Piketty's challenge for sociology.

This paper argues that Piketty's book should not simply be seen as that of an economist, but that it contains significant resources for sociologists to draw upon. These are firstly, this approach to social science and his use of visualizations which chime closely with recent claims about the power of description. Secondly I consider his conceptualization of time and history - which in rebutting epochal arguments about the speed of contemporary change allows for a much better appreciation of the 'long durée'; and finally his conceptualization of social classes and privilege through his elaboration of a sociology of accumulation and inheritance. In all these ways, Piketty's work assists in developing an account of elites and wealth which should be highly productive for future sociology.

Beyond capital? The challenge for sociology in Britain.

This article offers a 'local', British, reading of Piketty's landmark book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, suggesting that the challenge it offers to sociological approaches to inequality is more fundamental than hitherto recognized. The variations in 'national trajectories' exposed by Piketty reveal Britain to be anomalous in terms of standard approaches to the path dependencies embedded in different welfare regimes. Using the recent work of Monica Prasad on 'settler capitalism' in the USA and the tax and debt-finance regime associated with it, the article suggests that colonialism and empire and its postwar unravelling has had deep consequences for British social stratification, albeit largely neglected by British sociologists. Finally, it points to the fact that the form of tax and debt-finance regime that has become reinforced in Britain is at the heart of recent radical reforms to higher education. These are the currently unexplicated conditions of our future practice as sociologists and, therefore, an obstacle to building a critical sociology on the foundations laid out by Piketty.

After Piketty?

In this paper, I take Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty as the starting point for a set of twelve policy proposals that could bring about a genuine shift in the distribution of income towards less inequality. In designing the set of proposals, I draw on the experience of reducing inequality in postwar Europe and on an analysis as to how the economic circumstances are now different in the twenty-first century, highlighting the role of technical change and the rise in capital emphasized by Piketty. The proposed measures span many fields of policy, and are not confined to fiscal redistribution, encompassing science policy, competition policy, public employment, a guaranteed return on small savings, a capital endowment, as well as more progressive taxation of income and wealth transfers, and a participation income. Inequality is embedded in our social structure, and the search for a significant reduction requires us to examine all aspects of our society. I focus on inequality within countries, and what can be achieved by national governments, with the UK specifically in mind. The primary audience is those concerned with policy-making in national governments, but implementation should not be seen purely in these terms. There are different levels of government, and certain proposals, particularly those concerned with taxation, may only be feasible if pursued by a group of countries in collaboration. The last of the twelve proposals - for a basic income for children - is specifically directed at the European Union. Finally, actions by individuals as consumers, as workers, or as employers, can all contribute to reducing inequality.

Capital and time: uncertainty and qualitative measures of inequality.

This review compares Piketty and Marx's approaches to capital and time in order to argue for the importance of qualitative measures of inequality. These latter measures emphasize varying experiences across classes and through history of uncertainty and insecurity. They explore how the social rhythms of capital profoundly affect the ability to plan a life-course. Quantitative measures such as those used by Piketty that focus on the amount of capital that accrues through time cannot capture such important phenomenon. This is especially because their calculations rest on absolute amounts of capital recorded in formal state statistics. Their limits are particularly revealed if we consider issues of: informal labour, social reproduction, and changing institutional forms of public debt. If we are to build the inter-disciplinary rapprochement between social science and economics that Piketty calls for it must be through asserting the value of qualitative measures of insecurity and its effects on decision making. These are important to track both at the macro-level of institutions and at the micro-level scale of human lives. It is, therefore, through emphasizing the existing strengths of both anthropology and history that we can meet Piketty's important challenge to make our scholarship relevant to current political and social debates.

Capital in the twenty-first century: a critique.

I set out and explain Piketty's model of the dynamics of capitalism based on two equations and the r > g inequality (his central contradiction of capitalism). I then take issue with Piketty's analysis of the rebuilding of inequality from the 1970s to the present on three grounds: First, his model is based on the (neo-classical) assumption that companies are essentially passive actors who invest the amount savers choose to accumulate at equilibrium output - leading to the counterintuitive result that companies respond to the secular fall in growth (and hence their product markets) from the 1970s on by increasing their investment relative to output; this does indeed imply increased inequality on Piketty's ß measure, the ratio of capital to output. I suggest a more realistic model in which businesses determine investment growth based on their expectations of output growth, with monetary policy bringing savings into line with business-determined investment; the implication of this model is that ß does not change at all. And in fact as other recent empirical work which I reference has noted, ß has not changed significantly over these recent decades. Hence Piketty's central analysis of the growth of contemporary inequality requires rethinking. Second, despite many references to the need for political economic analysis, Piketty's analysis of the growth of inequality in the period from the 1970s to the present is almost devoid of it, his explanatory framework being purely mathematical. I sketch what a political economic framework might look like during a period when politics was central to inequality. Third, inequality in fact rose on a variety of dimensions apart from ß (including poverty which Piketty virtually makes no reference to in this period), but it is unclear what might explain why inequality rose in these other dimensions.

The politics of Piketty: what political science can learn from, and contribute to, the debate on Capital in the twenty-first century.

Thomas Piketty's imposing volume has brought serious economics firmly into the mainstream of public debate on inequality, yet political science has been mostly absent from this debate. This article argues that political science has an essential contribution to make to this debate, and that Piketty's important and powerful book lacks a clear political theory. It develops this argument by first assessing and critiquing the changing nature of political science and its account of contemporary capitalism, and then suggesting how Piketty's thesis can be complemented, extended and challenged by focusing on the ways in which politics and collective action shape the economy and the distribution of income and wealth. Although Capital's principal message is that 'capital is back' and that without political interventions active political interventions will continue to grow, a political economy perspective would suggest another rather more fundamental critique: the very economic forces Piketty describes are embedded in institutional arrangements which can only be properly understood as political phenomena. In a sense capital itself - the central concept of the book - is almost meaningless without proper consideration of its political foundations. Even if the fact of capital accumulation may respond to an economic logic, the process is embedded in a very political logic. The examples of housing policy and the regulation, and failure to regulate, financial markets are used to illustrate these points.

Piketty's capital and social policy.

Piketty's Capital (2014) primarily describes and analyses changes in the distribution of wealth and annual incomes. This paper focuses on his policy proposals that make up Part Four of the book. Piketty defends the 'social state' but he discusses it largely in terms of distribution and redistribution between tax units. This neglects the important role of social policy in promoting recognition and redistribution of income and opportunities that is related to gender, race, disability and sexual orientation. Nor does Piketty consider inequalities in health which effect life-time incomes, nor the impact of housing policies on house prices and the distribution of wealth. It is argued that Piketty's approach to social security is simplistic and plays down the complexity of competing policy goals. On taxation, Piketty defends progressive taxation and proposes a global capital levy. The latter proposal runs into formidable problems in seeking global taxation in a world of nation states. Rather than seeking a policy that is, for the foreseeable future, wholly politically impractical, a case is made for less idealistic but more practical and urgent tax coordination between nations to address the widespread avoidance of taxation that large corporations and the very wealthy are now permitted - taxation on which the future of the social state depends. The importance of human and social capital, which are largely set aside by Piketty, are discussed. Finally,it is argued that his approach to policy is to describe trends and propose amelioration of growing inequality rather than to identify causes of the trends and propose policies that might address the causes. Nevertheless, the importance of his work in bringing issues of inequality to the fore, especially among economists, is recognized and applauded.

Uncertainty: the Curate's egg in financial economics.

Economic theories of uncertainty are unpopular with financial experts. As sociologists, we rightly refuse predictions, but the uncertainties of money are constantly sifted and turned into semi-denial by a financial economics set on somehow beating the future. Picking out 'bits' of the future as 'risk' and 'parts' as 'information' is attractive but socially dangerous, I argue, because money's promises are always uncertain. New studies of uncertainty are reversing sociology's neglect of the unavoidable inability to know the forces that will shape the financial future.

Sociology, economics, and gender: can knowledge of the past contribute to a better future?

This article explores the profoundly gendered nature of the split between the disciplines of economics and sociology that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, emphasizing implications for current efforts to bring the fields more closely together. Drawing on historical documents and feminist studies of science, it investigates the gendered processes underlying the divergence of the disciplines in definition, method, and degree of engagement with social problems. The recently developed field of economic sociology and other efforts to bridge the disciplinary gap have the potential to heal this disciplinary split, if they are broadened, deepened, and made wiser and more self-reflective through the use of feminist analysis.