This is the first in five posts that subject the normative claims in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century to critical scrutiny. There have been many, many criticisms of his theoretical and empirical claims, but few of the reviews that have addressed his normative claims, and fewer still have said anything in much detail.

I. Setup for Critique

I will not review Piketty’s main empirical and mathematical lines of argument. If you’re reading this post, you either know the basic line or can figure it out through Googling. Furthermore, I will not critique his theoretical models or empirical claims in this series. Instead, I will assume, for the sake of argument, that all of his theoretical and empirical claims hold.

In this series, I am interested only in the following question: supposing that Piketty is right about the nature of capitalism, what are the normative implications? My answer will be that it’s far less clear than Piketty thinks. If you want to draw normative conclusions from Capital then you will have to significantly reconstruct his arguments. I will attempt some reconstruction in these posts, mostly in a Rawlsian spirit, as I’ve been informed that Piketty in person has said he’s sympathetic to Rawlsian approaches to distributive justice, though what he says in Capital in this regard is very minor.

Some will complain that Piketty is an economist and so we cannot expect him to be familiar with contemporary political philosophy. If that were true, Piketty should not have made the detailed normative claims he makes throughout the book. If you make claims about how wealth ought to be distributed, and you want your work to be influential, you owe it to your readers to be careful or at least show basic familiarity with principles of distributive justice. This is further buttressed by the fact that Piketty stresses the need to make economics empirically and normatively relevant, especially for the sake of democratic deliberation. So he is committed by his own lights to the validity of philosophical scrutiny of his arguments.

I won’t say much positive or negative about the work, just the normative arguments. FWIW, I think it is better than most of its critics think and worse than most its supporters think. I’ve read at least two dozen reviews and posts on the book, along with the entire book, and at this point I put my confidence in his data at p(.6) (.7 after reading his detailed reply to the FT), my confidence in his modeling at p(.4) and my confidence in his normative conclusions a p(.2). In words, Piketty is probably right that income and wealth inequality have been increasing in developed countries over the past several decades, he is probably wrong that this is explained best by r > g and his fundamental laws of capitalism, and he is very likely wrong to think that capitalism is normatively defective in the ways he describes and that a global wealth tax is a normatively acceptable solution.

I will divide Piketty’s normative arguments into two types: evaluative and prescriptive. Normative arguments are evaluative when they offer a moral assessment of some phenomenon, event or behavior, whereas normative arguments are prescriptive when they tell us how we should morally respond to certain (morally defective or sub-optimal) phenomena, events or behaviors. I believe Piketty has four evaluative arguments that roughly correspond four prescriptive arguments. He has other arguments as well, but I’m going to focus on these eight in my series. Here’s my list.

II. Evaluative Arguments

All the evaluative arguments are moral criticisms of what Piketty calls 21st century “patrimonial capitalism.”

1E. Social Instability: the danger of r > g and patrimonial capitalism is that wealth inequality will produce some bad form of social instability, perhaps even violent revolution.

2E. Unjust Inequalities: r > g and patrimonial capitalism generate inequalities of wealth that cannot be justified on egalitarian and/or meritocratic grounds, as these inequalities do not aid the “common utility.”

3E. Lack of Transparency: r > g and patrimonial capitalism entail high levels of wealth inequality that are easy to hide under present legal conditions. This makes the true distribution of wealth inaccessible to the voting public, preventing them from making rational collective decisions.

4E. Threats to Democracy: r > g and patrimonial capitalism imply that those with wealth will be able to undermine democracy or will at least not be properly controlled by democracy. It appears that the force of this argument is entirely derivative from the first three, and mostly from 1E and 3E. Though the appearance of inequalities and the fact that people find them unjust is a source of instability, so 2E partly supports 1E in vindicating 4E.

III. Prescriptive Arguments

All the prescriptive arguments hold that a global progressive tax on capital solves the problems identified by the evaluative arguments. Though some arguments favor additional policy solutions, almost all the prescriptive arguments are offered on behalf of the global progressive tax on capital, so I will focus on them.

1P. Restoring Stability: A global progressive capital tax will reduce wealth inequalities, and so will undermine, correct or at least restrain the instabilities generated by capitalism.

2P. Rectifying Unjust Inequalities: A global progressive capital tax will reduce unjust wealth inequalities in an efficient fashion, in comparison to socialist and protectionist alternatives.

3P. Increasing Transparency: A global progressive tax on capital will stop tax havens and other institutions that make it difficult if not impossible for the general public to know the distribution of wealth, as the taxing power will generate accurate records.

4P. Saving Democracy: A global progressive tax on capital will help to restore democracy’s control over capitalism. It appears that the force of this argument is entirely derivate from the first three, and mostly from 1P and 3P. Though the appearance of inequalities and the fact that people find them unjust is a source of instability, so 2P partly supports 1P in vindicating 4P.

I will provide quotes and citations for these claims in future posts. I’m especially hopeful that those of you who know the book will tell me if I’m classifying the arguments correctly.

IV. Links to Argument Posts (forthcoming)

Part II: Stability Arguments (1E and 1P)

Part III: Unjust Inequality Arguments (2E and 2P)

Part IV: Transparency Arguments (3E and 3P)

Part V: Democratic Control Arguments (4E and 4P)