Piketty, Meade and Predistribution

Thomas Piketty’s *Capital in the Twenty-First Century* presents a
troubling puzzle for social democrats and for parties of the
centre-left, as well as for academics interested in developing a more
egalitarian public policy agenda. Supported by a previously unimagined
wealth of statistical detail, gained through the archival labour over
many years of a large team of researchers, Piketty’s book confirms
profound concerns about the long-range dynamics of capitalism. Wealth
does not naturally disperse down to the many, but sticks to the few, and
especially to those who carry the arbitrary advantages of patrimonial
inheritance. The facts of inequality are devastating, and come with an
accompanying sense of deflation at the level of policy and political
action. We may have come to see the grim facts of capitalism’s internal
dynamics more clearly than ever before, but it is much less clear that
we have the tools to cure capitalism’s disfiguring disease of
accelerating inequality. Hence we see that a common reaction to
Piketty’s work on the left is one of resignation or even despair. The
sardonic good humour and cautious optimism displayed by Piketty himself
can seem oddly out of place against the background picture that has been
created by his years of ground-breaking research.

The sense that Piketty’s book should be seen as a deeply pessimistic one
is brought into full focus when we consider the single policy proposal
for which he is best known: that is, the idea of a progressive global
wealth tax. Such a tax would involve unprecedented levels of cooperation
between international tax authorities, alongside a massive shift in the
level of detail in reporting the ownership and transfer of both
financial and non-financial wealth. Such a proposal sounds like pie in
the sky: a wonderful policy if we somehow had a magic wand to change the
nature of both the world financial system and of its various (often
highly competitive) fiscal systems overnight, but a position
inaccessible any time soon from our current circumstances. If we imagine
states that could enact the policy that Piketty endorses, then we seem
at the same time to be imagining a world in which the concrete problems
of unequal power and unequal political influence that are created by
large economic inequalities are somehow dissolved. Piketty’s hoped-for
fiscal fix would seem to involve an impossible act of political
bootstrapping.

However, it seems to me that commentators have been too quick both to
reduce the implications of Piketty’s book to the headline proposals of
more aggressive fiscal transfers, and to accuse him of utopianism in
putting too much faith in such a solution. Piketty himself is not naive
about the short-run possibilities for a technocratic fix for runaway
inequality through the actions of some international fiscal authority,
seeing his global wealth tax proposal in strategic terms as a
‘worthwhile reference point, a standard against which alternative
proposals can be measured’ (p. 515). Moreover, and more importantly, he
also has a more ambitious agenda, speaking of the need for a
comprehensive democratic capture of capitalism, in which ‘the concrete
institutions in which democracy and capitalism are embodied need to be
reinvented again and again’ (p. 570). This would involve ‘the
development of new forms of property and democratic control of capital,’
with regard to which ‘new forms of participation and governance remain
to be invented’ (p. 569).

Piketty is in fact both more ambitious and more realistic than many of
his critics give him credit for being. What he proposes in fact is a
broad and comprehensive research programme that would involve finding
new ways in which the balance between democracy and capitalism can be
reset. His extraordinary empirical work shows the background of
increasing inequality, a declining labour share of overall economic
returns, and an increased role for patrimonial inheritance, where
today’s entrepreneur becomes the *rentier* of tomorrow and ‘the past
devours the future’ (p. 571) against which this research programme will
have to develop. Piketty, whose contempt for the ‘childish passion for
mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological
speculation’ (p. 32) of contemporary economics is entirely creditable
and admirably refreshing, realises full well that this can only be a
broad-based research programme across the social sciences, incorporating
insights from history, sociology and philosophy as well as economics
itself.

Before saying a bit more about where the road from Piketty’s remarkable
book should lead, I want first to take a step back, and to discuss the
fascinating relationship between Piketty’s weighty volume and an
earlier, contrastingly concise book by the economist James Meade.
Published fifty years before Piketty’s *Capital in the Twenty-First
Century,* James Meade’s 1964 book, *Efficiency, Equality and the
Ownership of Property* is an astonishingly prescient book that is
centrally concerned with the same problems of inequality that drive
Piketty’s work.

Where Piketty has a team of multinational researchers armed with a
wealth of historical data, Meade had to make do with no more than some
inspired armchair hunches about the evolution of capitalism, made all
the more remarkable by the fact that he was writing at the very high
watermark of the *Trentes Glorieuses*, at a time when the labour share
of economic returns was high, and inequality was historically low.
Gazing into his crystal ball, Meade predicted that the relentless
consequence of technological advances would be greatly to increase the
productivity of capital relative to labour. He also suspected that (as
Piketty and his colleagues went on to demonstrate) inequalities in
capital returns between large and small investors would lead to the
increasing growth of inequality among the holders of capital. Inequality
grows as returns to the savings of the already-wealthy increase much
more rapidly than those of more modest savers, even at the same time as
the inequality between those with and those without capital holdings
grows alongside it, creating a doubled force for divergence.

These twin forces of divergence would lead, Meade thought, to what would
be a horrific social outcome, identical in its main features to
Piketty’s prediction of a return to a new *Belle Epoque.* Meade named
his dystopia ‘The Brave New Capitalists’ Paradise.’ Here is his vivid
description of it:

> But what of the future? … There would be a limited number of exceedingly wealthy property owners; the proportion of the working population required to man the extremely profitable automated industries would be small; wage rates would thus be depressed; there would have to be a large expansion of the production of the labour-intensive goods and services which were in demand by the few multi-multi-multi-millionaires; we would be back in a super-world of an immiserized proletariat and of butlers, footmen, kitchen maids, and other hangers-on. Let us call this the Brave New Capitalists’ Paradise.

> It is to me a hideous outlook. What could we do about it? (EEOP, 33)

Meade’s problem – that is, the problem of what could be done to prevent
the realization of the Brave New Capitalists’ Paradise – is in effect
the same as Piketty’s problem of how to stop the emergence of a new
*Belle Epoque.* Meade’s solution to this problem was an intriguing one.
He thought that the state should take any reasonable means necessary to
prevent this dystopian outcome, pursuing three strategies
simultaneously. A single egalitarian aim should be realised by a
plurality of egalitarian means. Meade’s vision was of a new kind of
egalitarian social democracy, using a novel combination of both
socialist and popular capitalist institutions to create a society that
combined economic dynamism with a huge reduction in economic inequality.

Firstly, the traditional forms of redistribution through the welfare
state should be protected, both with regard to transfers to the
badly-off and the provision of collective public services. But Meade
thought that no strategy that did not address the underlying pattern of
ownership and control of wealth would go far enough. Public policy could
not be concerned only with the flow of income streams, but with the
sources of wealth from which they came.

On Meade’s view, traditional methods of redistribution simply did not go
deep enough, dealing – after the fact – with the symptoms of underlying
inequality, rather than providing a more fundamental cure by
restructuring patterns of individual and collective ownership within the
economy. Only the more fundamental strategy could ensure, stably and in
the long run, that the increase in the capital share of national income
would be made to work for everyone, and not just for a narrow class of
plutocrats. Egalitarian strategy had to be proactive, rather than merely
defensive.

Meade’s view was that attacking fundamental inequalities of wealth had
to involve a double-barrelled strategy, consisting in the creation of a
range of private and public institutions and policies, which he brought
under the headings of (i) a property-owning democracy and (ii) liberal
socialism. Instead of the role of the state being to sweep in as an *ex
post* fiscal authority, reallocating the hugely unequal rewards of
economic activity, the state’s function in shaping the economy should
instead be to restructure the rules of the capitalist game from the very
start, through these varieties of both private and public forms of what
[I’ll](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/12/ed-miliband-predistribution)
[call](http://www.policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=4262&title=The+promise+of+pre-distribution)
‘capital *predistribution*’.

Meade’s property-owning democracy involves, in effect, changing the
nature of property rights such that wealth is much less easily
transferable across generations, given that it would be subject to high
rates of taxation with regard to both inheritance and gifts *inter
vivos*. Wealth would be dispersed across the population, with individual
capital holdings for all viewed as an entitlement of citizenship, and
the use of a myriad of mechanisms that would spread the returns to
capital as broadly as possible. Such mechanisms could take a large
number of different forms, including ‘the encouragement of financial
intermediaries in which small savings can be pooled for investment in
high-earning risk bearing securities; measures to promote employee share
schemes whereby workers can gain a property interest in business firms;
and measures whereby municipally built houses can be bought on the
instalment principle by their occupants’ (EEOP, 59). The goal would be
both to spread capital returns widely across society, and to overcome
the forces for divergence between larger and smaller investors.

This ‘property-owning democracy’ was, though, just half of Meade’s
strategy of (in my terms) ‘capital predistribution.’ The other half –
his ‘Socialist State’ – involved the creation of forms of collective,
democratic wealth. Meade envisaged the creation of public institutions
akin to the sovereign wealth funds that have come to play an
increasingly important role in the world economy, such as the Alaskan
Permanent Fund or, most impressively, the Norwegian Statens Pensjonsfond
Utland (SPU), a collective investment vehicle that owns roughly 1% of
global equities. Such forms of public and democratic wealth ownership
could be used to fund a citizens’ income (as in the Alaskan case), or in
any other democratically authorized way that allowed the socialization
of increasing returns to capital, and the decoupling of individual
life-chances from excessive dependence on outcomes in the labour market.

Unlike John Rawls, whose own influences from Meade are clear even from
the names which he gives to different kinds of socioeconomic regime
(i.e. property-owning democracy and liberal socialism), Meade did not
think that we need to choose between private and public forms of capital
predistribution (and neither did he think that either strategy was a
[replacement](http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd1444334107.html)
for the traditional welfare state). Instead, Meade believed that a more
egalitarian future would involve the state doing three things – (i)
strengthening the provision of public goods and income transfers through
the traditional mechanisms of the social state, whilst simultaneously
pursuing capital predistribution in both its (ii) individual and (iii)
collective forms. Meade thought that what we need ‘is a combination of
measures for some socialization of net property ownership and for a more
equal distribution of the property that is privately owned’ (EEOP, 71),
taken as measures ‘to supplement rather than to replace existing welfare
state policies’ (EEOP, 75).

It is only now, fifty years after the publication of Meade’s prescient
classic, that the full force of his diagnosis of capitalism’s
inegalitarian ills is becoming clear. It may also be time to pay more
attention to his proposals for how those ills might be cured.

This brings us back to Piketty. In *Capital in the Twenty-First
Century,* Piketty describes himself as ‘following in the footsteps’ (p.
582) of Meade (and of Meade’s student and Piketty’s collaborator, Tony
Atkinson). When I [discussed](http://www.ippr.org/juncture/juncture-interview-thomas-piketty-on-capital-in-the-twenty-first-century)
[these](http://www.renewal.org.uk/articles/interview-inequality-and-what-to-do-about-it) issues with Piketty when he came to London at the time of the publication of his book in English, he had this to say about the
relationship between his thinking and Meade’s proposals:

> James Meade, just like me, believed that progressive taxation and the development of other forms of property relationships and of other forms of governance are complementary institutions. In the book I probably place too much emphasis on progressive taxation, but I do talk about the development of new forms of governance and property structure, but probably not sufficiently. So I agree with that – that can be for volume two!

Along the same lines, in his recent *Journal of Economic Perspectives
article,* ‘Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics:
Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century,’ Piketty has
returned to what one might describe as the unwritten, Meadean parts of
his argument for institutional change to combat inequality:

> I may have devoted too much attention to progressive capital taxation and too little attention to a number of institutional evolutions that could prove equally important, such as the development of alternative forms of property arrangements and participatory governance. (Piketty, 2015, p. 87)

What Piketty’s painstaking empirical work has shown is that the
besetting problems of inequality that worried James Meade are as bad as
Meade had feared. These tendencies towards shocking levels of inequality
constitute a deep challenge to the legitimate continuation of capitalism
in its current form, and will need to be addressed urgently in the years
ahead. Contrary to the occasional misreporting of Piketty’s
forward-looking views, it is no part of Piketty’s view that we can rely
on a simple technocratic fiscal fix to solve the problems ahead of us.
Mechanisms of redistribution will not be sufficient, but will have to be
supplemented by more radical forms of *predistributive* institutional
innovation.

If solutions to the problem of inequality are to be as radical as
reality now demands, what is instead required is a reimagining of what
would be involved comprehensively to tame capitalism through democratic
means. This will involve much further development of the kind of
plurality of institutional and policy proposals sketched by Meade, and
will involve both the private *and* public – individual *and* collective
– forms of capital predistribution that Meade advocated. Piketty, like
Meade, sees the need for *both* redistribution *and* predistribution,
and both see that the institutional means necessary to create a more
equal society will involve pursuing a plurality of parallel paths. It is
closely in keeping with the spirit of Piketty’s *Capital* that the
political and intellectual agenda ahead will be one that economics on
its own cannot hope to encompass. It’s a vital agenda, with high stakes,
and presents challenges to both academic researchers and political
activists. On the success of this endeavour depends nothing less than
the prospects for legitimate continuation of our economic system.

*For extremely helpful comments on this essay, I am grateful to Robert
Lepenies, Michael Rosen, Alan Thomas, and Stian Westlake.*