The book warned that when the financial returns on capital surpass the growth rate of the economy<\/a> \u2013 when merely owning wealth is more lucrative than working \u2013 riches become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few in a way that threatens democracy.<\/p>\n This was prescient. This month the Financial Times published<\/a> a long read on the threat \u201cAmerica\u2019s new oligarchy\u201d poses to democratic integrity, writing that the power of billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos under the Trump administration may now be even greater than the monopolistic \u201crobber barons\u201d of the Gilded Age.<\/p>\n The first question for Piketty is what has changed since 2014?<\/p>\n \u201cThings have gotten worse in terms of environmental crises. There are heatwaves and wildfires all over Europe right now,\u201d he replies with a sense of urgency. <\/p>\n \u2018Ireland could get more for itself through global co-operation than what they are doing now\u2019<\/p>\n \u2014 \u00a0Thomas Piketty<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cI think people are starting to realise that this is really going to be a defining threat for the future, and this makes the issue of inequality and redistribution even more important.\u201d<\/p>\n Piketty\u2019s publications are formidable and relentless: studies, media articles, and books, the latest co-written with his wife, fellow economist Julia Cag\u00e9. <\/p>\n He has also overseen the building of a free online database of each country\u2019s long-term wealth and income at the World Inequality Lab, which he co-directs.<\/p>\n Was there a particular experience that inspired him to start working on inequality? He starts to answer, and then breaks off.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Global Justice Report \u2013 I\u2019m really sorry, but this is really what I want to talk about. So if you\u2019re not interested in the Global Justice Report, maybe we should stop,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The report he mentions is the World Inequality Lab\u2019s latest publication, which contains eye-catching proposals around average monthly incomes per person converging to \u20ac5,000 in every country by the year 2100, working hours being halved, and large areas of the earth being reforested.<\/p>\n It argues that a wealth tax on the richest 1 per cent would pay for a transformation of the global economy to bring carbon emissions to zero and avoid disastrous levels of climate change.<\/p>\n I reassure the professor that I do have questions about it.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we should stop,\u201d he repeats. \u201cIt\u2019s clear, I can see you are not really interested.\u201d<\/p>\n He is kept on the line \u2013 just \u2013 by a stammered question. <\/p>\n The Global Justice Report imagines a world of much greater wealth equality, with lower carbon emissions. To help an ordinary person imagine what such a world might look like, is there a country he can think of that is closer to that ideal now?<\/p>\n [\u00a0Europe needs to start treating the climate emergency as a threat to our national securityOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n His reply is frustrated: of course no current country is a model, he says. \u201cBy definition.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRight now, with the kind of climate investment that we are making, our baseline projection for global warming is above four degrees in 2100,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n A four-degree rise in average global temperatures would be catastrophic: large parts of the world would be uninhabitable; the sea rise due to melted polar ice would submerge much of Dublin.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just saying: it\u2019s going to be really warm. So we need to do something,\u201d he continues.<\/p>\n \u201cThe question is really how to reconcile prosperity with planetary habitability. This is, I think, a very optimistic report \u2013 it is saying it is possible to combine the two.\u201d<\/p>\n The report\u2019s proposals rely on taxing billionaires to pay for the climate transition and to rebalance the distribution of wealth between countries. But are today\u2019s billionaires \u201ctaxable\u201d? Haven\u2019t they become so wealthy and powerful as to be beyond the reach of ordinary tax systems?<\/p>\n \u201cAt every time period in history, there has been a feeling that you cannot change the tax system. At the time of the French Revolution, there was the idea that aristocrats, you cannot make them pay tax, that\u2019s impossible,\u201d Piketty replies.<\/p>\n \u2018This little niche that Ireland is creating for itself looks attractive, but in fact it\u2019s a mediocre development strategy\u2019<\/p>\n \u2014 \u00a0Thomas Piketty<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cIf you had asked mainstream economists or politicians in 1910 in Ireland or Britain or France: is it okay if we compress inequality three-fold? And is it okay if the total tax revenue goes from 10 per cent of GDP to 30, 40, 50 per cent of GDP?<\/p>\n \u201cThey would have said: \u2018this is communism, this is going to be the collapse of the economy, the sky is going to fall\u2019. But in the end, it was very successful and it came with unprecedented prosperity and growth.\u201d<\/p>\n He has no time for those who describe the report as utopian.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s entirely a matter of political choice and political decision. Of course it\u2019s easier if more governments get together and take the decision together. But I think even individual countries can do it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a very moderate proposal as compared to what already happened.\u201d<\/p>\n Piketty is a long-term critic of Ireland\u2019s economic model, and some of his proposals sound almost like a caricature of the kind of continental thinking abhorred in Merrion Street.<\/p>\n A group of senior academics recently called for Ireland to recuse itself from negotiations on corporation tax and digital rules during its current presidency of the Council of the European Union due to a \u201cquestionable record\u201d. Does he agree with that view?<\/p>\n \u201cI think what would be even better, rather than recusing itself, would be for Ireland to change its attitude on the subject,\u201d Piketty says. <\/p>\n \u201cThe extra income that Ireland is generating by trying to be business-friendly, in practice means a lot of fake accounting of international corporations booking their profits in Ireland with economic activity which, in fact, is not happening in Ireland.<\/p>\n \u201cThe entire system of economic accounting of Ireland which has become completely opaque, and nobody knows the true GDP of Ireland, the numbers are impossible to follow.\u201d<\/p>\n Ireland\u2019s model imposes costs on others, Piketty believes, because multinationals continue to damage the climate while other countries are forced to impose taxes on their low and middle-income earners to make up for the escaping corporation tax.<\/p>\n \u201cFor one euro of extra wellbeing that you bring to Ireland by playing that kind of game, you are imposing 10 or 20 or 30 euros of damages to other countries, to the rest of the world, and to the planet,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n It is ultimately unsustainable because Ireland relies on trade and the prosperity of others to thrive, he says. \u201cIreland cannot be prosperous in autarky.\u201d<\/p>\n Piketty adds: \u201cI don\u2019t want to blame Ireland. I understand why every country is looking for its own little niche in this difficult world.<\/p>\n \u201cI would like Ireland to say: look, we\u2019ve been doing that because we had no other plan, to find a bit more resources for ourselves. <\/p>\n \u201cThis is the problem: this little niche that Ireland is creating for itself looks attractive, but in fact it\u2019s a mediocre development strategy. I think in the end, Ireland could get more for itself through global co-operation than what they are doing now.\u201d<\/p>\n We are soon out of time, but I later email Piketty a recent interview with the Italian writer Roberto Saviano<\/a> to give him an idea of the kind of article I am hoping to write about him. <\/p>\n He apologises for \u201cthe misunderstanding\u201d, saying he thought the plan was to write a story about the Global Justice Report \u2013 and answers some follow-up questions.<\/p>\n His interest in studying inequality came from observing \u201cvery different levels of wealth and social status in my family\u201d, he writes. \u201cSome very poor, some quite rich.\u201d<\/p>\n Previous profiles have described his parents as left-wing idealists who, in the years after France\u2019s 1968 student revolt, rejected well-to-do Parisian backgrounds to raise goats in the countryside, his mother later becoming a primary school teacher and his father a research technician.<\/p>\n\n
![\"Thomas](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/BZ7CHTOWLI5L53BBKAJQO6KYMU.jpg\")
Thomas Piketty won global renown in 2014 with the unexpected bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Photograph: Charles Platiau\/Reuters <\/p>\n\n
![\"Thomas](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GZDM5DDNOZKCJE3UDLS7OXAS2Q.jpg\")
Thomas Piketty with then Central Bank of Ireland governor Patrick Honohan during a conference hosted by the Think-tank for Action on Social Change at Croke Park, Dublin, in 2014. Photograph: Aidan Crawley <\/p>\n