Two cheers for Piketty: Or, why both he and the OECD and nearly everyone else are wrong on growth. Part 2

By Rupert Read. Piketty has shied away from grasping the uncomfortable implication of his own data: that growthist capitalism is an engine for inequality both in the present and over much longer timescales. For growthist capitalism – and there is no other kind – systematically leads to inequality. It leads to inequality-in-the-future in part because the exponential return on debt, so as not to lead to excessive human exploitation, has instead relied on exploitation of the planet as an alternative property-right-claim to reduce the cumulative impact of the impossibility of paying returns to money: but this exploitation results in brutally depleting the future. And it leads to inequality-in-the-present in part because we still insist on paying returns to money anyway, and in most of the world are no closer to implementing a debt-jubilee or even a debt-audit than we were in 2007. More...