Pickety Publishes
Book Review:
Piketty, Thomas, “Why Save the Bankers? And Other Essays on Our Economic and Political Crisis.” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston New York, 2016. Dallas Library 330.94 P636W 2016
Apparently, publishers were looking for anything by Piketty after his world-shaking 2014 (in French, 2015 in English) book “Capital in the 21st Century.” This is only a collection of his essays on contemporary developments in Europe 2010-2015. He has a monthly newspaper column.
These are short and readable and, if nothing else, give a short summary of major economic developments in the European Union during the period. They also encapsulate some of his major recommendations for solutions to the capitalist crisis:
- The worldwide wealth tax espoused in his major work
- Additional economic integration — he calls it ‘federation’ — within the European Union. He particularly wants the EU to be able to issue common bonds and have common debt. At other times, he mentions other economic aspects of closer federation.
“Federalism, the Only Solution,” is the title of one very central essay.
Piketty doesn’t believe that austerity will solve any particular country’s crisis, consequently, he sees no reason why some countries (Germany and France) would force it onto other countries (Greece). He opposes what he calls “tax competition” between nations. It consists of lowering business taxes in order to entice more economic activity away from countries with higher taxes. He mentions Luxembourg and Ireland particularly.
At the end of 2017, Republicans in Congress drastically lowered taxes for businesses and wealthy Americans. One of their excuses was that other nations had lowered theirs already. Race to the bottom!
In a very general sense, Piketty sees the European Union as having unnecessary crises because they only partly joined their economies. Fiscal and monetary policy simply don’t work when they aren’t coordinated among the nations. What hurts one helps another.
–-Gene Lantz
I’m on KNON radio‘s “Workers Beat” program at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. 89.3 FM in Dallas. They podcast them on Itunes. If you are curious about what I actually think, check out my personal web site.
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