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Thomas Piketty, president of @ecineq starts his ptesentation on the recent evolution on inequality and political attitudes 
One of Piketty’s first well known papers was on social mobility and the transmission of redistributive preferences (it’s published in the QJE of 1995, look it up, it’s quite good)
“The recent evolution of trade and higher education has created two new cleavages in society. Trade among workers, education between those who have access to higher education, and those who don’t”
The evolution of income concentration in three developed countries through the XXth and XXIth centuries.
(Piketty recognized two large limitations of Capital in the XXIst century: it has nothing to say about developing countries and its very lacking in the political economy)
(Piketty recognized two large limitations of Capital in the XXIst century: it has nothing to say about developing countries and its very lacking in the political economy)
Evolution of top income and inheritances taxes. So, yes, there is a historical experience with inheritance taxation. (#impuestoalasherenciasya)
Never forget: income distribution is a zero-sum game. Any gains at the top come at the cost of those at the bottom. Saying that inequality does not matters when you observe high levels of inequality, is saying that those at the bottom are less important
Share of public wealth in net national wealth. Notice the transition of the Chinese levels from something very communist (almost all wealth was public in 1978) to levels more proper of mixed economies (around 1/3 of national wealth is public wealth)
Also, notice that for the US and Italy, net public wealth is negative. Which means that the moment interest rates return to their usual level, the transfer of resources from the public to the private sector will be substantial.
“The model of globalization that we have in the present is a choice. To have an unequal globalized world is the result of the type of policies governments decided to implement as they open up”
BTW Piketty’s new book is called Capital and Ideology. Is coming out in French this September, in English on February 2020 (and I hope @FCEMexico already fetched the rights to do the Spanish translation)
The evolution of higher education and income inequality has led to the rise of a multi-elite political system: the left caters the highly educated elite, the right the business-high income elite
To exemplify this evolution, Piketty quotes Keynes on why he (Keynes) would never vote for the Labor party: he considered it a party without an intelectual elite. Now, it is the party for which the intelectual elite votes (while it leaves unattended the demands of workers)
(For the US, Thomas Frank makes a similar argument in this book Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? amazon.com/dp/1250118131/… He focuses on the obsession of the Democratic party with higher education and retraining)
The evolution of the French party system since 1945 in terms of the vote shares along the right wing-left wing axis.
Key result: at the beginning of the period (1956) the more educated you were, the more likely you would vote for the right in France.
By 2012, the more educated, the more likely you would vote for the left
By 2012, the more educated, the more likely you would vote for the left
The result holds even after controlling for age, sex, income and wealth
Left vote pattern along the income and wealth distribution. The lower the wealth and income, the larger the share of votes that the left gets
The creation of a multi-elite party system in France. The educated elite votes for the left, the wealthy elite votes for the right.
Migration and voting patterns in France: non-European sons of migrants are more likely to vote for the socialist party than European migrants.
Votes for the Democratic party by educational level. Again, in the fifties, the more educated you were, the less likely you would vote for the left.
2016, the more educated, the more likely you would vote for Democrats.
2016, the more educated, the more likely you would vote for Democrats.
Aaaand 2016 was weird. Both the top 10% of the income and of the educational distribution voted largely for Clinton. Before that, Democrats only had the vote of the intelectual elite.
In Britain, although the income and wealth elite might hate Brexit, they dislike Corbyn even more. And the Labour party is now the party of the intelectual elite.
And Piketty closes his talk with a plea to return to the big questions, even if that means not being able to talk about causality in statistical terms.
The French political quadrant according to Piketty
