 100 researchers all over the world. And all the books I have written in a way are very much have been made possible by this collective research program. And to a large extent what I've been doing is to pursue a tradition of research which you can see in the French Annale School of Economic and Social History, trying to build historical series and income wages, et cetera. I'm also very much influenced of course by the Anglo Saxon trade addition on national accounts and historical study and income distribution that was pioneered by Simon Kuznets and in the us Tony Atkinson in Britain. And you know, I've been trying to push this research agenda further. So I've been, you know, at a personal level, I've been back in Paris pretty soon after my stay at mit. I mean I enjoyed a lot the US but not sufficiently to shift country permanently. And so I came back to Paris and to this school, the Ecole des Haudaise Tut Social, where Braudel was the first president a long time ago and where The Annals School partly developed. And I've been developing this international network of researchers with many friends actually based in California, including Emmanuel Sez and Gabriel Zucman at Berkeley. And, you know, with people from all over the world, we've been pushing this agenda of building historical series on income and wealth inequality going back sometime to the early 19th century or to the late 18th century, and offering a broad historical comparative perspective on inequality. So this is what has kept me busy for more than 20 years now.
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E
Can I ask you something more about that? Because that's a very unconventional path for a scholar, I would say. And although you've been quite successful building a fantastic and very interesting research agenda, I can imagine that at the time when you're making all these decisions of leaving the US after being a professor, deciding to move from more formal type of research to one that it's more based on primary sources. Also considering starting to write books, probably at the expense of writing more articles. Like I'm trying to think about how did this feed into the pressure of the system? I don't know. Did you have some opposition from your mentors? How did you navigate that? I'm very curious about that.
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I guess I was very lucky in a way because I had some very early recognition from the discipline. I was a young assistant Prof. At mit, I had a top journal publication in economics I could sort of afford. It was relatively easy for me to say, well, look, okay, now I want to calm down, to take a few years just to write a big book. And that's what I'm going to do. And I should say it's also the advantage of, I think, going back to France and going back to a school of social sciences where colleagues in history, in sociology, in anthropology actually value the kind of long term project, in particular book writing, which economists unfortunately don't always value a lot. And I think had I stayed in an economic development at US University, say at mit, maybe I would not have done that. Because indeed, the pressure to keep writing the kind of short articles at which you are good at is very strong. And so, yeah, you know, partly for personal reason, but also partly for intellectual reason, you know, I was very happy to return to Europe. And you know, I think overall this has been, you know, very beneficial.
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E
That's great. And it's also very inspiring for, well, for me in particular, I'm Colombian and I'm in the US but, but I experience also some of the interest and I'm aware of the pressures of the system for doing something that is not necessarily coherent with Those interests. But let's get now to your book. The book, it's called A Brief History of Equality. I think that already anticipates a lot of what it's inside the book. The first thing is that it's brief. And I said on Twitter that we were going to have this conversation and someone said a brief history, like PKT doing a brief history. That doesn't sound to be very consistent with your previous work, which is rather monumental, to put it in a certain way. And the equality part of it. It's also interesting, usually when you think about your subject of research, it's frequently framed as inequality. Right. So why is this a brief history of equality and not a long history of inequality?
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A
Well, first it's brief, it's a 250 page book or so. So I have made a lot of effort, I strained you to write a sort of concise version of what I wrote before. I've written three big books of around 1000 page each on the history of the distrib of income and wealth. And the first one was Top Incomes in France in the 20th century that was published in 2001. Then Capital in the 21st century in 2013, and finally Capital and Ideology in 2019. And these books were becoming bigger and bigger. The last one, Capital and ideology is even 50% bigger than capital in the 21st century, which was already very big. And I realized that this was getting. I mean, I don't regret that I wrote these books because I learned a lot by writing them. And I think it makes sense for a number of purposes to write big books. But I think maybe I've gone a bit too far in this direction. And at some point I thought, okay, you have to be more concise and to write something, to write something that people can actually read in two or three days and they don't need weeks and weeks and weeks to read it. That's the first difference between these book and the previous one. The second difference, which is maybe even more important, is that as you said, I stress very much in this new book the optimistic dimension. Because by trying to summarize what were really the most important findings of my research, I came to realize that in the end, probably the most important conclusion is that we do observe long run movement toward more equality, more equality in income, in wealth, but also more political equality, more gender equality, racial equality. Of course, this is still very much imperfect. But if you look at the long run picture, starting sometime at the end of the 18th century, so particular with the French Revolution, the US Revolution, to some extent, you have a movement, say between 1780 and 2020, which goes toward more equality. So this is not a movement. This does not happen just like this. This comes from political mobilization, sometimes from revolution, revolts, trade union mobilization, elections, social struggles. But this really goes in this long run direction. This is a movement that starts, as I said, with the end of aristocratic privileges, in particular the French Revolution and also the slave revolt in Saint Domingue in 1791, which sort of marks the beginning of the end of slave and colonial societies. Now, of course, then it takes a very long time. You know, in the 19th century, you have the abolition of slavery, the beginning of the labor movement, of labor rights, the rise of male suffrage. And in the 20th century you have the rise of female suffrage, you have independence war, you have the rise of Social Security, progressive taxation. At the end of the 20th century, the end of apartheid, you have the beginning of a movement toward more gender equality, towards racial discrimination. And this movement toward more equality is of course continuing today. And we've made a lot of progress, but we still live, for instance, if you think of our democratic ideal, I think we still live in societies where the power of money to influence elections, to influence politics, to influence the media is much bigger than what a true democratic societies should look like. The concentration of wealth and properties is much bigger than what it should be. It's not as extreme as one century ago or two centuries ago. So when I say there's a long run movement toward equality, I'm not saying this to conclude, okay, everything is great, we should just be happy about everything. But rather the conclusion is, okay, we should continue in this direction. And how are we going to continue in this direction? Well, probably the first step is to better understand how this positive evolution toward more equality and more prosperity at the same time, because these two new movement of the modernization process, you know, really came together how this happened and, you know, what can we learn from this to, you know, to continue in this direction?
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Right. So most of the forces that you describe in what you just said are of, let's say, a national level, right? So it's basically societies that through different process, decide to make reforms that make them more. More egalitarian, I guess. But in the book you explore some dimension of inequality that is very interesting, which is, I guess, what you could call of international level, right? And you talk about slavery and about colonialism. So why don't you tell us a bit about that? What has been the role of those type of international institutional arrangements and inequality? And how should we think about them in the present.
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Yes. So you're right. You know, slavery and colonialism, you know, played a major role in the process of industrialization and more generally, you know, in the process of wealth creation. You know, the Western countries developed by organizing the world economic system in a particular way, with a specific form of division of labor, exploitation of natural resources. At the eve of the US Civil War, nearly three quarters of the cotton that was used in the manufacturing industry in northeast United States, but also in Britain, but also in the rest of Europe, came from the plantations, the slavery plantation of US South. So this is not saying that industrialization could not happen without slavery. You can imagine another trajectory with a more equitable labor regime, a different distribution of power, a different distribution of income. But this requires some imagination, and this requires a different power situation, a different power relations at the global level between the different forces at play. So in any case, this is the trajectory from which we come. None of us today, of course, is responsible for this trajectory, but we are all individually responsible for deciding to take this into account or not in our analysis of the modern world. And so in my book, for instance, I talk about the issue of reparation, which I think is an important issue that is not going to go away like this. So, for instance, in the case of Haiti, which was the first slave revolt in Saint Domingue at the time of the French Revolution, gave rise to the Republic of Haiti, except that the French state in 1825 forced Haiti in order to recognize the independence of Haiti, Haiti had to pay to France an enormous war tribute, so to speak, which was the equivalent of three years of GDP of output of hait at the time, in order to compensate the French slave owners for their loss of property. Now, of course, this was impossible to repay in one year. So the French bankers came in and proposed generously to refinance this debt with enormous interest rate, of course, and Haiti ended up repaying this debt from 1825 up until the 1950s. You have payment from Haiti to the bank of France until 1957. I mean, it's a long story. Some of the debt was restored to US bankers in the interwar period anyway. But to make a long story short, there is this very well documented payment from Haiti to France, which basically the money was used to compensate French slave owners for their loss of property. Now what do you do with this kind of history when you are today in 2022? It's always complicated to set the right system of reparation. I make proposal in the book on this Specific case. And I argue that France should repay the equivalent of maybe billion euros or dollars of today to it. I'm not saying I know the exact formula to set the right number, et cetera. This has to come from democratic deliberation and decision making process. And it's certainly very complicated. But it's too simple to say, okay, this is a long time ago, we should just forget about it and we don't care about it because these payments are very well documented and took place until the 1950s. And there are expropriation and various injustices that took place during World War II or even sometime during World War I, which we are still compensating today, and rightly so. In my country in France, you had to wait until 1999, so a little more than 20 years ago to have a new commission to look at the Jewish expropriation during World War II and to set up reparation. Now if you tell Haiti, well, in your case you had payments that were made in 1950 until the 1950s to compensate French slave owners for their loss of property. And we are not going to do anything. And this is too old, and you're putting yourself in a very complicated situation when it comes to constructing norms of justice that are universal and which look universal and which are universal. So let me be very clear. We are not going to solve all the problem of the world today with reparation. We need to look at the future. And in my book, in my work, I look at structural transformation of the international tax system today so that poor countries, including Haiti, including countries in Sub Saharan Africa, South Asia, have a decent share of tax revenue coming from corporate taxation. So we have to look at the future. We cannot just look at reparation. But what I argue that we need to do both. If you don't do something about past injustices in a way that is fair, or at least that tries to treat the different injustices of the past in a way that is more or less equitable and more or less consistent. It is going to be very difficult to look at the future and to develop universal institutions to favor redistribution. When I propose, for instance, minimum inheritance for all, I don't propose to look as to whether your ancestors were slaves or slave owners or white or black or whatever. If you have universal health care, it should be universal. Minimum in everything, it should be universal. So I favor universal policy to reduce inequality. But at the same time, there are also reparations for specific injustices of the past that also need to be taken seriously. And of Course, it's a difficult articulation to try to care about, you know, both aspects, but, you know, and that's why, you know, we have difficulties sometime making progress in the direction of equality. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think this is the only way. And, you know, I think it's possible. I think through democratic deliberation, I think we, you know, we can find our way. And, you know, in this example of Haiti and, you know, post colonial reparations, and in my case, it took me a long time and a lot of research to realize that this is the way things took place and this is the way we should try to address this legacy. Because this is typically, this is not part of the curriculum. I think this is not part of what you are being taught at school. I grew up in France in the 1970s. So this was just a decade after decolonization, 10, 20 years after decolonization. But, you know, in my country, you know, people, you know, the way children were taught about history at school was as if, you know, colonial empires never existed, you know, and I guess, you know, partly because the country was, you know, wanted to forget this past. You know, just like in the US people want to forget the past of segregation, et cetera. But, you know, if you want to build another future, sometimes you have to confront this legacy, and that's actually going to be difficult. But in the end, this is going to facilitate the construction of another world and a more equal future.
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E
Fantastic. Fantastic. Let me ask you one final question that I ask all my guests, which is why writing a book, why not transmitting your ideas in a different way way, like, like an article for a journal, for instance, or I know that you also write op EDS and so on, but like, why investing so many months writing a book?
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Yeah, no, I, you know, I write all the formats. You know, I write very short op ed, you know, one page in Le Monde every month. You know, I go on radio every Friday morning to have, you know, 15 minute debates about economic policies, you know, which is listened by 4 million people, you know, and French radio every Friday. At the same time, I write 30 page, 40 page articles for academic journals. And yes, I care even more about books. You know, I think books is, to me, the only format where you can really develop a fully articulated thought. Let me say this. Writing books is the only time when I feel I am really trying to think hard about a problem. You know, as long as you are not confronted to book writing, as long as you can just talk and talk and talk, or you can write one page article or talk for 15 minutes or even write a 30 or 40 page article you are not really confronted to the difficult question. And I think to me it's only you know I feel it's really only by writing books that I have tried to come with sensible answers you know to big questions and you know I'm not claiming the answers I come with are fully satisfactory. You know I keep changing my mind and making progress about these big questions. You know I spend a lot of time reading what other people write to people and this makes me always you know come to you know to a slightly different position and evolve but at the end of the day it's only in the format of book writing that I feel we can you can develop a fully articulated reasoning and thought about question.
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E
Well thank you very much Thomas. Thank you for writing this fascinating book and thanks for taking taking the time to talk to us.
- [28:28]
A
Thanks a lot.