I know these aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the fate of the peasant is often on my mind …

One of the reasons I like Russ Roberts is that he is willing to interview people with whom he disagrees on fairly major philosophical and ideological grounds.  He will get his point in, but then let the guest speak.  And I am also a fan of his open university concept, where anyone can get an education if they can get on the internet.

This gentleman, Thomas Picketty, has written a book entitled Capital, that has stirred the pot in the income gap and wealth distribution world and his data certainly match what I feel anecdotally has occurred.  His European background gives poignancy to his argument as well.  Much of Europe still has an hereditary aristocracy firmly in place, and there are remnants of monarchies still sucking up the public dollar.  And is Brussels, head of the UN, not a little kingdom today?  And while France had a revolution at about the same time as the American one, it was a bloody horror that dissuaded others from following in such drenched footsteps.  The Russian revolution got rid of the Tsars perhaps, but it didn’t do much for the peasant.

Europe has had to deal with what the American emigrants left behind, as they claimed a vast wilderness and became rich from the natural resources that were so abundant. Difficult and brave, yes, and a nightmare for the folks already living there, but it created for almost two centuries a more egalitarian society with the richest and the poorest far apart but never so far as in the Europe they had left behind.  [That sounded snarky.  I am a beneficiary of ancestors who took the plunge and crossed the pond to North America so perhaps my guilt is showing.]  But with that context in mind, which gives the two economists very different anecdotal and educational and therefore ideological backgrounds, one raised presumably on Horatio Alger, and the other on Le Petit Prince, here is their interesting conversation:

Thomas Piketty on Inequality and Capital in the 21st Century

 One cannot see well except with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.

[The Little Prince, en Anglais]