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Chris Bertram
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century tells us a great deal about the evolution of inequality in wealth and income over a long period and how that distribution is likely to evolve unless we intervene. What Piketty does not do is to tell us why inequality is bad or why people care about inequality, although we can glean some knowledge of his personal beliefs here and there. In what follows I draw on some aspects of Rousseauvian moral psychology to suggest that the reasons people care about inequality matter enormously and that because some people value inequality for its own sake, it will be harder (even harder than Piketty thinks) to steer our societies away from the whirlpool of inequality.
In the book, Piketty argues that, without significant political intervention, it is likely that wealth inequality will increase dramatically in the coming century and that a class of rentiers will come to dominate over those who earn their incomes from labour, just as previous classes of rentiers did before the twentieth century. His book tells of a U-shaped pattern in the evolution of inequality in the past hundred years, with high levels of inequality being reduced but then bouncing back. Striking levels of economic growth coupled with the destruction by war and revolution of the wealth that formed the background to previous inequality, led to societies that were an unprecedented combination of egalitarianism and meritocracy, where those who worked hard could do well for themselves and where the domination over the living by wealth inherited from ancestors had become greatly diminished.
(co-written with Sarah Fine, Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College London)
Only two months ago Europeans were shocked by the picture of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee lying dead on a Turkish beach. Then, there was a profound sense that more should be done to help people fleeing Syria’s civil war. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the ISIS murders in Paris and with unconfirmed reports that at least one perpetrator may have travelled through Europe disguised as a Syrian refugee, there are loud calls to close our doors. For some of Europe’s politicians, such as UKIP’s Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen of France’s Front National, and the new right-wing Polish government, enough is enough: refugees trying to get to Europe should be stopped and nobody should be resettled here. There are demands for Schengen to be abandoned, together with current rules about freedom of movement within the European Union. In the United States, a similar debate is playing out, as a number of Republican governors, Presidential candidates and members of Congress push back against President Obama’s plans to welcome thousands of Syrian refugees. With so many in Europe and across the world outraged at the atrocities in Paris, these voices will be seductive, but if heeded they will lead us towards policies that would be profoundly mistaken and counterproductive.
Clamping down on refugees fleeing the region will not prevent acts of terror. In the European case, if ISIS and similar organisations wish to engage in further attacks, they do not need to bring anyone in from Syria to do so. The perpetrators who have been positively identified turn out to have been lawful residents of France and Belgium.
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I’ve no words to add to what others have written. Solidarity and care for the dead and those who mourn them and for the wounded and those who care for them are the most important thing right now. Here’s a picture of ordinary life, people in a café.
Here’s one I took on Friday night. One of the swing bridges that connect the north and south of the city is closed for repair, so there’s a temporary replacement for cyclists and pedestrians that takes you much higher than usual and affords a different vista of the water.
This is more of a bleg than a post, I’m looking for contradiction. One of the often-claimed worries about immigration is of cultural loss, that the incomers will overwhelm the natives who will then lose the distinctive identity that they value. Supposedly, open borders would lead to the erosion of difference, people would lose their countries, and be bereft. But thinking about it, I’m struggling to think of *any* cases of cultural extinction due to the kind of immigration that results from individuals and families simply choosing to move to another country for a better or different life. Open borders within Europe haven’t caused the Germans and French to disappear. Open borders within the UK (and with Ireland) haven’t led to the demise of the Scots, the English, the Welsh or the Irish. And such immigrants as have come, have just turned into regular folks with slightly unusual names or atypical appearance within a generation. Not that there haven’t been historical cases of some peoples chasing out or killing other peoples, of course there have. But all the instances — at least all the modern ones — I can think of are *state-sponsored projects* of colonialism, genocide, forced relocation and the like. In the absence of deliberate state action and political mobilization, peoples of ethnic, cultural, religious, or linguistic distinctiveness seem to be pretty robust entities. Though Henry Sidgwick and Michael Walzer seemed to think they needed borders and border control to preserve themselves, mostly they don’t.
(for a much better photograph of a similar subject in a nearby location look [at this picture by Harry Gruyaert](http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2015/10/random-excellence-harry-gruyaert.html) via the Online Photographer, and then buy his book!)
