ONE of the most arresting things about “Capital in the 21st Century”, the best-selling economics book by Thomas Piketty, is that it caused far less of a stir in his native France when it came out last year than it has in the English-speaking world. Its publication in English has turned Mr Piketty into what New York magazine calls a “rock star economist”. Writing in the New York Times, Paul Krugman has called Mr Piketty’s text “discourse-changing scholarship”. Martin Wolf, in the FT, described it as “an extraordinarily important book”. An enthusiastic review in The Economist can be read here and a detailed discussion is on our economics blog here. “Capital” has entered the New York Times best-seller list, an unusual achievement for a weighty economics text.
In France, however, where Mr Piketty is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, it has drawn far less attention. Although amazon.fr now puts it at the top of its current best-selling books, it did not feature at all in the top 100 in 2013 and did not grab headlines when the 970-page French version came out in August last year. Across all outlets, the French version of “Capital” is currently in 192nd place, according to Edistat, the French book-publishers’ ranking.
The French seem almost bemused by the sudden international fame of their home-grown economist. “Thomas Piketty, une star américaine”, ran the headline of an article in La Tribune, a business newspaper. Le Monde ran a story pointing out that Mr Piketty was referred to “only five times” as French in a piece in the New Yorker, as if this were proof of his being taken seriously.
Why did the French version of “Capital” not make the same splash? One review last year, in the left-leaning Libérationnewspaper, suggested that the book was not left-wing enough. There is no discussion, lamented the author, of “social and cultural domination, violence, relegation, exploitation, alienation at work, class, struggle etc.”
A more serious explanation could be that Mr Piketty was too closely linked to a proposal by François Hollande, France’s Socialist president, during his 2012 election campaign to introduce a now-discredited 75% top income-tax rate. The 75% tax rate sent an important message, Mr Piketty said approvingly at the time, and “lots of other countries will inevitably follow this route”. In fact, the millionaire tax was denounced by one of Mr Hollande’s own advisers as “Cuba without the sun”, ruled unconstitutional by the French constitutional court, and was hastily watered down.
Perhaps the chief reason, though, is that questions about inequality, the centrepiece of Mr Piketty’s research, have long been central to the political debate in France, a country that already has an annual wealth tax on assets. This has been true for the right as much as for the left. Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist, was first elected president by campaigning to mend the country’s “social fracture”. Mr Hollande was at his most passionate on the campaign stump when denouncing the world of finance as his “chief adversary”, and the super-rich as “grasping and arrogant”. In short, drawing attention to resurgent inequality has a sense of novelty in America, but in France it is a political given.
