We live in a complex world: We start to tear up thinking of innocent victims. And Bryan Stevenson tells the stories of the other side. Domestic abuse and violences are, in most cases, driven by alcohol. Bryan Stevenson deserves some respect for his actionable courage; furthermore, for the fact he never drinks alcohol for his entire life.
Many people justify the action of drinking alcohol. Probably drinking a glass or two might not cause serious harm. However, so many people simply use alcohol as the execuse to do bad things and cause serious harm to others. Alcohol is the origin of many sins, which include domestic abuse, especially to innocent children.
If you agree, there are things you can do. Stop drinking. If not, drink only a glass a week as a starter. It will just make the world much a healthier and better place to live and save many children from abuse and violence. It doesn’t demand you to commit lots of time and energies to making this world better. It is habitual. And in the process, you will become a better person.
In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), an innocent black man, Tom Robinson, is falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small 1930s southern town not unlike Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Robinson is tried and convicted by an all-white jury, despite the best efforts on his behalf of Atticus Finch, a white lawyer who defies the town’s lynch-mob mentality and demonstrates at trial that the victim’s story is false. Robinson tries to escape, and is shot in the back and killed. The book’s considerable dramatic power derives in part from its raw story of racial injustice, but also from the author’s choice of an innocent narrator, Atticus Finch’s young daughter, Scout.
Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy tells the story of an innocent black man from the real Monroeville, Alabama, wrongly accused and convicted of a violent crime against a young white woman, although in this case the crime is murder, and this time the story is nonfiction. Stevenson’s account of the trial and appeals of Walter McMillian takes place in the 1980s and 1990s, not the 1930s. But some things apparently do not change. McMillian, like his fictional counterpart Robinson, had committed the ultimate southern sin of having relations with a white woman, and he may have been singled out for prosecution in part because his affair had rendered him suspect and dangerous in the eyes of Monroe County’s white community.
Instead of Atticus Finch, the legal part in this story is played by Stevenson himself, a young African-American who grew up in rural and segregated Delaware, graduated from Harvard Law School, and founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law office in Alabama, to provide legal assistance to the many unrepresented men on death row there. Stevenson is today, along with his mentor, Stephen Bright, one of the nation’s most influential and inspiring advocates against the death penalty. He and his EJI colleagues have obtained relief for over one hundred people on Alabama’s death row, and won groundbreaking Supreme Court cases restricting the imposition on juveniles of sentences of life without parole. Unlike Finch, Stevenson won his client’s case. After extensive investigation, he proved that the scant evidence offered at trial against McMillian was all false, much of it coerced out of hapless “witnesses” by a sheriff and prosecutor who needed to pin the unsolved murder on someone…
David B. Feldman and Lee Daniel Kravetz combine the latest research on post traumatic growth with stories of people overcoming trauma to achieve great success, such as a blind man who rowed across the Atlantic and a woman who survived the Rwandan genocide and became a President Obama appointee.
Professor Thomas Piketty has given a more detailed response to the Financial Times articles and blogs on his wealth inequality data in Capital in the 21st Century(here, here, here and here). He says it is “simply wrong” to suggest he made errors in his data.
There are a few things on which we agree. First, the source data on wealth inequality is poor. I have written that it is “sketchy” and Prof Piketty says it is “much less systematic than we have for income inequality”. Second, it would have been preferable for Prof Piketty to have used a more sophisticated averaging technique than a simple average of Britain, France and Sweden to derive an estimate for European wealth inequality. Third, the available data suggests a broad trend of reduction in wealth inequality during most of the 20th Century.
There are more aspects on which there remains disagreement. Prof Piketty does not explain the multiple missing data points in his data or tweaks to it; he explains transcription errors as deliberate adjustments to overcome discontinuities in data, but does not provide formulas or an explanation of why these undocumented adjustments should apply to only one data point in a time series; he does not explain why it is consistent to favour household surveys over estate tax records for the US but not the UK; nor why his UK series showing rising wealth inequality differs so materially from his source materials, which show falling UK wealth inequality in eight of the most recent nine decades.
Further debate on many of these items is difficult because Prof Piketty accepts he makes still undocumented adjustments to his data from his original sources, but says they are appropriate because any alternative would not be plausible. The sources he has appear to be secondary to Prof Piketty’s prior expectations of what the data needs to show.
I would urge those interested, who have the time, to read Prof Piketty’s technical annexes, the source data and the spreadsheets and decide whether his graphs on wealth concentration are a reasonable summary of the sources he used.
I get a lot of emails from people asking me how they can learn to persuade others.
Learning about the ways people (honestly and dishonestly) influence you is one of the best things to learn early in life. But it’s never too late.
The go to book on the subject is Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Cialdini has spent a lifetime researching the psychology of compliance.
The book highlights six principles of persuasion, which most commonly and effectively are used by compliance practitioners.
We all employ them and fall victim to them, to some degree, in our daily interactions with neighbors, friends, lovers, and offspring. But the compliance practitioners have much more than the vague and amateurish understanding of what works than the rest of us have. … It is odd that despite their current widespread use and looming future importance, most of us know very little about our automatic behavior patterns . Perhaps that is so precisely because of the mechanistic, unthinking manner in which they occur. Whatever the reason, it is vital that we clearly recognize one of their properties: They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone who does know how they work.
These principles work via near automatic response – a “nearly mechanical process by which the power within these weapons can be activated, and the consequent exploitability of this power by anyone who knows how to trigger them.”
Reciprocation
This principle suggests people will be nice if you are. Therefore, if you do something first, by giving them something or doing something nice for them, it is more likely to come back to you. The key is to go first. And, at least in this case, size doesn’t matter. Something as small as a pen has been shown to influence people well beyond its monetary value.
Reciprocation is the basis of cashing in points, calling in a favor, owing other people one, etc.
The reason it works so well is that you have two choices, you either act in a socially approved way by giving in to a request or decline and face (perceived or real) shame. And we want to say yes because this is a way to avoid confrontation.
Reciprocation also works on multiple levels. We are more likely to trust someone who trusts us. We share secrets with people who share secrets with us.
One way to resist this is to refuse the initial favor or gift. Once you accept, it becomes a lot harder.
Consistency
Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment.
It’s easier to get people to comply with requests that they see as consistent with what they’ve already said (especially in your presence.) This is the basis for one of the bestinterview hacks, I’ve ever seen. If you ask people to state their priorities and goals and then align your proposals with that in mind you make it harder for people to say no.
If you start to see yourself as a devil’s advocate for example, you will reinforce that idea by acting like a devil’s advocate.
Say less at work and you’ll be more flexible when things change. Also examine why you want to comply and if things have changed. And keep a decision journal so you can see how often you’re wrong — there is no point holding on to bad ideas.
Once you’ve got a man’s self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this new view of himself.
Social proof
we…use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves.
Ever wonder why TV shows use laugh tracks. It’s so you know when to laugh. I’ll let you sit on that one for a minute.
People will more likely say yes when they see other people doing it too. This is amplified in situations of uncertainty, where we look to others for cues on what we should do. This can be dangerous. If you are in an emergency, you might look around you for clues on what to do and how to act. Others, of course, might do the same thing. This is why, in an emergency, you need to give explicit instructions. You should always point to someone in a crowd, and say, you call 911. Point to another person and ask them to do something.
Cialdini writes:
In the process of examining the reactions of other people to resolve our uncertainty, however, we are likely to overlook a subtle but important fact. Those people are probably examining the social evidence, too.
Consider walking into a restaurant in a foreign city. You’re starving and have no idea “what’s good” here. Luckily, there happens to be a section of the menu labelled “most popular dishes,” and that’s exactly what you’re likely to order.
Social poof is not all bad. It’s one of the main ways we learn in life. I’ve written extensively on this one before.
Liking
You prefer to comply with requests from people you like more than from people you don’t like. Go figure. One way people exploit this is to find ways to make themselves like you. Do you like golf? Me too. Do you like football? Me too. Although often these are genuine, sometimes they’re not. One way to get people to like you is to establish quick rapport.
This is the basis for tupperware parties. Who can say no to a good friend?
You also like people more if they like you. This is why Joe Girard, the world’s “greatest car salesman,” sends every customer a holiday card with the message “I like you.” And you know what, it works. People go back to him.
Oh, and by the way, I like you.
Authority
This relates to our tendency to be persuaded by authority figures, that is people who demonstrate knowledge, confidence, and credibility on the topic. Something as simple as informing your audience of your credentials before you speak, for example, increases the odds you will persuade the audience. Beware of those wearing uniforms or engineering rings as those are rather overt signs of authority.
We’re taught from a young age to listen to those in charge. And most times this works out ok but sometimes it doesn’t.
Consider this, the co-pilot is never supposed to let the plane crash no matter what, even in a simulator. The pilot, however, is the authority figure. So in simulators they’ve had the pilot do things that are so obviously wrong that an idiot would know that what he’s doing would lead to a crash. But the co-pilot just sits there because the pilot is the authority figure and a meaningful percentage of the time the plane crashes.
Scarcity
It is easy enough to feel properly warned against scarcity pressures, but it is substantially more difficult to act on that warning.
We all want something other people don’t or can’t have. If you offer people something rare or scarce, they are more likely to want it.
I just bought a book off amazon and interestingly on the page they said “Only 2 left in stock.” That’s scarcity. I better order now, or I might have to wait. And I don’t know about you but I really don’t want to miss out.
Dr. Paul Offit doesn’t like getting threats. But the 62-year-old pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia says it goes with the territory when taking on powerful industries and interest groups whose beliefs are deeply rooted in emotion.
He’s ready for a tsunami of criticism with his latest foray into debunking popular wisdom – “Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine” in which he takes on the vitamin and herbal supplements industry, alternative medicine of all kinds, Congress and celebrity doctors who peddle their own products…From NBC
This was a year ago. The reaction has been divided as anticipated.
In her new book, Elizabeth Warren tells the story of her life in order to make an argument about America (the middle class is trapped in a vise of debt), which is the sort of thing politicians do when they’re running for office. Warren, who spent most of her career as a law-school professor, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012; she’s not up for reëlection until 2018. “I am not running for President,” she insisted at a press conference in Boston in December, pledging that she will finish her term. But the publication, this month, of her autobiography, “A Fighting Chance” (Metropolitan), ahead of a memoir by Hillary Clinton that is due out this summer, only adds to the speculation that Warren is considering challenging Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016. And, even if Warren doesn’t run, this book is part of that race…
Libertarianism — the political philosophy that says limited government is the best kind of government — is having its moment. Unfortunately, that’s mostly because government has been expanding in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and the financial crisis. Somehow government failures lead to even more government.
When the financial crisis hit in the fall of 2008, the politicians in Washington had one response: start printing money and bailing out big businesses. First it was Bear Stearns, then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, then most of Wall Street. But voters had a different response. Polls showed widespread opposition to the bailouts. When Congress prepared to vote on President George W. Bush’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, Americans made their opinions known in no uncertain terms. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown reported, “Like my colleagues, my phones have been ringing off the hook. The sentiment from Ohioans about this proposal is universally negative.”
In the end, though, Congress took another vote, and the lobbyists won. Wall Street got its bailout. And we can date the birth of the tea party movement to that very week.
Meanwhile, the government’s response to the financial crisis sent people looking for answers. Sales of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” soared. The Cato Institute’s pocket edition of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution even hit The Washington Post best-seller list.
Libertarian ideas often cross left-right boundaries. Lots of libertarians were involved in the tea party and the opposition to the bailouts, the car company takeovers, the 2009 stimulus bill and the quasi-nationalization of health care. But libertarians were also involved in the movement for gay marriage. Indeed, John Podesta, a top adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and founder of the Center for American Progress, noted in 2011 that you probably had to have been a libertarian to have supported gay marriage 15 years earlier. Or take marijuana legalization, which is just now becoming a majority position: Libertarians have been leaders in the opposition to the drug war for many years.
Libertarians have played a key role in the defense of the right to keep and bear arms over the years, notably in the two recent Supreme Court cases that affirmed that the Second Amendment means what it says: Individuals have a right to own guns. Support for stricter gun control has been declining for years.
Much of the libertarian energy in the past few years was generated by the presidential campaigns of former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, and then by the leadership of his son Rand Paul representing Kentucky in the Senate. When Ron Paul began his campaign in 2007, he didn’t attract much attention. But then, in a nationally televised debate, he clashed with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani over the causes of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The confrontation became the cable TV moment of the night.
The next day, the conservative magazine National Review declared it a victory for Giuliani. But his campaign never got off the ground, while Ron Paul’s took off. “Ron Paul” briefly even became one of the most popular search terms on Google News. Paul’s support, especially online and among young voters, was intense, but it wasn’t broad enough to win any primaries.
Paul ran again in 2012, and he found even more success. He hadn’t changed much; indeed, his themes sounded like what he’d been saying since he entered Congress in 1976: The federal government is spending too much, printing too much money and launching too many wars. But the country, and the issues, had changed.
In 2007, Ron Paul warned that an economy based on debt and cheap money from the Federal Reserve was not sustainable, but the economy was booming and nobody wanted to listen. After the crash of 2008, they started listening.
In 2007, Paul criticized excessive federal spending, but with a Republican in the White House Republicans weren’t much interested. When Obama opened taxpayers’ wallets, they listened.
In 2007, Paul criticized endless military intervention, but most Republicans were content to repeat, “The surge is working.” By 2012, even Republicans were getting weary of 10 years of war. They listened.
In 2007, Ron Paul said that Congress and the president should not act outside their powers under the Constitution, but Republicans didn’t want to hear about unconstitutional acts by a Republican president. After the bailouts and the health care takeover and Obama’s unauthorized war in Libya, they listened.
And in 2010, a hitherto unknown ophthalmologist in my home state of Kentucky got elected to the U.S. Senate, helped by being the son of Ron Paul and by the energy of the tea party. Rand Paul upset the Republican establishment candidate in the primary, then comfortably defeated the Democratic attorney general in November.
Rand Paul, like his father, doesn’t agree with libertarians on everything. But in the Senate he’s been a strong voice for freedom on a wide range of issues. He introduced a bill to cut spending and actually balance the federal budget. He spoke out against President Obama’s intervention in Libya. He managed to kill a particularly bad piece of indefinite detainment legislation just by demanding that the Senate vote on it in public view. He fought “government bullies” from the EPA to the TSA, and even managed to get detained by the TSA when he objected to a full-body patdown.
Most memorably, in 2013 he stood like Jimmy Stewart in the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” at a desk in the Senate for 13 straight hours to force the country’s attention on the issue of unmanned drone strikes.
Shortly after Paul’s filibuster, America’s libertarian soul was pricked again by a series of revelations about government surveillance, overreach and abuse of power. First came the reports suggesting that the IRS had targeted tea party groups and those engaged in “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights” for extra scrutiny and delays in confirming their tax-exempt status. Then we learned that the Justice Department had been looking at the telephone records of as many as 20 reporters and editors at The Associated Press as well as Fox News reporter James Rosen. Both those efforts were part of the Obama administration’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers.
Then came the stunning revelations about the massive surveillance of Americans’ phone calls and emails by the National Security Agency. We learned that in more than a dozen secret rulings, the secret surveillance court has created a secret body of law authorizing the NSA to amass vast collections of data on Americans. The NSA broke privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times a year.
Americans were shocked. Members of Congress expressed outrage. President Obama defended the surveillance programs and assured us that the people with access to all this data “take this work very seriously. They cherish our Constitution.”
But distrust of government is in America’s DNA. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in condemning the Alien and Sedition Acts: “Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.”
This time it wasn’t “Atlas Shrugged” or “The Road to Serfdom” that shot up on the best-seller lists, it was another libertarian classic: George Orwell’s “1984,” known for its warning that “Big Brother is watching.”
Must reading for everyone. I bought a bunch of copies and am giving them as gifts to my friends.
I used to wonder why I heard so much contradictary news in the major media pertaining to health and the environment. First, a news item quotes an authority saying a food is safe, the next year the same newspaper says it’s dangerous, and the next year after that they claim it’s good for you. After reading this book, I know why. There are thousands of environmental and health , and scientific organizations. According to this book, many (but not all) of these organizations are not much more than clever PR fronts, funded mainly by industry. For example, I have often seen and continue to see information provided by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) in the major newspapers and magazines. The media usually takes this organization at its word as a credible scientific source.
According to this book: The ACSH is an industry front group that produces PR ammunition for the food processing and chemical industries. They praise the nutritional values of fast food and receive money from the fast food industry. They claim pesticides are very safe and take money from a host of pesticide manufacturers. The list goes on and on.. Yet the journalists usually take the ACSH words almost verbatim as fact and print it in their newspaper. Most journalists don’t check their sources, or they’re puppets of industry. Then the public reads this stuff as if it were scientifically proven fact. Public policy and law often gets decided on the basis of this “knowledge.” Of course, some readers of these “facts” are skeptical, but no one seriously challenges the ACSH’s credibility. Thus the ACSH continues to operate as if it were an objective science institute. Thousands of front groups worldwide use many of the same techniques. It then becomes obvious why so many people have a mistrust for science and don’t know what to believe.
I used to think this country was a democracy, but now I know who really pulls the strings on many key issues. It’s not the PR firms, it’s the companies who hire the PR firms. Don’t miss this book. For related info on health and environmental issues, I recommend “Our Stolen Future” by Theo Colborn
We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing exposé, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States—enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over—has a downside. Our overefficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more—more food, more often, and in larger portions—no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being.
Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is very big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly $900 billion in sales. They have stakeholders to please, shareholders to satisfy, and government regulations to deal with. It is nevertheless shocking to learn precisely how food companies lobby officials, co-opt experts, and expand sales by marketing to children, members of minority groups, and people in developing countries. We learn that the food industry plays politics as well as or better than other industries, not least because so much of its activity takes place outside the public view.
Editor of the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health, Nestle is uniquely qualified to lead us through the maze of food industry interests and influences. She vividly illustrates food politics in action: watered-down government dietary advice, schools pushing soft drinks, diet supplements promoted as if they were First Amendment rights.When it comes to the mass production and consumption of food, strategic decisions are driven by economics—not science, not common sense, and certainly not health.
No wonder most of us are thoroughly confused about what to eat to stay healthy. An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics will forever change the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. By explaining how much the food industry influences government nutrition policies and how cleverly it links its interests to those of nutrition experts, this pathbreaking book helps us understand more clearly than ever.
FORCES OF DIVERGENCE: Is surging inequality endemic to capitalism? BY JOHN CASSIDY, The New Yorker
In the stately world of academic presses, it isn’t often that advance orders and publicity for a book prompt a publisher to push forward its publication date. But that’s what Belknap, an imprint of Harvard University Press, did for “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” a sweeping account of rising inequality by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Reviewing the French edition of Piketty’s book, which came out last year, Branko Milanovic, a former senior economist at the World Bank, called it “one of the watershed books in economic thinking.” The Economist said that it could change the way we think about the past two centuries of economic history. Certainly, no economics book in recent years has received this sort of attention. Months before its American publication date, which was switched from April to March, it was already the subject of lively online discussion among economists and other commentators.
Part of Piketty’s motivation in returning home was cultural. His parents are politically engaged Parisians who took part in the 1968 riots. When he was growing up, his intellectual role models were French historians and philosophers of the left, rather than economists. They included members of the Annales school, such as Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, who produced exhaustive analyses of everyday life. Compared with this scholarship, much of the economics that Piketty encountered at M.I.T. seemed arid and pointless. “I did not find the work of U.S. economists entirely convincing,” he writes. “To be sure, they were all very intelligent, and I still have many friends from that period of my life. But something strange happened: I was only too aware of the fact that I knew nothing at all about the world’s economic problems.”
In Paris, he joined the French National Center for Scientific Research, and, later, the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where some of his heroes had taught. The main task he set himself was exploring the hills and valleys of income and wealth, a subject that economics had largely neglected. At first, Piketty concentrated on getting the facts down, rather than interpreting them. Using tax records and other data, he studied how income inequality in France had evolved during the twentieth century, and published his findings in a 2001 book. A 2003 paper that he wrote with Emmanuel Saez, a French-born economist at Berkeley, examined income inequality in the United States between 1913 and 1998. It detailed how the share of U.S. national income taken by households at the top of the income distribution had risen sharply during the early decades of the twentieth century, then fallen back during and after the Second World War, only to soar again in the nineteen-eighties and nineties.
The question is what’s driving the upward trend. Piketty didn’t think that economists’ standard explanations were convincing, largely because they didn’t pay enough attention to capital accumulation—the process of saving, investing, and building wealth which classical economists, such as David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill, had emphasized. Piketty defines capital as any asset that generates a monetary return. It encompasses physical capital, such as real estate and factories; intangible capital, such as brands and patents; and financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. In modern economics, the term “capital” has been purged of its ideological fire and is treated as just another “factor of production,” which, like labor and land, earns a competitive rate of return based upon its productivity. A popular model of economic growth developed by Robert Solow, one of Piketty’s former colleagues at M.I.T., purports to show how the economy progresses along a “balanced growth path,” with the shares of national income received by the owners of capital and labor remaining constant over time. This doesn’t jibe with modern reality. In the United States, for example, the share of income going to wages and other forms of labor compensation dropped from sixty-eight per cent in 1970 to sixty-two per cent in 2010—a decline of close to a trillion dollars.
In the nineteen-fifties, the average American chief executive was paid about twenty times as much as the typical employee of his firm. These days, at Fortune 500 companies, the pay ratio between the corner office and the shop floor is more than two hundred to one, and many C.E.O.s do even better. In 2011, Apple’s Tim Cook received three hundred and seventy-eight million dollars in salary, stock, and other benefits, which was sixty-two hundred and fifty-eight times the wage of an average Apple employee. A typical worker at Walmart earns less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year; Michael Duke, the retailer’s former chief executive, was paid more than twenty-three million dollars in 2012. The trend is evident everywhere. According to a recent report by Oxfam, the richest eighty-five people in the world—the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Carlos Slim—own more wealth than the roughly 3.5 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world’s population.
Some people claim that the takeoff at the very top reflects the emergence of a new class of “superstars”—entrepreneurs, entertainers, sports stars, authors, and the like—who have exploited new technologies, such as the Internet, to enlarge their earnings at the expense of others in their field. If this is true, high rates of inequality may reflect a harsh and unalterable reality: outsized spoils are going to go to Roger Federer, James Patterson, and the WhatsApp guys. Piketty rejects this account. The main factor, he insists, is that major companies are giving their top executives outlandish pay packages. His research shows that “supermanagers,” rather than “superstars,” account for up to seventy per cent of the top 0.1 per cent of the income distribution. (In 2010, you needed to earn at least $1.5 million to qualify for this élite group.) Rising income inequality is largely a corporate phenomenon.
Defenders of big pay packages like to claim that senior managers earn their vast salaries by boosting their firm’s profits and stock prices. But Piketty points out how hard it is to measure the contribution (the “marginal productivity”) of any one individual in a large corporation. The compensation of top managers is typically set by committees comprising other senior executives who earn comparable amounts. “It is only reasonable to assume that people in a position to set their own salaries have a natural incentive to treat themselves generously, or at the very least to be rather optimistic in gauging their marginal productivity,” Piketty writes.
That’s a pretty shocking figure. Piketty calls the tendency for inequality to rise during periods when the rate of return on capital is higher than the economy’s rate of growth “the central contradiction of capitalism.” Of course, the logic can also run in reverse. If the rate of growth exceeds the rate of return, wages and salaries will grow more rapidly than income from capital, and inequality will fall. That’s what happened in much of the twentieth century. The problem, Piketty argues, is that this state of affairs is unlikely to be maintained. “A concatenation of circumstances . . . created a historically unprecedented situation, which lasted for nearly a century,” he writes. “All signs are, however, that it is about to end.”
Given that inequality is a worldwide phenomenon, Piketty aptly has a worldwide solution for it: a global tax on wealth combined with higher rates of tax on the largest incomes. How much higher? Referring to work that he has done with Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva, of M.I.T., Piketty reports, “According to our estimates, the optimal top tax rate in the developed countries is probably above eighty per cent.” Such a rate applied to incomes greater than five hundred thousand or a million dollars a year “not only would not reduce the growth of the US economy but would in fact distribute the fruits of growth more widely while imposing reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior.”
Piketty is referring here to the occasionally destructive activities of Wall Street traders and investment bankers. His new wealth tax would be like an annual property tax, but it would apply to all forms of wealth. Households would be obliged to declare their net worth to the tax authorities, and they would be taxed upon it. Piketty tentatively suggests a levy of one per cent for households with a net worth of between one million and five million dollars; and two per cent for those worth more than five million. “Or one might prefer a much more steeply progressive tax on large fortunes (for example a rate of 5 to 10 percent on assets above one billion euros),” he adds. A wealth tax would force individuals who often manage to avoid other taxes to pay their fair share; and it would generate information about the distribution of wealth, which is currently opaque. “Some people think that the world’s billionaires have so much money that it would be enough to tax them at a low rate to solve all the world’s problems,” Piketty notes. “Others believe that there are so few billionaires that nothing much would come of taxing them more heavily. . . . In any case, truly democratic debate cannot proceed without reliable statistics.”
Economists can debate whether such a wealth tax would reduce incentives to invest and innovate, or whether it would be punitive enough to make a real dent in inequality. A more immediate problem is that it isn’t going to happen: the nations of the world can’t agree on taxing harmful carbon emissions, let alone taxing the capital of their richest and most powerful citizens. Piketty concedes as much. Still, he says, his proposal provides a standard against which to judge other proposals; it points to the need for other useful reforms, such as improving international banking transparency; and it could be introduced in stages. A good place to begin, he thinks, would be a European wealth tax that would replace the property tax, which “in most countries is tantamount to a wealth tax on the propertied middle class.” But that may be utopian, too. If the European Union moved ahead with Piketty’s proposal, it would produce a rush to tax havens like Switzerland and Luxembourg. Previous efforts to introduce wealth taxes at the national level have run into problems. Spain, for example, adopted a wealth tax in 2012 and abolished it at the start of this year. In Italy, a wealth tax proposed in 2011 never went through. Such difficulties explain why governments still rely on other, admittedly imperfect, tools to tax capital, such as taxes on property, estates, and capital gains.
In the United States, the very idea of a new wealth tax looks like a nonstarter politically, as would the notion of raising the top rate of income tax to eighty per cent. That’s not a knock on Piketty, though. The proper role of public intellectuals is to question accepted dogmas, conceive of new methods of analysis, and expand the terms of public debate. “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” does all these things. As with any such grand prognostication, some of it may not withstand the test of time. But Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.
PROTAGONIST | DEUTERAGONIST | TRITAGONIST 
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