Piketty makes upbeat comments on Bernie Sanders and what he implies about US inequality trends.

Just to pass on a very optimistic comment from Thomas Piketty, on our on-going struggle against the American convergence to a government controlled by an emerging aristocracy.

Fig 1 Thomas Piketty published an Opinion piece in The Guardian

In the 2016 Feb 14 on-line edition of The Guardian,  Piketty published an opinion piece on the U.S. election. He is shown in Fig 1, picture from here.   He discussed the phenomenon of Bernie Sanders having anything more than a tiny token part of the process we use here to get candidates nominated by the parties.

He reviews the position America had as the world leader in the growth of equality, right up to the end of the 1970s, and our horrible decent since then.  He discusses Bernie Sanders and what he might mean.  His final sentence…

“However, new forms of political mobilization and crowdfunding can prevail and push America into a new political cycle. We are far from gloomy prophecies about the end of history.“

Hugely positive, considering Piketty’s comment in his book C21 (Capital in the twenty first century).  He ends his book observing that the convergence to total inequality is not deterministic, which is  nice way of saying this is where the momentum from the recent past is pushing our Ship Of State.  His current upbeat tone became even clearer when compared another one of his comments – the world does not have to regress to an aristocratic feudal state, although he thought it very unlikely that we, the people of the world, would change this future end result (my rephrasing).

We now resume our annual blog pause for Autumn and Winter.
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Charles J. Armentrout, Ann Arbor
2016 Feb 20
This is listed under Politics … a post in the Politics > 2016 thread
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