On Thursday the 28th I went to a lecture by the celebrated economist Thomas Piketty at Columbia University. Author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty emphases his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. He says that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. To address this problem Piketty proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth. In this talk, Piketty spoke mostly about changes in political parties that have created two elites, the left wing Brahmin Elite, and the right wing Merchant Elite, which has left the lower class without support for redistributionist policies. His most interesting point is how we (the Brahmin elite) even blame the working class for their state, their lack of education, lack of technological savvy, their racism, the Obama condescension about clinging to guns and religion. It’s true–we have a problem with those we have left behind.
