The financial and economic turmoil triggered by the Donald Trump administration means there is no better time to get to grips with even bigger issues that not only inform the rise of authoritarian nativists, but will also outlast them.
To this end, recommended reading is a new book by Thomas Piketty, Equality: What It Means and Why it Matters. Surprisingly, but thankfully, unlike his seminal works, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and Capital and Ideology (2020), which run to more than 700 and 1,000 pages respectively, his latest is a short, snappy read. This is mainly because it’s written as a dialogue with co-author Michael J Sandel, a political philosopher and professor of government at Harvard University.
Their conversation took place in May last year at the Paris School of Economics, where Piketty is the associate chair. It’s contextually appropriate that an American and a Frenchman are having this discussion. The American Revolution and the drafting of the US constitution partly inspired the French Revolution of 1789, which amplified the slogan liberté, égalité, fraternité.
The long view of history since then is one of an expanding democratic awareness and rising prosperity, manifesting in what Piketty calls “an appetite for equal access to fundamental goods, to participation [and] to dignity in all forms”. Their respective nations have been leading lights in this march of modernity.
But today even France and the US show signs of stalled progress or regression in many measures of equality. France’s 2024 legislative elections confirming Marine Le Pen’s far-right movement as a powerful bloc and Trump’s re-election are evidence of intense dissatisfaction with society’s status quo.
Globally, we are in an age of anger, Pankaj Mishra wrote in his 2017 book of the same title. Albeit in tightly condensed format, Piketty and Sandel build on Mishra’s argument that the root of this resentment is a sense many people have of being left behind — essentially, that the ideal of equality has passed them by.
As expected, when two profound thinkers and theorists engage, ideas abound. Sandel, like a probative Socratic philosopher, plays the role of discussant. He raises the question: is dignity for all a tenet of equality?
They don’t pin down dignity as a concept, fluffing over it as a mix of social relations measures. Dignity would seem intrinsic, however, to a common sense understanding of fairness and morality. But the fact that inequality is so rife is evidence that equality does not come naturally to humankind, and Piketty and Sandel agree that part of the reason that we are conditioned to understand — and confer — dignity largely according to meritocratic achievements.
However, though meritocracy is entrenched within capitalist ideology and structures, they posit that it is not entirely fair and just, and hence not equitable. (Indeed, one of Sandel’s other recent books was The Tyranny of Merit.) From multiple angles in 10 short pages, they shred it.
Piketty provides some specifics using the example of a high-achieving, high-earning individual who would feel entitled to avoid tax, or pay no tax by sending their wealth to a tax haven, or create corporate or trust shells to ensure it stays within their families for generations: “Well, no, I’m sorry, this is not your money. This comes from the collective labour of millions of people. This could never have been produced without public infrastructure or our legal system. You are not on your own in the world, and you cannot just say, ‘it’s my money’.”
“Even a perfectly realised meritocracy has a dark side: it’s corrosive of the common good,” Sandel summarises. “It encourages the successful to forget ... their indebtedness to those who make their achievements possible.”
Piketty and Sandel are visionaries whose ideas, unfortunately, may gain critical mass only with the passing of another generation or two.
This comes back to how societies need “to affirm the dignity of work, how to make life better for those who contribute to the economy and to the common good”. Reading this without context makes it sound like a line from Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, but Piketty and Sandel land sound points in their argument that pervasive meritocratic competition is causing fissures in even the world’s most progressive democracies.
The serious conversation is also interspersed with humour. Discussing the importance of intrinsic motivation rather than financial incentives in sectors such as education, Sandel notes that 18th-century Enlightenment figure Adam Smith suggested that Oxford University tutors be paid according to the number of students attending their lectures. “Maybe he was too much of an economist,” Piketty quips.
Generally, more so than Sandel, he conveys a sense of urgency, and wonders why Sandel sees the need to build international “commonality” before initiating stronger drives for progressive taxation. Sandel then admits one doesn’t have to wait for the other — they can be geared simultaneously. “So I’ll wait for your next book then,” Piketty teases.
Spanning markets and morality, taxation and global trade, and the decommodification of sectors such as healthcare, they also brainstorm provocative ideas — though some are not perhaps as left-field as they initially seem.
For instance, they both want labour union workers’ representation on company boards; this has been standard practice in large companies in Germany since 1976. Piketty believes that the salary scale between the lowest-paid workers and the highest-paid should be no more than one to five; while his proposed ratio is narrow, many organisations are starting to benchmark, set minimums, or standardise compensation.
Sandel presents the case for a public lottery system to source candidates for political office, the point being to embed genuine representativity rather than having legislative bodies dominated by a tiny demographic with elite education. Actually, this happens to an extent in India, where all parties in 25% of parliamentary constituencies, randomly drawn, must present candidates from the bottom quarter of India’s caste categories.
Idealism on hold?
Piketty amalgamates his ideas towards the end of the discussion. Acknowledging that globalisation means that initiatives towards greater equality must be multilateral, he would ultimately like to see a form of “federal internationalist socialism”, some kind of “United States of the World”. I think of John Lennon’s famous song, Imagine, especially the lyrics Imagine all the people / Sharing all the world. To be fair to Piketty, he outlines some specific practical ambits of change that would catalyse greater international co-operation: a refined, global corporate tax regime; tighter governance agreements regarding capital and trade flows; and wider — but conditional — freedom of movement.
These would be a start, and one doesn’t need to be a philosopher or a social historian to agree with their point that only purposeful multilateralism can address climate change as one example of a daunting global challenge affecting all 8.2-billion of us.
But it’s been more than 60 years since Lennon crooned, longingly yet optimistically, You may say I’m a dreamer / But I’m not the only one, and the flame of progressive movements and politics seems now to be barely flickering.
My sense is that Piketty and Sandel are visionaries whose ideas, unfortunately, may gain critical mass only with the passing of another generation or two. Perhaps then, when equality — in all its dimensions — is better understood, there will be widespread agreement that it is a principle worth making sacrifices for.
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