 Sometimes democratic party leaders in the US or similar political leaders in Europe saying there's no way we can bring them back. We've done everything we could. They just don't understand the final point. Look, if you say that, how can you then convince other people or other parts of the world that you believe in electoral democracy? Hello, this is Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. We have the good fortune today to be in conversation with a person who I think my young scholars should study closely, not just your work, but your courage, your breadth of curiosity and the way in which you, how would I say, rigorously analyze real problems. And I'm talking about Thomas Piketty, who is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and author of many, many articles in all the top journals. He's written a number of books, most powerfully, at least in my experience, was capitaled in the 21st century, capital and ideology. I've skimmed through a time for socialism in his new book on the, how would I say, brief history of equality. What I am stung by in preparing for this conversation is in these difficult times, how positive, constructive and courageous this gentleman has been. And I see this book as an example, like I said, for our young people to follow. But I also see a long history of work. When I was a graduate student, I knew Dr. Anthony Adkinson, worked with him and the whole group, including the Condor Alvarado, Gabriel Zuckman, Emmanuel Saez and Dr. Piketty, as they built the World Top Income Database and basically created the platform for rigorous analysis of the questions of inequality. That's a tremendous gift and it's a gift that keeps on giving as you're going to find out in the next hour. Thomas, thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure to have you here. Thanks, thanks for inviting me. So let's talk with that body of work, with the prominence of you and that whole constellation of people that you work with. What inspired you to create this particular message? Well, it was important for me to try to write a short book on the history of equality, that's one thing. My previous books, I mean, I don't regret anything, but of course they are quite long. In particular, Capital and Ideology was 50% longer than Capital in the 21st century, which was already very long. After writing Capital and Ideology, I thought, okay, I have to stop somewhere. I cannot continue writing longer and longer books. That's objective number one was to write something more concise. Objective number two, and I guess the main novelty of the book, it's not only that it's shorter, by being shorter, I sort of clarified I think the general message and sort of the main lessons that I have learned from all this work. And I guess the main message that I'm trying to push in this new book called A Brief History of Equality, as opposed to inequality, is that I try to develop a sort of optimistic perspective. To show, well, look, this can seem paradoxical because there's lots of terrible things in the world today, and in some dimensions, inequality has worsened in recent decades. But if we take a very long-run perspective, in fact, there's been a long-run movement about more equality, both more political equality, social equality, and also economic equality to a large extent. This is a movement that has never been easy, that has never been natural in any meaningful sense. It has been grounded in political mobilization, social struggles, and most importantly, the constructive transformation of institutions, the development of new legal system, fiscal system, educational system, electoral rules. This is a movement that has not been there forever. It's grounded in history. It's not a long-run trend that has been going on since the Neolithic times. It started basically at the end of the 18th century with the French Revolution, the US Revolution to some extent. And it starts in particular with the abolition of the tax privileges of the aristocracy in the French context. It also starts with the first slave revolt in Saint-Domingue in 1791, which sort of sets the beginning of the end of slave and colonial societies. And then in the following two centuries, it has been continuing. In the 19th century with the final abolition of slavery, the development of the labor movement, the rise of male suffrage, universal male suffrage, in the 20th century with the rise of universal female suffrage, decolonization war, civil rights movement in the US, the rise of social security, the rise of progressive taxation. And this is a movement that's continuing today, of course, with the Black Lives Matter movement, the NATO movement. And this long-run quest for more social, political, economic equality of status is still going on because we still live in societies where there is enormous power of money, for instance, in politics. So we are not back in the 18th century with the privileges of the aristocracy, but there are all sorts of new privileges around. And our democracy is still very, very imperfect and incomplete. And maybe one day in 50 years, 100 years, when we look at today's period where you can put whatever private money you want with no limit in the financing of political campaigns, in the influence of the media. We have such a system of unequal political participation, unequal work, that maybe one day we look at this as something sort of intermediate between the 19th century or 18th century democracy and more effective democracy. And it is the same for other dimensions of inequality. OK, we've seen the end of slavery, decolonization, civil rights, but we still have enormous racial discrimination, racial injustices within each country and at the international level. So the general viewpoint in the book is, OK, there has been a long-run movement toward more equality. This has been very successful in the long run. It has come with more economic prosperity, in particular the rise toward more equal access to education has been absolutely central, both for the rise of more equality and more prosperity. We can and we should continue in this direction in the 21st century. This will take, again, big political mobilization, big political battles. But we should not lose sight of the fact that history is not deterministic. It's not frozen. So, you know, the enormous transformation in the political systems, the economic systems, the fiscal systems that have already happened over the past two centuries, you know, it's something, you know, if you had told someone in 1900 or 1910 that there would be enormous progressive taxation and rise of social security in the following century, you know, many people who have not believed it. So I think when we look at the future, we have to take this long-run perspective. So, you know, in my book, when I make proposals about what I call, you know, new form of democratic socialism and participatory socialism, multicultural socialism, you know, I'm not saying this is going to happen next week right away, you know, but at the end of the day, you know, I think what the kind of perspectives that I am proposing, the kind of international economic systems that I am proposing, you know, it's not more different from the system we have today than the system we have today is different from the system we had one century ago. So I think it's important to reopen the discussion about the kind of long-run future we want, which doesn't mean we will get there next week, but if we don't even know where we want to go in 50 years or 100 years, we are certainly not going to get anywhere. And, you know, on the other side of the political spectrum, we have all this, you know, xenophobic, racist, sort of identitarian retreat movement which, you know, don't hesitate to push forward, you know, sort of very strong view, you know, and I think very reactionary view of the future. And it's very important, you know, that progressive camps, so to speak, or at least, you know, people who are ready to stand for equality, equality, you know, of all forms, you know, between social classes, between genders, between races are, you know, ready to take again this task of saying, look, this has worked in the past. We've made lots of progress. We can, we should continue. And looking at the historical record, you know, an enormous success, for instance, of very progressive taxation of income in the 20th century in the United States. You know, we have to revisit this record and, you know, in order to push an ambitious agenda for the future. So that's, you know, what I'm trying to contribute to in this optimistic book, which I should, let me just conclude, you know, this is a book of my own, you know, of course I'm the only one responsible for, you know, whatever views are being expressed, but, you know, by the kind of collective work and in particular enormous project of historical and comparative data collection on which I rely and which I, you know, I'm trying to give a short synthesis of this work in this new book. Also, this research work could never have been conducted without this incredible international research network. So there are all the great people you have mentioned, Yadkinson, Emmanuel Sez, Gabriel Zucman, Pakumdol Taredo, Luka Chancel, but it's much bigger than this. It's over 100 researchers from all over the world, lots of institutions also have helped us and, you know, I met us in our early development a number of years ago and, you know, United Nations Development Program, European Research Council, you know, lots of public and non-profit institutions have helped us develop this little, you know, global public good where we're trying to provide more transparency on income and wealth inequality because in the end we really believe that this is the sort of democratic mobilization, democratic awareness, and, you know, the fact that more citizens can appropriate for themselves, you know, this kind of evidence. You know, economic data is too important to be left to economists and to experts. We want citizens to be able to appropriate this for themselves. And so, you know, we're trying to contribute to this with this little global public good which is a world inequality database and this could never have been possible without so much support from so many people. And yes, so, you know, this little book that I write is just one little output out of this much broader collective research agenda. Well, I was telling you, from my experience, many people treat the economy like it's some mechanical thing that doesn't require software to use an analogy and the software of governance, of innovation, of thinking about how to handle externalities and public goods. Those are little building blocks in the back pages of our textbook. You're bringing all this to light and you're also bringing to light in the more recent books and interviews that, let's say, there's a bit of difference between scientific analysis for the public good and marketing for self-interest and a lot of the information and a lot of the debate. I see you providing what I'll call the North Star of the public good to navigate toward. No one does that. We don't know where we're going. We're swamped in the marketing for self-interest and despondency rises in what I might call in the despondency and resignation, the temptation towards authoritarian alternatives become stronger. So I see what you're doing is very purposeful and it's very deep and it's very credible. But I do, I'm quite interested in what you might call the institutions that you think at this time, perhaps with climate on the horizon, having just experienced the pandemic. I just made a podcast and talked with the people, Max Lawson, at Oxfam. They said the top 10 wealthiest people on Earth doubled their net worth versus the pandemic and didn't pay any tax when a reasonable slice tax, not of their wealth but of the increment in their wealth, could have largely paid for vaccination of everyone on the planet and saved trillions of dollars in fiscal stimulus that people used in coping. So I see all of these dilemmas, many people who are not economists, not trained formally like you or I or many of our audience today, they smell a rat right now, but they just don't know how to find the exterminator and get back to feeling like they're on a healthy backyard. How do we organize the process? How do we create the nautical society that's directed towards your North Star, especially in the realm of globalization where the nation state is not any longer? The Treaty of Westphalia model doesn't work in the era of nanosecond mobility of capital, people hiding their money offshore and all kinds of other things. So we have to have almost like a global governance solution. That's even before we talk about climate. Yeah, no, these are big challenges. I think the democratization of economic knowledge is really to me a big part of the solution and there is so much more progress to be made in this direction. I've tried to contribute a little bit to that, but let's be honest, the kind of very long books I have written, even though it sold a lot, millions of copies, I'm not sure this is really something everybody is going to read until the end. Writing shorter books can contribute, but it goes much beyond this. I think, for instance, in the world inequality database today, it's easier to use it when you're a researcher, a scholar. There are lots of other ways to communicate knowledge through videos, through training sessions, through other means of communication which modern communication technology would allow us to do so much more. And to be honest, we've done so little for now, partly because we were focused on research, partly for lack of resources, partly because this takes time, but we're not going to stop there. That's a long-term commitment. I really believe that a big part of our democratic problems today and sometimes some of the disappointment with democracy has to do with the fact that economic knowledge and economic issues have sort of been left to sometimes a very small group of experts with very conservative views, and getting back the citizens and also other social scientists from sociology, from history, to go back to economic issues and not leave these issues to smaller self-proclaimed experts I think is very important. Now, there's also, you mentioned the nation state and the national limitation of our public conversation. I have been involved in another project in recent years which is called the Manifesto for the Democratization of Europe We tried to develop a sort of grassroots, we got like 200, between 150 and 200 thousand signatures which is not huge, but it's the equivalent of the population of Luxembourg after all, which have veto power on every tax decision in Europe. This is less than one person, this is less than 0.1% of the population of Europe. In France and the ancien régime, the nobility was about 0.5% to 1% of the population and they had those used to veto power on the tax legislation until the revolution took it away from them. So today, we live in a very different world but we still have some sort of deep institutional problem so in the case of the European Union, the fact that 0.1% of the population veto power on any possibility to have a tax policy for the other 99.9% is a problem. So we have set up an institutional system which has lots of good ingredients into it. I am a Federalist European and I am a Federalist citizen of the world so I believe we need more European Union, we need more agreements between the African Union, the European Union, we need the Arab League to develop a new, more ambitious Federalist approach to solve the problem of the Middle East. I am a deep federalist and internationalist but we need to put international cooperation to the service of social justice, fiscal justice. So in the manifesto for the democratization of Europe, what we say basically is, a group of countries, say the core European countries should be able and should decide on their own to create a common democratic assembly so that they can have a common budget in terms of green investment, in terms of progressive tax on high wealth, high income citizens and if other countries in the European Union want to join, that's perfectly fine but if they don't want to join, they should not make it impossible for countries that want to move to a more equitable kind of political and economic system to do so because if we continue with free trade, free capital flows without any tax coordination, without any coordination about carbon emission and social objective and inequality objective, then we should not be surprised that we have a very big part of the lower income groups and lower middle income groups who feel very negatively about globalization and about European integration in the context of Europe and this is what has led to Brexit this is what has led to Trumpism and I'm really trying hard in my own country there's a tendency today in the European Union to say, Brexit, this crazy British nationalist there's nothing we could do to keep them with us they were just crazy but in fact, when you look at who voted for Brexit you have the same profile that what we had in France when we had a referendum in 2005 about Europe which is that the upper income groups, upper education groups are very happy with European integration, globalization lower income groups, lower middle income groups are very negative and you cannot just say, okay, they are nationalists, they are stupid they don't understand, we will explain better I think this has to do with sort of structural problems in the way we have organized globalization and the fact that it benefits in a disproportionate manner the most mobile economic actors and in particular, we've created a very sophisticated legal system of free capital flows without any control and without any way to make the different social groups contribute in relation to how much wealth and income they have accumulated so you create a system where basically you can benefit from the public infrastructure of a country from the public education system in a country in order to accumulate wealth and then you can press on a button and transfer your assets in another jurisdiction and nothing has been planned to follow you and to make you contribute in proportion to how much you have benefited from the public infrastructure and how much you have been able to accumulate and then you explain the immobile classes the rest of the population you tell them, oh, that's too bad we don't know where the high wealth individuals have gone and we're going to have to tax you, the immobile people because at least you're still there but at some point, this is a machinery to make the middle class and the lower middle class very skeptical about this entire organization which has nothing natural it is man-made, it is a specific institutional setup and the institution could be designed differently international talks at the level of the OECD G20 have started since the 2008 financial crisis to talk about this and move in this direction we've had this agreement last year about a minimum tax rate on multinational corporations but this is still far too limited and in particular, on that example the 15% minimum tax rate was far too small small and medium-sized companies and middle class taxpayers played very often a lot more than 15% you can include income tax, social contribution, everything so if a multinational creating a subsidiary in a tax haven can pay only 15% that won't work and in addition, probably the even bigger problem with the agreement last year was that the countries in the south didn't get anything so it was basically a scheme where rich countries in the north would split between them some of the tax base that is currently located in tax havens in the north and the south will get almost zero share of the new tax base which to me is the biggest problem and this is what makes this kind of deal completely unsustainable especially given the huge damages that countries in the south are going to suffer because of global warming because of all the negative externalities produced by the north but even without that I mean this makes things even worse but even without that I think it's important to realize that there will be no rich country or rich firms or rich individuals today without the global economy without poor countries the entire process of wealth accumulation since the beginning of the industrial revolution did not happen in Otafki it happens through a global economic system based on global division of labour and global exploitation of natural resources and also of human resources sometimes in a very brutal manner and without this system there will be no rich country today and so I think today of course nobody individually is responsible for all this long colonial legacy etc but we are all responsible individually for accepting to be deciding or not to take this into account in our analysis of the world today and to take a concrete example I think when we talk about international tax reform there should be every country in the world should receive at least positive fraction of the total tax revenue coming from the largest the most powerful economic actors in the world multinationals and high wealth individuals and every country in the world should receive a fraction of this on the basis of their population and even if it's a small fraction of the total tax revenue for very poor countries it will make a major difference to be able to count on this resource as opposed to a system where they have to beg year after year and the basic justification for doing that is simply that there should be a minimum equal right to development to investment in education, health care from every citizen of the world when we were talking about the vaccine during the pandemic we could see or we should have seen that everybody should have access to this sort of minimal health expenditure but it's more general than this and if you add to this all the damages that are related to global warming of course it makes the case even more compelling but even without that it will still be I think very important to move the discussion in this direction in an earlier room essay you did with Daniel Steinmetz Jenkins I believe was at the nation you talked about kind of the dynamics I'll call it among elites that there's a Brahman elite that is very intellectual and then what may my called the merchant class and I've often thought let's say you know I was an undergraduate at MIT we're into electrical engineering if I'd stayed in the merchant class building in this digital age and I thought today either I or my son or daughter had a great idea I'd be afraid it couldn't be realized because of the breakdown of all of our systems in other words what I'm saying is the Brahman elite should be saying to these guys an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure you guys have great commercial ideas but unless we do things like adjustment assistance when we talk about globalization we can make everybody better off and nobody worse off I grew up in Detroit walk around Detroit or Cleveland see if anybody believes that possibility without transformational assistance there's going to be a lot of resistance to energy transformation related to the dangers of climate and global warming so what I guess I'm saying is I think you might be the best friend of a long-term equity portfolio and your own books have taught me that the time when the distribution of wealth gets flattened meaning less extreme is the time of world wars and crises so if you can like I say do the ounce of prevention you don't have to pay the pound of cure from the social collapse and your good ideas can blossom oh sorry Rob I think I missed I missed a sentence you said I would be the best friend of of the merchant class aspiring merchant class because by creating with your vision of these government structures something that what you might call is making social sustainability more likely you're allowing a blossoming and a vitality and an appreciation of innovation that will make them profitable you're not necessarily energy in the long run you're right I'm not going to talk about it on Wednesday night at Tabar that's different but you have a prescient vision and they probably don't fear the collective social instability as much as I sense they should yeah no you're right you know it's always a problem you know when you look back in time you always feel that the elite in some cases should have accepted the structural change before but you know I was talking of the French Revolution you know of course how did these people in the nobility imagine that they could get away with the system of tax privileges for basically one percent of the population forever you know it looks but yeah you know they were accustomed to an organization of the world where if I'm trying to give them a chance and not just being selfish and they were selfish of course but if I'm trying to give them a chance about what kind of view of the world justifies their views conservatism their view of the world just like many elite today is to say okay that's all fine you know your story about social justice tax justice is perfectly fine but the only problem is you know if we start moving in this direction we will never know where to stop so you know it will be chaos basically so we have to organize societies through you know strong principles and the division sort of different function in society the mobility class the clergy class you know was the organizing principle then it was replaced by another organizing principle which was the principle of property so everybody should have access to property right but once you have property you should never question property rights and you know in the 19th century this was very strong this is like when we abolished slavery slave owners were compensated for their loss of property so there was no compensation for slaves owners you know in particular France made 80 pay you know huge work tribute in effect between 1825 and the 1950s so during almost one century and a half in order to compensate you know slave owners for their loss of property and you know liberal thinkers when so called liberal thinkers like Tobville you know in 1848 was a very strong supporter of compensation to slave owners and we hear about doing something for slaves because he said you know if you start questioning property rights including the property right of slave owners where are you going to stop because you know what are you going to do with the slave owners who sold this slave five years ago and who now owns a building in Paris or a castle in Bordeaux or a financial portfolio in Paris you also going to go after him and indeed you know probably a fair abolition of slavery should have involved the compensation to slaves actually some people at the time like Condorcet at the time of the French Revolution was not like Tobville he was in favor of compensation to slaves but then you need to have some democratic deliberation and some democratic decision making about where you are going to stop in terms of redistribution of rights and indeed this is a complicated process and this was a complicated process back then it is still a complicated process today but I think we have no other choice than to trust democratic deliberation democratic decision making to arrive at some acceptable compromise about you know the right distribution of income and wealth but I guess you know one sort of perpetual and classic argument by the elite and you know also by you know some you know people who are trying to listen to different arguments around is to say okay that's all good and fine but you know where is this going to stop isn't there a risk that this ends up in complete chaos and look it is a complicated you know discussion in the end my own view is that if you look at history and in particular the experience during the 20th century with a very progressive taxation of income something the United States you know I think it was a big success and I think that's one reason to believe that you know we can do it again in a more ambitious scale involving not only income redistribution but also distribution of wealth involving you know sort of more international perspective or more global perspective on these issues so you know that's the basis of my optimism is to look at you know these successes in history now is this simple you know is it simple to convince everyone of that no it's not simple it will never be simple and so you're right you know in the long run you know even the elite should realize that their own prosperity will not continue for very long without a different distribution of wealth but yeah you know these things are never with unanimity you know at some point this is a balance of power but what I want to stress is that the balance of power you know is primarily intellectual institutional and not simply you know just you know pure pure balance of power it's very important to think and think again about the set of institutions or the economic platform that we want to put in place and so you know that's what I'm trying to contribute you mentioned in one of the interviews something let me broaden out for a second I see lots of work that like my kindred spirits growing up in Detroit are resentful of globalization some are resentful of automation and machine learning because the school systems haven't built the rungs in a ladder to allow people to transform from physical work to mental work adequately in any of these places but I also see another side of this and Bronkel Milanovic has been very illuminating in his work with Arjun Jayadev and Aynette the narrowing of income and wealth inequality between the global north and the global south particularly within China has been quite extraordinary so there are which are my call as somebody once said to me it's not clear that God was born in Pittsburgh or Detroit meaning there are things to care for here and the other dimension which I find to be very very tricky and you brought this up and you talked about cultural diversity in among the Brahman elite a lot of the people with all whole working class basically white people that I know in Michigan say the Brahman elite are the marketing men for this new globalized system of power and Wall Street and Silicon Valley and what they do is they understand that there's 400 years of woundedness of people of color that something like reparations is deserved but by appointing a handful of them to be in the 1% isn't changing the system in other words they didn't appoint Martin Luther King to come and upend militarism, racism and materialism they view it as a cynical decoration on the part of the Brahman elite and it doesn't send people in the direction of the merchant class it sends them in the direction I think you called nativism and it becomes polarized and very ugly because these people feel like those symbols of transformation which are deserved are leaving them out and that deepens their despair and so I see so many of these things are quite what I'll call supple, quite complex and at some level you're talking about I think democracies where what you've got to be is called a human being regardless you've got to be treated equally as though you have birth rights not rights based on one piece or another or a degree or education or the color of your skin and all that but it's especially with the history of woundedness it's a very, very tricky road to navigate when we're in such a tumultuous time now it is tricky and I think it's also to some extent it's also the price to pay for some of the collective success so I think we again, like you said in recent decades if you look at the post-1980 evolution of the global structure of inequality there's been some negative evolution but there's also been some positive evolution at the international dimension I think I enlarge poor countries if you have made progress although not all of them I think it depends also on the possibility to construct to go into a process of state building and construction of state legitimacy which is much more complicated process than just generalizing free trade generalizing market competition if you don't go through this complex process of state building in the different countries you cannot benefit from market integration you cannot benefit from anything so depending on the country we look at China India, Sub-Saharan Africa we get very different outcome of globalization depending on whether this process of state building how it developed in different manners and in the post-1980 there's also been some very positive evolution in terms of gender inequality which is much less extreme than what it used to be although it is still enormous and in terms of racial inequality you know the thing is that we started from a situation in the 60s or 70s which was a situation of extreme racial inequality and a situation in fact where in many cases people from different races or from different ethnic or religious origin did not even meet so they met through a complete domination in the context of colonial empires through basically military relation but there was very little direct contact we now live in societies in many parts of the world where people with different origin and grandparents or ancestors coming from completely different parts of the world now live in a single political community with in principle equality of political rights although this equality of political rights can be qualified and it's still far from a really meaningful equality of political voice and ability to influence the process but at least in terms of formal rights they live together under a principle of equality of rights which as compared to the situation in the a few decades ago is an enormous progress now it creates frustration it has created frustration in particular among people who felt that their situation has deteriorated or did not improve as much as the rest of the population and they feel they have been abandoned for the sake of making progress for other group of people so the only solution is more equality democracy, more redistribution in all dimensions I think the only way to make some of the people who are today feel close to the kind of nativist ideology I was describing and white poor voters in the US or in Europe is to the only way to bring them back to the political process and to the constructive political agenda is to propose much more ambitious program of redistribution of income wealth, educational expenditures health expenditure which has been proposed so far and I think in the end in many cases the feeling of being completely abandoned and left behind which has created this recentment so to speak is that if you look at the lower income voters both in the US or in Europe they actually have very low rate of political participation which is not good in itself but which shows that there is a demand I think for something different if these voters were very happy with the nativist political parties or xenophobic platforms you will see 90% participation rate and in Europe in particular in the period 1950 to 1980 the participation rate for lower income groups was very high just like for other income groups they were voting for Labour Party in Britain, Social Democratic Party in some cases a combination of Socialist Communist Party they were voting for the post-1980, post-1990 period all the decline in participation rate has come from lower income groups probably because they felt that the political choices that were offered to them were not very convincing including the xenophobic platforms that they have been offered which some of them go for it because that's the only option they feel they have but at the end of the day most are not satisfied with either platform so the only possibility in the longer run is to change this this will take a very long time because this is itself a process that's spanned over several decades but there's no other solution in the long run so when I hear sometimes Democratic Party leaders in the US are similar political leaders in Europe saying there's no way we can bring them back we've done everything we could they just don't understand final point look if you say that how can you then convince other people or other parts of the world that you believe in electoral democracy it's you have to be optimistic otherwise you cannot even define the very basis of electoral institution which we are supporting okay one last question often people in Asia talk about who is going to lead the world in the next phase 21st century Asia China, US behind for leadership and many people point to the United States and say is it a plutocracy or a democracy why are there so many people in prison and so forth but I recently read in the South China Morning Post a story about when your book I think was capital and ideology was planned to be released in China they don't want to show your research or data on how concentrated distribution of income and wealth is there so all these people that come out of the Marxian or Vablin or whatever schools of thought are now in countries and I would add Russia to that where the concerns you have about concentration of income and wealth may be as or more severe there than it is in the Democratic West yeah definitely so yes they wanted to cut you know every part about China basically so I mean this was ridiculous you know I received this incredible letter from the publisher in China saying okay you know this is the list of you know like 30 or 40 pages basically every page where I was talking about China so you know the nice thing is that okay I told them no way you know you will just not publish my book and in the end you know there were a couple of articles in the international press and in the end they came back to me they come back to my French publisher and they say okay we are not going to cut anything so of course we were very suspicious about their change in mind and so we said we are going to have a very well written contract where you know we want to be able to check the translation so you know we hire people who will check the translation here in Paris and we're still in the process in fact it's not yet published and we'll see you know if there is a problem we will say no anyway you know I was that was an interesting experience what you know I think if the west you know want to resist you know the rise of China and you know the rise of autocratic countries in general in particular China and Russia I think they also you know western countries also have to put forward you know more ambitious egalitarian development model and economic system that what we have been doing so far and you know if western countries simply say okay we are the rule of law we are the rule of justice we are the rule of democracy and you should agree with us about everything because we are so much more advanced than you are you know that's not going to work first because it's not very nice to hear from the rest of the world and nice because this is not true you know there are some institutions that were developed in western countries that are working better than other institutions but you know there are also so many you know so many problems with the functioning of our democracy you know the funding of political campaigns is incredibly unequal access to education is incredibly unequal the international tax system and of course the domestic tax system but particularly the international tax system is not equitable so you know if western countries don't come with proposals concrete proposals to change this you know how are they going to be able to tell people in India, people in Brazil who today are happy to get cheap oil from Russia are happy to get investment subsidies from China and if you continue with an economic system where we sort of keep the wealth for us we don't want to share at all any of the new resources that we get from tax events how can we convince these countries who are very poor as compared to western countries that they should not take this cheap oil from Russia etc so all the discussion about the rule of law, the rule of democracy and of course you know the fact that we need to resist to the military escalation by Russia and possible new military escalation by China after the terrible crash on democracy in Hong Kong which happened in the past 2-3 years and what would be the next step in Taiwan but if we want to be credible on these issues I think we are at the same time to the south and to poor countries much better deal and in a way which is much more respectful of state building, state legitimacy so typically we need automatic rights to get a certain fraction of certain tax resources in the past rather than forcing countries to beg year after year for aid which really never comes remember some of the commitments that were made at the end of 2015 at the Paris Summit and global climate change are still not paid so western countries during the conference committed to actually too small commitments to finance adaptation fund and the mitigation fund that countries in the south used in order to limit the consequences of global warming but the payments that were announced by rich countries at the time have still not been made in full so the credibility of these countries is severely damaged by this so if we want to be convincing and to confront the alternative model starting with China will this be the chance? okay thank you let's turn to the questions I have one quick one and then a couple that I'd pair together the first one is what is your view Thomas of universal basic income and its potential role in creating income security in a world of growing economic insecurity and its ability to reduce inequality and create a floor of rights as part of the citizens rights so I like the form of universal basic income or let's call it a minimum income scheme that in fact we already have in a large number of European countries it's not sufficiently automatic but it's targeted on individuals who have a labor income below a certain level I think it's it could be improved it could be made automatic but I think basically this is the right approach because once you pass a certain income level I think we should still have the ideal of wage earner status with wage stability and labor rights for workers in corporations I am very much in favour of having more voting rights for worker representatives in board of companies where they can negotiate salary scale, better wages and I am concerned that by giving basic income to absolutely everyone even if people have a job even if people have an income above a certain level this could be a way to then deregulate the labor market and sort of deconstruct the wage earner status so I think minimum income is absolutely a central institution but in any case let me say this it will never be very large so I am in favour of it but basic income depending on the proposal it's going to be anywhere between 50% or 75% of a full time minimum wage that's good it's important to have it so that nobody falls below this level that's not going to be the magic bullet so I think it has to come together with a very ambitious welfare state program access to education access to much more egalitarian ways than what we have today it could come with other system like the job guarantee proposals that was pushed by a number of people including Pavlina Charniva recently where you can have access to a full time minimum wage job that is administered by local bodies and municipalities and various non-profit organisations and this has to come also in my view in the long run with a minimum inheritance for all through redistribution of wealth which is even more ambitious because in addition to the minimum income maybe 50% or 75% of full time minimum wage and job guarantee at the level of minimum wage if you have in addition to that minimum inheritance to all where I proposed everybody would have say 120 zahousan euros or 150 zahousan dollars around 60% of average wealth per adult at age 25 this would make a big difference people who have millions or millions maybe don't make the difference between having zero or having 100 or 200 zahousan euros but in fact it makes a huge difference remember the bottom 50% of the population in the US owns less than 1% of total wealth they own basically nothing at all in Europe it would be 3-4% that's better than 1 or 2% in the US but it's ridiculously small you don't own anything or when you only have that negative wealth you are in a very weak bargaining position vis-à-vis your own life vis-à-vis society in general because this means you have to accept anything you have to take any working condition any jobs that you are being proposed anyway because you need to pay for your rent you need to pay for your family you cannot in addition to the basic income to a job guarantee system then you can start to negotiate you can start saying no to certain offers you can start your own business you can start projects which you will not dare starting otherwise you can bug a little home so that you don't need to pay your rent this makes a more dynamic society a more decentralized society where more people could have access to more opportunities more bargaining power so this is just to say basic income is important but it will always be relatively small in terms of amount as compared to average income average wealth in society so this will never be the magic bullet that's important we need to do it but this has to come with a whole series of more ambitious reforms to me this is really sort of ground zero of of social reform and wealth redistribution thank you I've got I'll read you three questions but they all resonate with the same theme there's something Rob I need to tell you which is that I have a young age children at home with a babysitter which I'm going to have to go there quite soon in fact I should go there right away so I can answer another question if you want let's read the last question and I want to applaud your treatment of the future generations not just the present I have two young children as well and I appreciate your discipline and your focus on them so quickly in a time when elites are becoming more powerful not only economically but politically do you think it's possible to change the institutions that produce inequality what incentive do they have and then second one is you talked about how money and politics is a corrupting factor can you give us a comparative view across different countries and finally a question about the United States while your data tells a story of long run progress towards equality the period from 1980 the present has seen a retracement in America given the difficulty of mirroring possibility of amending the U.S. Constitution where do you see hope look it's true that sometimes when I look at the U.S. and in particular the fact that money has taken so much control of the political process and the situation in many ways is so untrenched and you have so many congressmen so called congressmen in Washington from the Democratic Party including from the Democratic Party who are so finance in a way by big money that they don't their economic views their fiscal views are so conservative sometimes I feel like everyone that's not going to be easy to change I tend to be more optimistic in Europe or other parts of the world sometimes and for the U.S. but at the same time I should say we are always surprised by electoral mobilization political process in history so something I want to remember is that in the United States I remember 10 years ago back in 2014 after the publication of Capital in the 21st century we had a debate with Elizabeth Warren in Boston and I remember at the time I was pushing for the progressive wealth tax with tax rate up to 5 to 10% per year for billionaires and I remember Elizabeth Warren telling me this is too big how can you think about something like that and then 6 years later in 2020 Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who was going to propose the biggest wealth tax with a wealth tax rate of 5 to 10% per year and most importantly there was majority approval if you look at opinion polls not only among Democrats but also among Republicans about the idea of a billionaire tax and we should remember that every country has a complicated and ambitious relation with equality including of course the United States which invented very progressive taxation at the beginning of the 20th century and I think even today large fraction of the population feels that this is necessary to renew with this kind of policy and also let's remember that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders got almost half of the vote and actually much more than half of the vote if you look at voters in the primary below 40 in age with a different candidate maybe someone younger maybe someone with more diverse origin things could change could change so I am not impressed by people who sort of know in advance what's going to happen or what's not going to happen I guess the best way to contribute wherever we are about this process I think is to contribute to this democratization of economic knowledge and economic conversations that I was talking about at the beginning which to me is really a key condition for transformation of power relation in general and then whatever will happen will happen and we cannot predict everything but we have to be ready to contribute to this collective process and to this process of democratic change and deliberation okay so we should close here I always use some kind of artistic or music parable that comes to my mind as I'm listening to you talk and I've often thought today of a song called woman of heart and mind by Joni Mitchell because I think you are an economist of heart and mind but the one that really comes through to me is by a man named Todd Brunberg it's called I saw the light I saw the light excuse me it was late last night I was feeling something wasn't right there was not another soul in sight only you so we walked along though I knew there was something wrong and a feeling hit me very strong about you and you gazed up at me and the answer was playing to see because I saw the light in your eyes I think that you should tell your children as we get off that my children are going to hear about this discussion on the day when you win the Nobel Prize in economics because I'm proud to have met you you are shining a light on where we have to go you are our navigator in this profession you are a leader almost without compare other than your other members of your inner circle and I want to thank you for being here today but more importantly for what you're doing for your children, my children and everybody with the courage that you demonstrate