ALSO BY THOMAS PIKETTY

  Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century: A Contrast between European and English-Speaking Countries

  (coeditor, with A. B. Atkinson)

  Top Incomes: A Global Perspective

  (coeditor, with A. B. Atkinson)

  Capital in the Twenty-First Century

  The Economics of Inequality

  Chronicles: On Our Troubled Times

  Why Save the Bankers?: And Other Essays on Our Economic and Political Crisis

  Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century: Inequality and Redistribution, 1901–1998

  Capital and Ideology

  Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities: A Study of Fifty Democracies, 1948–2020

  (coeditor, with Amory Gethin and Clara Martínez-Toledano)

  Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2021

  A Brief History of Equality

  Originally published in French as Nature, culture et inégalités: Une perspective comparative et historique in 2023 by Société d’ethnologie, Nanterre, France.

  Copyright © Société d’ethnologie, 2023

  English translation copyright © Willard Wood, 2024

  This text is based on a talk given at the Musée du Quai Branly—Jacques Chirac on March 18, 2022, at the invitation of the Société d’ethnologie.

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Patrice Sheridan

  This book was set in Chaparral Pro by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Piketty, Thomas, 1971- author. | Wood, Willard, translator.

  Title: Nature, culture, and inequality : a comparative and historical perspective / Thomas Piketty; translated from the French by Willard Wood.

  Other titles: Nature, culture et inégalités. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2024] | “Originally published in French as Nature, culture et inégalités: Une perspective comparative et historique in 2023 by Société d’ethnologie, Nanterre, France”—Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2024002605 (print) | LCCN 2024002606 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635424560 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781635424577 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Equality—Cross-cultural studies. | Equality—History. | Social stratification—Cross-cultural studies. | Social stratification—History. | Capitalism—Moral and ethical aspects. | Capitalism—Environmental aspects.

  Classification: LCC HM821 .P552313 2023 (print) | LCC HM821 (ebook) | DDC 305—dc23/eng/20240220

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024002605

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024002606

  Ebook ISBN 9781635424577

  a_prh_7.0_148118688_c0_r0

  CONTENTS

  Also by Thomas Piketty

  List of Figures

  Are There Naturally Occurring Inequalities? The Long March Toward Equality

  The Evolution of Inequality and Inegalitarian Systems

  Inequality of Income

  Inequality of Wealth

  Gender Inequality

  An Uneven March Toward Equality in Europe

  The Example of Sweden

  The Rise of the Welfare State: Education Spending as an Example

  Making Rights More Equal

  Progressive Taxation

  What to Do with the Debt?

  Nature and Inequality

  Conclusion

  References

  Credits

  About the Authors

  LIST OF FIGURES

  Fig. 1—Share of income going to the top 10 percent globally, 2022

  Fig. 2—Share of income going to the bottom 50 percent globally, 2022

  Fig. 3—The extreme concentration of capital—global wealth inequality by region, 2021

  Fig. 4—Share of income from work received by women in different regions of the world, 1990–2020

  Fig. 5—Distribution of income in France, 1800–2020: The start of a long-term movement toward equality?

  Fig. 6—The distribution of property in France, 1780–2020: The gradual emergence of a propertied middle class

  Fig. 7—The persistence of highly concentrated property ownership

  Fig. 8—Extreme inequality of wealth: European property-owner societies in the Belle Epoque (1880–1914)

  Fig. 9—The rise of the welfare state in Europe, 1870–2020

  Fig. 10—The inequality of education investment in France

  Fig. 11—Colonies for the colonizers: Inequalities in education spending in historical perspective

  Table 1—Proposals for a progressive tax in France in the eighteenth century

  Fig. 12—The invention of progressive taxation: The top tax rates on income, 1900–2020

  Fig. 13—The invention of progressive taxation: The top tax rates on inheritance, 1900–2020

  Fig. 14—Effective tax rates and progressiveness of taxes in the United States, 1910–2020

  Fig. 15—Foreign assets in historical perspective: The height of colonial ownership in France and Britain

  Fig. 16—Public debt: Alternating between accumulation and cancellation

  Fig. 17—Carbon emissions worldwide, 2010–18

  Fig. 18—Emissions per person per region across the world, 2019

  ARE THERE NATURALLY OCCURRING INEQUALITIES? THE LONG MARCH TOWARD EQUALITY

  Inegalitarian systems—that is, the structure and degree of socioeconomic inequality in different societies, and their evolution over time—are extraordinarily diverse. We can make sense of the phenomenon only if we take into account the central role of history and human culture. Inequality has, in fact, followed markedly different trajectories—political, socioeconomic, cultural, civilizational, and religious. It is culture in the broadest sense—and, more particularly, collective political mobilization—that provides an explanation for the diversity, degree, and structure of the social inequalities we observe. In contrast, the importance of so-called natural factors (personal talents, reserves of natural resources, and other factors of this kind) is relatively limited.

  Sweden, considered one of the most egalitarian countries in the world, provides an instructive example here. Some have attributed its egalitarianism to the country’s ingrained characteristics, to a culture that has a “natural taste” for equality. In fact, Sweden was long one of the most stratified countries in Europe, highly sophisticated in the political organization of its inequality. This situation changed very rapidly in the second third of the twentieth century, in response to a concerted social and political effort, after the Social Democratic Party came to power in the early 1930s. This party, which then governed continuously for the next half century, put Sweden’s governmental capacities toward an entirely different political program than had existed before.

  Sweden thus provides an interesting case, one that should inoculate us against any belief in long-term determinism, according to which certain natural or even cultural factors might make some societies forever egalitarian while making others (India, for example) forever inegalitarian. Social and political forms can change, sometimes much more quickly than contemporary observers think. Those who benefit most from a system tend, for obvious reasons, to see inequalities as part of the natural order, and they are apt to characterize disparities as permanent and inevitable, warning against any change that might threaten the existing harmony. In fact, reality is highly changeable and always being rebuilt: it is the product of power relations, institutional compromises, and partially explored forks in the road.

  But looking beyond this great diversity of inegalitarian systems, we can recognize a basic movement over the course of the past centuries: a tendency toward greater social equality. This trend started at a particular point in history and not, for instance, in Neolithic times or in the Middle Ages. It is part of the historical development that had its origins in 1789—call it the end of the eighteenth century—and it has led toward increasing political and socioeconomic equality.

  Limited in extent, this gradual movement toward equality has been a halting, chaotic process in which social conflict has played an extremely important role. And it has called for various forms of collective learning. In my book Capital and Ideology (2019; English translation 2020), I laid out the theme of collective learning about just institutions, specifically around the question of borders: What are the outlines of the community one belongs to? How are political power and the political system organized within this community? The same goes for property: What are the collective rules that define the limits and extent of property rights? What do you have the right to own? What does it mean to be an owner?

  These tw
o central questions—borders and property—are thus sources of conflict and directional change, with each country trying to learn from its own trajectory and all too often forgetting the trajectories of other countries. Each country follows its apprenticeship trajectory, which in the long term tends toward greater equality, even if the motion is hesitant and punctuated by retrograde phases.

  Finally, overarching the diversity of inegalitarian systems and the limited trend toward equality, there exists another type of relationship between nature, culture, and inequality that I’d like to examine here and that I’ll address in the last part of this text: global warming, CO2 emissions, and the destruction of nature and biodiversity. This issue will occupy an ever-more-central place in the decades ahead. It may lead to a greater demand for equality than we’ve recently seen: there can be no resolution to the global warming crisis, no possible reconciliation between man and nature, without a drastic reduction in inequality and without a new economic system that is radically different from the current capitalist one. In describing this system, I refer to “a participatory, democratic, and ecological socialism,” but other terms could clearly be devised—and no doubt will be. At all events, I consider it imperative to reopen the discussion on changing the economic system and reimagining its long-term development.

  THE EVOLUTION OF INEQUALITY AND INEGALITARIAN SYSTEMS

  The elements I intend to present here come in part from my book A Brief History of Equality, first published in France in 2021, and in part from the World Inequality Database (which issued the World Inequality Report 2022). This database on global inequality is the product of a collective effort and draws on the work of more than a hundred international researchers. Under its aegis, historical data has been collected that allows us to track changes in the distribution of income and wealth over long periods—sometimes more than three centuries.

  The field of social and economic inequality itself has a long history, and I’ve simply followed on earlier efforts. Among my predecessors are Fernand Braudel, Ernest Labrousse, Adeline Daumard, François Simiand, Christian Baudelot, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and many others. There is a great tradition in France, starting in the early twentieth century, of historians, sociologists, and economists engaging in the task of collecting data on salaries, income, profits, plots of land, and inheritances. I had the good fortune to start working at a time when the digitization of this data made gathering knowledge much easier. In fact, what’s striking when one rereads the works of Labrousse or Daumard is that the labor of collecting data was done by hand, often at the expense of anything else. Inheritance data had to be culled from archives in Paris and the provinces, where it was stored on file cards. This involved considerable work but left little in its wake that could be used by later researchers. The resulting studies, labeled “serial” history, have all but disappeared from view, partly because the organization and description of the data collection itself took up such a large part of the researcher’s energy, to the detriment of historical analysis. Today, obviously, the task of data collection is much simpler and is performed on a comparatively vaster scale, in a directly cumulative context.

  Furthermore, the fact of explicitly integrating the twentieth century into the long timeframe studied (which was not the case with the first wave of serial historians, who mainly dealt with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) necessarily puts history, and especially politics, at the very center of the analysis. When you consider the eighteenth century, or even the nineteenth, you can easily be led to believe—wrongly, I would say—in fateful trends that operate independently of political developments. But with the twentieth century, the connections jump out at you the moment you draw a curve showing salaries, income, and wealth: World War I, World War II, the liberation of France, the events of May 1968, et cetera. You immediately have to factor in political history to explain the inflection points you’re seeing. I want to emphasize right away that I’m talking about the constructive and collective aspects of political history. Contrary to what some have claimed, equality has not been the product of wars per se, nor of great catastrophic events such as the Black Death. In the case of the French Revolution, war even tended to stifle revolutionary developments. And World Wars I and II had relatively little effect on equality in many countries: it all depended on the societal structures and outcomes that were implemented afterward. Political mobilization and union pressure were more important in bringing about a shift, for instance, in Sweden, where the two world wars had relatively little impact. In the United States, it was largely the economic crisis of the 1930s and not World War I that led to instituting social welfare policies. The real force for change derives, as we’ll see, from concerted social and political pressure, as well as the ability to build new institutional outcomes.

  I had the good fortune, as I mentioned, to start my career as a researcher in this intellectual context, along with an international network of researchers like those who have contributed to the World Inequality Database. It allowed me to enlarge my comparative and historical focus and to observe the great diversity of inegalitarian systems and the halting progress toward equality that I spoke of earlier. So as to give a preliminary sense of the diversity of systems of inequality around the world, I’ll start by presenting results relating to a very simple criterion: income distribution. Afterward, I’ll go on to look at the distribution of wealth. Let’s quickly define the difference between these two terms: income is what is earned in the course of a year, either as remuneration for one’s work or from one’s wealth (in the form of rent, interest, dividends, et cetera); wealth is what one owns (housing, business assets, securities, et cetera), and it is always distributed much more unequally than income. The possession of capital also determines the structure of power relations: this is obviously true for the ownership of business assets and the means of production, and it is also true for the possession of housing and the framework for reproducing private and family life, as well as the ownership of the state and public power through public debt, which can take different forms.

  INEQUALITY OF INCOME

  Let’s start, then, with income. We use a fairly simple metric for this: the share of total income going to the top 10 percent of earners. By definition, in a perfectly egalitarian society that share would equal 10 percent of total income, since those earners represent 10 percent of the population. In a perfectly inegalitarian society, they would take all the income, a share of 100 percent. What actually happens, of course, lies somewhere between the two extremes. As shown in figure 1, the share going to the top 10 percent is lowest in Northern Europe (20 to 30 percent), and highest in South Africa, where that share reaches 70 percent. This should give you a first glimpse of the considerable variation in levels of inequality across the globe.

  If you were to try, looking down from a great height, to decide which were the most egalitarian and inegalitarian parts of the world, the first thing you’d notice is a great deal of variation, sometimes even within a single region: in Latin America, for instance, Argentina is more egalitarian than Brazil or Chile, in keeping with the country’s sociopolitical history and the groundwork laid by Juan Perón to build a welfare state, which was realized more fully there than in any of the neighboring countries. But some regions do show a higher degree of overall inequality: South Africa, with its legacy of apartheid, and southern Africa generally; and Latin America as a whole has a high degree of inequality of property, tied to Spanish colonization and the political regimes that followed; North America, for its part, bears traces of specific racial inequalities. Generally speaking, colonial legacies have left a strong and lasting mark on the structures of inequality. But there are also areas, like the Middle East, where the sharp disparities are not due to a past history of racial or colonial inequality but to a modern fact, namely oil revenues, which have turned into financial revenues, concentrated among an extremely small share of the population. In the current map of inequality, we therefore see a mix of old and new, with different interlocking rationales.