ピケティはマルクスを超えられるか──映画『21世紀の資本』を考察する

Can Piketty Surpass Marx?: A Review of the Film, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Asahi Noguchi

In 2019, Thomas Pikkety released a documentary film based on the best-selling book, Capital in the 21st Century. The book has won tremendous readers worldwide; it might not need another commentary. This article is not about the book's content, but about the implications of Piketty's making the movie from a policy perspective.

Every economic policy begins with defining the tasks that should be accomplished according to some value judgments, that is, the policy objective. The concrete measures used to achieve that objective are policy instruments. Briefly speaking, economic policy assigns instruments to objectives. I have examined this problem using the framework of "policy programs." Science philosopher Imre Lakatos, following Karl Popper's argument on falsifiability, proposed the concept of "scientific research programs" that grasps science as a structure comprising an unfalsifiable and irreplaceable hard core and a falsifiable and replaceable protective belt. Policy programs apply the scientific research programs to economic policy making.

The core of policy programs consists of a certain worldview and related value judgments, which teaches us specific problems to be solved in our society. This worldview and value judgments are more often called "ideology." The protective belt is a policy strategy that indicates policy objectives that should be set up to realize these values and policy instruments to achieve the objectives. For a policy strategy to be sufficiently effective, it must have a scientific ground that goes beyond mere ideology. The scientific reasoning that links policy objectives and instruments, which is usually provided by economics as empirical science, is its vital component. In the following, I discuss the kind of policy program Piketty suggests, based entirely on the film.

The Core Worldview Shared by Both Piketty and Marx.

At the core of every policy program, there is an ideology (in some sense of the word.) In this respect, Keynesianism and neoliberalism are not essentially different from Maoism or Islamic fundamentalism. Keynesianism, for example, can be defined as a policy ideology maintaining that governments should actively implement counter-cyclical macroeconomic policies to maintain adequate employment and income, which is based on the Keynesian worldview that capitalist economies are inherently unstable, at least macroeconomically. Neoliberalism, by contrast, maintains that the economic freedom of the individual should be expanded to the maximum, and conversely, the economic functions of the government should be reduced to the minimum; it is based on the worldview of classical liberalism that justice and prosperity of our society can only be achieved by ensuring the free and voluntary will of the individual.

These worldviews, which are at the core of policy programs, do not necessarily have to be strictly scientific, although they need to have a certain degree of practical validity. That is, they do not need to be falsifiable in the sense that the validity or invalidity of the proposition can be discerned from data derived from reality. In fact, whether Keynesianism or classical liberalism, their worldviews are far from being falsifiable scientific propositions by themselves. They are merely metaphysical grasps of the world. Therefore, they are "isms" rather than sciences.

If there were a policy ideology called "Pikettyism," what would be its worldview? As this film clearly shows, it is that a capitalist economy inevitably leads to a widening inequality of income and asset holding. This is precisely the conventional Marxist worldview. Perhaps that is why Piketty dares to use the highly perverted word "capital" in his book.

Different Theoretical Reasonings and Policy Strategies

Although it is now only a fragment of history, the Marxian policy program once came close to overwhelming the world in the form of expanding socialist economies. Part of the reason was probably its "scientific" look. Marxism was apparently more than just an ideological worldview. It had the impoverishing theory based on the labor theory of value and the theory of exploitation. It also had the "historical law" based on them. It was on this basis that Friedrich Engels, a comrade of Karl Marx, distinguished Marxism from its preceding "utopian socialism" in his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1892).

According to this Marxian theory, capitalists' exploitation of workers and the resulting impoverishment is due to private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism based on such private ownership would inevitably collapse due to this fundamental contradiction. This is the so-called historical law that Marxists consider to be science.

As Karl Popper criticized in his The Poverty of Historicism (1957), this Marxian "historical law" is clearly unfalsifiable. Thus, from the Popperian understanding of science, it is not a scientific proposition. However, it was apparently groundbreaking that Marx provided one rigid theoretical explanation for social phenomena in the mid-19th century when science was still vague. In addition, Marx proposed a policy strategy based on that theory, that is, the abolition of private ownership through communist revolution. In that sense, Marxism was a solid policy program that had a certain grasp of the nature of capitalism at its core and a strategy to realize its own objectives at its protective belt.

Pikettyism clearly shares the Marxian worldview in terms of its grasp of the inherent inequalities of the capitalist economy. However, its theories and policy strategies that protect the grasp are quite different from those of Marxism. Apparently, Piketty has no sympathy for Marxian theory and practice. This is evident from the fact that the film begins with an episode of collapsing socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, which Piketty sums up as "the political system that promised human emancipation produced misery and political oppression."

What Piketty relies on as a reason for the inevitable increases of income inequality in the capitalist economy is its tendency to have r > g, i.e., the rate of return on capital r exceeds the rate of economic growth g. If this inequality holds as the "fundamental law of the capitalist economy," it means that the share of income distribution of capital owners should always rise while that of workers without capital should always fall. Therefore, the generality of increasing inequality is guaranteed only by r > g. Furthermore, the extent to which r > g is true in the real world can be confirmed by historical data, as Piketty himself has extensively gathered. Yet, it is also falsifiable by the same data. Therefore, for the purpose of clarifying the inherent inequality of the capitalist economy, there is no need to bring up an irrefutable metaphysical concept such as Marxian exploitation.

The capitalism that Piketty portrays is a scheme of confrontation between the haves and have-nots of capital. In that respect, it is similar in appearance to the Marxian scheme of class conflict. However, unlike the Marxists, Piketty does not call for the abolition of capital ownership. This is because, as he says at the end of the film, equalization of income distribution would be inevitably achieved if equalization of ownership of capital is achieved. Furthermore, he suggests that it can be fully realized by tax reform through democratic procedures, without resorting to the violent revolution.

What Is Needed for Pikettyism to Penetrate into the General Public

Piketty's intention in making a film version of his major book is very clear: to make his policy program, with its worldview, theoretical underpinnings, and policy strategies, penetrate into the general public. If Piketty had been interested only in academic pursuits, it would have been enough for him to write papers and books for peers rather than to make a movie. In short, Piketty's ultimate goal is to realize the policy. For that purpose, it was essential for him to acquire not only the admiration of his peers but also the recognition of the general public as to the policy program he proposed. In this sense, the film is a means for highlighting Piketty's policy program. In other words, it is propaganda for Pikettyism.

If the film escapes the negative impression usually associated with the word "propaganda," it is because Piketty as a social scientist tries to portray his worldview exclusively on historical facts and data. Indeed, the worldview to which the film appeals--the tendency of economic inequality in capitalist economies to expand--has a sobering reality. This is especially true of the economy of the United States in recent decades. It is perhaps for this reason that Piketty's appeal has been most enthusiastically welcomed in America that was formerly supposed to be relatively tolerant of economic inequality.

It is not clear at this time whether Pikettyism will be able to penetrate into the realm of practice, like Marxism until a certain time. For that to happen, it must win the worldview competition in the minds of the general public, against opposing policy programs such as neoliberalism. Moreover, following ideologues who resonate with the Pikettyian worldview should proliferate. Ultimately, practitioners and politicians who can realize the Pikettyian policy strategy, such as Vladimir Lenin in Marxism or Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in neoliberalism, must emerge. The hurdles for achieving them look extremely high at this moment. However, it might be possible since we remember that policy ideas have often turned on a dime like in Othello.