Making Sense of Thomas Piketty’s Irrelevance to Americans

Only just over two years ago, the English translation of French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century came into print and seized global headlines. As the culmination of years of work with a massive set of empirical data, the book demonstrated one central conclusion: the average annual rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g). But, as Piketty explains, the unassuming appearance of r > g belies its profound consequences for economic and political organization:

Under such conditions, it is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of capital will attain extremely high levels — levels potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies.

In making clear that wealth earned through labor could not overcome the disproportionate benefits of inherited wealth, especially in a slow-growing economy, Capital therefore represented a direct refutation of the Reaganite vision that capitalism could self-regulate and inherently diminish inequality. The data had spoken: without serious reforms through regulation and global taxation, currently-existing capitalism is in the process of reproducing aristocratic wealth distributions.

A coup de grace for the American Dream, Capital became a “bona fide phenomenon”; it caused a “Piketty Panic” and understandably became “the right’s new public enemy №1.” That it was both earnestly and sarcastically referred to as “the most important book ever” speaks to the widespread fascination with the work and what it meant for Americans across the political spectrum. This was so much so that Britain’s The Economist even started a “book club” series evaluating the main arguments of the text, and the popular socialist publication Jacobin satirically wrote a manual on how to “intelligently” critique Capital, titled “How to Write a Marxist Critique of Thomas Piketty Without Actually Reading the Book.” Capital, whether one loved or hated it, was a focus of discourse across the political spectrum.

So when I finally managed to pick up the book in early 2016, I was admittedly late to the party. Indeed, after becoming increasingly interested specifically in the American reception of Piketty’s work, I quickly realized that the American preoccupation with Piketty was long over. Reading Capital already felt dated and irrelevant in a republic grappling with the sudden resurgence of culturalist, anti-establishment politics. But why? When and how did Piketty become passé, especially when several fundamental themes of his work — critique of inequality, class, capitalism — are still firmly at the core of the politics of today embodied in Sanders and Trump? Put differently, how did Piketty become irrelevant to the discourse on inequality he spearheaded only two years ago?

In a review of Capital in Bloomberg View, Clive Crook astutely observed that the book had stirred up an “erotic intensity” in the American psyche. This passion Piketty evoked in America becomes even more interesting when approached comparatively with his reception in continental Europe — particularly in France. Whereas the book was an immediate success in the U.S, Piketty’s book, ironically, became popular in France only after it grabbed the attention of American academics.

As the French philosopher and Stanford professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy wrote in Le Monde, the greatest merit of Capital for the French was its very success in America. Whereas the Americans felt an instant fascination with Piketty’s book, the French had shrugged it off as yesterday’s news. This French complacency was eventually shaken not because they had found the text newly informative, but because they had found the American reception a revelation on the lasting distortive influence of the American dream. That is, the conclusion in Capital that capitalism without regulation is anti-meritocratic and replicates aristocratic wealth distributions was rather unsurprising to the Europeans who were less inculcated with the illusion that society was meritocratic and free from entrenched, historically aristocratic class differences. In other words, Capital offered nothing fundamentally new to Europe. But for Americans, in Paul Krugman’s unyielding praise, it at last revived an older economic language for mainstream economists to speak of inequality normatively with unprecedented strength in data.

A recognition, then, of Piketty’s quiet but considerable downfall must be recognized and reckoned with. It might be explained away by cuing the familiar elegy over the rising tide of anti-intellectualism and the further decay of the American mind. That may well be true; after all, looking at conservatives as one example, the trajectory from William F. Buckley’s conservative intellectualism down to Donald Trump’s buffoonery is a disenchanting one. But another dimension must not be overlooked: Capital is and was out of touch with the way in which Americans were discussing the very issues it was tackling.

The so-called revolution against the existing American economic system is led by the young, a slight majority of whom are already sufficiently disillusioned with capitalism and cannot help but focus on its flaws in the wake of the Great Recession. The major conclusions in Capital that Piketty made sure to prove with a tsunami of facts seem to be relatively intuitive to many at this point. More specifically, the idea that the healthy functioning of our democratic institutions is at risk of being corroded by the rising tide of wealth inequality aided and abetted by an economy in need of more regulation is increasingly gaining credibility. Piketty’s fears and conclusions are old news to many.

What the “political revolution” needs is not confidence in its basic ideological premises, but a plan for actualizing these revolutionary dreams, especially now that they have been held back by the political marriage of the unorthodox Sanders and the orthodox Clinton. Revolution has bowed its head, temporarily absorbed into the establishment in order to combat the extraordinary threat posed by Trump.

For those looking for a way forward, Piketty has been fatally unhelpful in two ways. First, his economic recommendation and policy proposal of a global wealth tax has been ridiculed for its wild impracticality, prompting Slavoj Žižek to characterize Piketty as a “utopian” thinker who expects this of a world that cannot even agree on the urgent threat posed by climate change. Second, the language of Piketty’s approach is foreign to contemporary social movements — such as Black Lives Matter — more concerned with social and cultural injustices than an economic, data driven analytic of how we got here.

One of the Sanders campaign’s greatest insecurities was its inability to relate to and speak in the language of the socially and culturally agitated population. It is for this reason that Sanders’ endorsements by figures such as Killer Mike mattered more than Piketty’s own endorsement. That a major presidential candidate whose principal objective was to seriously reduce inequality favored a rapper as an “unofficial campaign adviser” over an internationally acclaimed “rock star” economist at the height of his powers is not something to simply pass over.

In Margaret Talbot’s profile of Sanders for The New Yorker, Sanders made clear his complete disinterest in Piketty:

[Sanders] did not particularly warm to discussing the theories of such economists as Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty. (Gutman [a close friend of Sanders]told me, “I read a third of Piketty’s book. I don’t think Bernie would read a page of it.” Sanders was interested less in academic arguments, Gutman said, than in hard numbers that “exemplify the disparities he sees and feels and hears about from people.”)

The recent populist shift of American politics mandated a change in prophets at the same pulpit. Piketty failed to and could not have anticipated the need to speak to a resurgent culturalist Left — not unlike how many expected Jeb! to be a formidable presidential contender. Piketty’s Capital validated and granted intellectual security to the then recent Occupy movement’s proclamation that “capitalism isn’t working.” Krugman’s assertion that Capital was “serious, discourse-changing scholarship” is true — but with a catch. For the majority of Americans who have no part in this elite discourse, it failed to truly ever escape the confines of its reputation as a coffee table book.

Abandoned by the Left it needed and shouldered by the Right that’d rather have it forgotten, Capital and the discourse Krugman referred to in 2014 became detached from the discourse of social and cultural movements that has come to dominate American politics in the present.

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Truman Chen, a senior studying history, is the editor in chief of Stanford Political Journal.