Capital and Ideology. Thomas Piketty.
This book is a follow up to Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, the 1000+ page definitive economic documentation and review of global inequality. Capital and Ideology is also 1000+ pages and provides a comprehensive review of the historic sequence of global economic systems that resulted in and claimed to justify the inequality described in the first book. Piketty defines ideology as a set of plausible ideas and discourses describing how society should be structured. He adds two interesting descriptions of ideology: 1. an idea in service of a particular interest, and 2. the justification for inequality by a system’s beneficiaries.
Piketty describes a progression of economic ideologies, with special emphasis on trifunctional (clerical, aristocratic, and commoner), slaveist, colonialist, proprietarianist (ownership), social-democratic, and communist ideologies. This sequence progresses to revived proprietarnianism together with hyper-capitalism that has led to rapidly increasing inequality since 1980. The details of these systems are extensively discussed.
One remarkably twisted mindset of 19th Century exploitive proprietarianism is worthy of note. In 1833, England outlawed slavery and compensated former slaveholders with 5% of GDP (paid by taxpayers) but gave no compensation to ex-slaves. In the early 1800s, the French blockaded Haiti after its successful slave revolt and forced it to pay three years of national income to compensate former slaveholders. When Haiti could not pay, France severely undermined its future development by forcing it to pay 15% of its GDP annually indefinitely (until WW I) to service French bank loans for the compensation. Even Lincoln offered compensation to slaveholders before the Civil War. In the final chapter Piketty offers his views of many possible remedies to the social injustice of economic inequality. His discussion ranges widely from better concepts of ownership to equality of access to education to international cooperation to prevent races to the bottom to progressive property, income, inheritance, and wealth tax, and more.
