Because the rate of return on capital always will exceed income growth (expressed "r>g") we will always suffer from increasing inequality of wealth. Those with money and capital always will make more, and make more more quickly than even the sturdiest entrepreneur. "The past," he says, thus "devours the future" (571).
The only modern historical events that have interrupted this ever increasing divergence of wealth are WWI, the great Depression, and WWII. For a brief period, Piketty shows, these catastrophes compressed the wealth gap and for those of us lucky enough to grow up in the post-War west, and gave the illusion of some degree of equality.
But two World Wars and a Depression are strong medicine.
As an economist, he suggests a "progressive annual tax on capital" (572) as a way to curb inequality without slowing income growth and "primitive accumulation."
As a sentient being in the world today, however, he also knows the likelihood of getting the political support necessary for such a tax is nil.
Piketty does not speculate much, though, on why there is no political will -- from the majority on the bottom -- to tax the very few on top.
There is no STEM field that can provide an answer to that question.
Fear not. I am here to help with yet another S(hakespeare)TEM crisis.
Shakespeare, or a close reading of Shakespeare, I think, can provide an answer -- and rather quickly.
There is no will for a progressive tax on capital simply because people identify with those "above" them. We do this as children when we want to be like our parents. We do this as seventh graders when we want to be like the pretty, popular girl. We do this when we emulate our bosses at work (if we are at a job where we want to "move up").
And we do this when we vote.
In my regional home, Macomb County, MI, people did this en masse in 1980 when traditional Democrats -- union born, bred and fed -- turned on their own party to become "Reagan Democrats."
Why? Reagan inspired an image of what Macomb Democrats wanted to be: American cowboys, independent, virile and so on.
I can't blame them.
Everyone admires those above them, even Shakespeare.
For all his talents, the man wanted nothing more than to procure a "coat of arms," a sign that he was, in fact, an aristocrat -- even when he wasn't. Paradoxical as it sounds, aristocrats were at the top of the social order in the Renaissance and you had to be born an aristocrat. But, gradually, over time, you could buy your way in to the "class."
This selling of aristocracy was one of the reasons the world no longer considers aristocracy a "real" thing.
This is no where more clear than in Shakespeare's King Lear -- a production of which is being staged at Stratford, Ontario this year.
In that play, Shakespeare makes an audience side -- not with their own class -- but with the aristocracy. There are heroes and villains in the play, and because of our transhistorical desire to be those above us, we don't even realize when we are prompted to root against ourselves just as unions in Macomb County Michigan did in voting for Ronald Reagan.
Here, for example, is the first soliloquy in the play by Edmund, the Bastard son of Gloucester, and one of the playwright's most famous villains (along with Iago, Aaron the Moor, etc.).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrAYq7MuV5k
As a Bastard, Edmund has no legal rights. He finds this intolerable as he knows he is worth as much in terms of merit. Indeed, the play quite consciously supports this self-assessment. He is skilled, clever, physically attractive (all the women in the play love him). Early on, then, he rages, like a good American should, against propertied rights, class structures, illegitimate laws.
No Kings for him!
What matters, he argues, is not who you are or where you come from but your abilities.
Indeed, I would stage him in a Captain America suit while he delivers this speech that concludes with a cry for Bastards that could be easily found at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty ("Give us your tired, your hungry.....").
For quick reading "Wherefore" = "Why."
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well, then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word,--legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards! (1.2.1-22)
In short, Edmund sees a legal, political injustice and decides to right that injustice through his own independent actions and create a world where merit, not birth order or rank, matter.
Did I mention in this play, though, he is the "villain"?
Shakespeare's dramaturgy guides an audience -- even a modern American audience -- to sympathize not with those with whom we share comparable situations or values, but with those above us.
Instead, of Edmund or the ambitious servant Oswald, we come to appreciate the King, his daughter Cordelia, the Duke of Kent -- all figures who believe we are lesser beings.
Fantastically enough, Shakespeare's characters would have thought him a lesser being, as he was not born an aristocrat. Yet he makes us weep for them.
Because of Shakespeare's sympathies, and Edmond's actions, the whole world of the play collapses backwards in to history, it collapses -- as Richard Halpern wrote in his book intriguingly titled The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation -- "back into feudalism." A play that began with a very modern bureaucratic structure, a peaceful transfer of power, originally staged in front of an audience that was increasingly modern, asks us to fall backwards, to let as Piketty says "the past devour the future." The play's final resolution is as primal as it gets: brother to brother, hand to hand combat between Edmund and his "legitimate" brother Edgar. [Spoiler alert: Edmund loses, but the spirit that inspires him wins big in history -- King Lear was first performed in 1606, a scant 14 years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock].
But to my point: the reason the play collapses back in to history is the same reason we won't vote for a progressive tax on capital. That could be us, we think, up on the top with Bill Gates and King Lear! Like Shakespeare, we identify with those above us -- always.
We won't address the problem of inequality til we become better readers of Shakespeare.
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