Two Theories of Plutocracy

A century ago, F. H. Bradley, then a much-admired Oxford philosopher, introduced a book on his idealist metaphysics, with the disarming assertion that 'metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct'. Philosophers often used to display such becoming modesty. However, their sometimes unworldly but historically literate ruminations have now been largely replaced by the more unequivocal declarations of the later arriving legions of social scientists, equally unworldly, but fortifying their claims with statistical data. The first half of the 20th century saw the rise of psychologists and sociologists, but louder noises in recent decades have come from economists. A great stir has lately been created by one of these, the French Grand Theorist, Thomas Piketty. It is instructive to contrast his portrait of advancing plutocracy with the mid-20th century prognosis of the eccentric English sociologist, Michael Young.Piketty, in his bestselling Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, claims to have charted, with massive statistical detail, the historical development of international capitalism over the last two centuries, and the changing levels of inequality that have gone with it. Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy was very different: a satirical essay, written in the form of an imagined memoir from England in 2033, by a senior member of the future 'Meritocracy', explaining the historical steps which were culminating in a social and political disaster.Piketty extrapolates an increasingly inegalitarian future, unless modified by a worldwide 80% income tax on annual incomes above $500,000, and a further 15% tax on inherited wealth. He bases the need for this unlikely development on his conviction that he has definitively shown that the rate of return on capital, save in exceptional circumstances, always outstrips the rate of economic growth. Hence inherited wealth will, on average, always exceed wealth achieved by a life of labour,… Read More