(Newswire.net — September 11, 2019) — Six years after the book “Capital in the 21st Century” sold in more than two million copies, catapulting him among the most influential thinkers of today, French economist Thomas Piketty has published a sequel, entitled Capital and Ideology, the Guardian reports.
In another monumental piece that spans as many as 1,232 pages (roughly like “War and Peace” by Tolstoy) Piketty further elaborates on the ideas of concentrating wealth.
According to the Guardian, in addition to analyzing the ideas that justified inequality throughout history, Piketty in his new book takes a look at despair and the powerlessness of the traditional left and right parties, and also presents his own ideas about redistributing wealth and how to achieve a fairer economic system.
Among the suggestions Piketty makes in the book, mentioned by the Guardian, there are several ideas that are sure to encourage heated debate among economists and politicians, and perhaps the general public.
According to Piketty, employees of some companies should hold half of the positions on the board of directors of the company, and the voting power of even the largest shareholders should be limited to 10 percent of the total number of votes.
Predictably, significantly higher real estate taxes are proposed, up to 90 percent for the largest properties. Furthermore, to anyone who turns 25, Piketty would pay a one-off payment of € 120,000 ($132.599) and would also introduce an individual CO2 tax, calculated to track each person’s “carbon footprint”, that is, his or her “contribution” to global warming.
While there is no doubt that many will declare these ideas too radical and unworkable, Piketty does not seem to moved by his critics. In an interview with the French weekly L’Obs, he said he was not concerned about the impact that the implementation of his proposals might have on the stock exchanges.
“This will affect crazy prices of real estate in Paris, and will create new social groups whose members will become owners (of real estate) and shareholders,” said Piketty.
“Capital in the 21st Century,” Piketty’s 2013 book, is one of the few economics books that has gained popularity among the masses, and given its ambitiousness and context of publication, many have compared it to much of John Maynard Keynes’s “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.”
But unlike Keynes, Piketty was more popular with the masses than with the ruling class, so his call for a global wealth tax came across deaf ears.
The book has arrived on the shelves of French bookstores Thursday, but an English translation is not expected until March next year.