New Left Project, 12/08/2014
This post summarizes my longer review of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, forthcoming in Capital & Class.
Social democratic lamentation about rising inequality is often clouded in nostalgia for the mid-twentieth century ‘golden age’ of capitalism, which combined low unemployment and increasing wages with falling inequality. Thomas Piketty, author of the explosive Capital in the 21st Century (2014), does not share the optimism of garden-variety social democrats. The ‘golden age’, he argues, was an anomaly made possible by very specific historical conditions—conditions that no one would wish to see return (notably, the two world wars, which destroyed vast amounts of capital and set the stage for accelerated ‘catch-up’ growth between 1945 and 1970). But if we cannot simply return to twentieth century social democracy, how are we to halt the seemingly inexorable rise of inequality?