![]() ![]() By the early years of the twentieth century, inequality was at unprecedented levels, far higher than those of the ancien régime that the Revolution pushed aside. ![]() ![]() ![]() (139) By the end of the nineteenth century, half of the people who died in France had no property at all to pass on to relatives. (pp.127-131) What he and his colleagues had not expected to discover as they studied the accounts was that this concentration would get greater over the next hundred years. At the start of this period, he explains, the concentration of income and property was extremely high, with the richest 10 per cent of the population earning half the total national wage and owning 80 per cent of its wealth. Piketty began his academic career looking at income, wealth and taxation in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This time, however, in his 1,000-page follow up, Capital and Ideology, the political is more obviously personal. In spite of his heroic commitment to data, data, and more data, (in)equality is, it seems, an intimate concern for Piketty. Piketty had, after all, been economic adviser to French Socialist Presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, in 2006. Thomas Piketty’s original, groundbreaking, block-busting, macroeconomic tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, first published in 2013, was transparently motivated by a deep concern about growing levels of inequality. In this long–read Nick Spencer reflects on Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital and Ideology’. ![]()
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