Thomas Piketty: Why France’s ‘rock star economist’ still wants to squeeze the rich

Seven years ago a French economist named Thomas Piketty published a book entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It was 700 pages long and featured in-depth empirical analysis of various historical tax systems, amounting to a forensic argument against widening inequality. You wouldn’t say that it spelled international bestseller, and yet it has sold 2.5 million copies to date.

Hailed as a modern successor to Karl Marx’s monumental Capital, it rejuvenated radical leftwing critiques of capitalism and earned Piketty (it rhymes with spaghetti) the epithet of “rock star” economist. Seldom has a media cliche been more misleading.

With Yanis Varoufakis, the brooding, motorbike-riding former Greek finance minister, the term “rock star” might serve a shorthand descriptive purpose. But when I meet Piketty in Paris, he looks like George Osborne’s slightly fleshier twin brother (they were born two weeks apart in 1971). What’s more, his preferred pastime is to bury himself in comparative assessments of incremental capital returns in late 19th-century economies. It’s not exactly throwing televisions out of hotel windows.

In one respect, however, there is an element of danger about Piketty that has recently come back to haunt him. In November last year he was promoting his latest book Capital and Ideology, about which I’ve come to interview him, at the University of Toulouse when he was suddenly taken by surprise. During a question-and-answer session, he was asked by a female student about a complaint of domestic violence filed against him in 2009 by his former partner, Aurélie Filippetti, then a Socialist party MP, later to become minister for culture.

Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Socialist party at the time, Piketty apologised for his actions and Filippetti quickly dropped the charges. Although the original allegations surfaced in the British press in 2014, the details of the incident had never been publicly discussed. So Piketty was unprepared when the student asked him what he, as someone who had admitted to beating his ex-girlfriend, thought about appearing at the university just three days before a march against violence towards women.

The economist did not respond with his customary eloquence. He seemed ruffled and defensive, informing his inquisitor that hers was an “indecent” question and that the case was closed a long time ago. Then he went further and said that the relationship the student referred to was with someone (he didn’t mention Filippetti’s name) who “was extremely violent towards my daughters”.

“I put her out of my home,” he told the stunned audience. “I pushed her outside, which I regret, but I can assure you that given the behaviour towards my daughters, I think that a lot of people would be much more het up than that.”

He explained that Filippetti fell through a half-open door but that his actions, while regrettable, did not prevent her from going to work.

Shortly afterwards Filippetti’s lawyer served a writ for defamation, asking for damages and the publication of the ruling in the media of her choice. This latest episode had not been reported in the British press, so I arrived at the Paris School of Economics – France’s answer to the LSE which Piketty helped to set up – ignorant of the Toulouse outburst.

Instead, our discussion is to be focused on the English translation of his latest tome, which weighs in at a forbidding 1,093 pages.

Piketty’s fifth-floor office is heavily book-lined and a significant section of the display is made up of the various editions and translations of his own works. His efforts have made him a wealthy man. But he laments the fact that he wasn’t able to pay more tax on the considerable royalties he’s accrued. “I would have liked to have paid 90 to 95% in tax,” he says, a little forlornly. “I didn’t need that money.”

Nor has he wanted the huge sums offered to him by hedge funds, who have asked him to come and lecture them on the worrying excesses of capitalism (as if they didn’t know already). Whenever he turns such offers down, he says, the companies just double or triple the fee, but he always says no.

“We’re getting more and more used to a situation in which private money can buy everything, from political parties to media to individuals,” he says, noting that the very people who offer hundreds of thousands of euros for an hour-long lecture are also those who, in the name of “economic rationality”, refuse to pay their cleaners a living wage.

The central thesis of his earlier book was that private wealth was destined to outstrip economic growth, meaning that, without progressive taxation, the rich were bound to get richer and richer, leaving the rest of society ever further behind. Some of his assumptions and conclusions had their critics, but the quality of writing and breadth of vision was almost universally admired.

Piketty is not a Marxist, though it’s untrue, as is sometimes said, that he has never read Capital. Whereas Marx believed that the history of society is the history of class struggles, Piketty argues that human progress is the product of the struggle for equality and education in which ideology plays an instrumental role. “What I mean,” he says, explaining his differences with Marx, “is that your class position is not enough to determine your view of what’s the best system of property, education, taxation. We need ideas and ideologies and we need to take them seriously.”

The problem with many leftwing ideas is that they have often been wonderful in theory and rather a letdown in practice. Piketty notes that not only was Soviet communism a disaster in itself, but it also undermined the appeal of leftwing thought in general. Just about its only success, he suggests, was in helping to contain capitalism. He attributes the fall of the Soviet Union to the unleashing of “hypercapitalism” across the globe, though in truth that development had already been under way for a decade before the USSR’s demise.

The point that he repeatedly comes back to is that between 1950 and 1980 nearly all western democracies had high levels of taxation, and yet it was a period of economic growth. While this may be true, recent attempts to impose high tax rates have not enjoyed success.

One notable failure was Francois Hollande’s imposition of a 75% supertax in France, which was said to have led to falling tax revenues, capital flight and a brain drain before being withdrawn. “They did not really try it,” he says with a dismissive Gallic shrug.

Briefly an economic adviser to Labour in the UK, Piketty and the party parted company as a result of what he saw as its weak EU referendum campaign. “I can understand why Corbyn was not happy with the current way the European Union is organised, but I would have preferred him to suggest something else,” he says. “He didn’t really propose any alternative way of organising Europe or, for that matter, the world economy.” To be fair, economic literacy is an ability for which few modern politicians are renowned. In any case, as Piketty himself argues, ideology trumps economics.

Identity politics have electrified the left in a way that redistributive policy hasn’t quite managed to do. So where does that leave Piketty, not just a white heterosexual privileged male, who is therefore seen by a growing constituency on the left as part of the problem, but someone who has actually been accused of domestic violence?

“All I can say about what you just referred to is that if people knew the content of the facts they would have a very different view about this,” he says obliquely, refusing to enlarge, and determinedly not repeating the story he told in Toulouse.

Speaking more generally, he says that it makes perfect sense that people are very sensitive about these issues. “But I think they are so important that we need to be very serious about the content of the cases we are referring to.” The French online journal Mediapart took his case very seriously and last month published a long investigation, including the original agreement with Filippetti signed by Piketty, in which he states: “I would like to express my profound regrets for having lost my calm on several occasions during our relationship and to have made you suffer violence, and I apologise for that.”

In a statement to the journal, Piketty said that he and Filippetti had been in a “pathological relationship” in which, he said, Filippetti was “in a state of strong aggressiveness towards my daughters and towards herself”. He said he profoundly regrets that he was not able to respond “with as much distance as I would have like to”.

In her response, Filippetti, who believes the affair has caused French society to see her as mad, told the journal: “It’s a typical technique for dirtying the person who is a victim.”

There are some dark ironies in this dispute that surrounds the publication of a book about the role of ideology in shaping the world. We live now in era in which movements such as #MeToo can gain global momentum almost overnight and a 280-character tweet can have far more ideological power than a 1,100-page book.

While recognising the many different kinds of inequalities, including those concerning gender and race, Piketty wants to return the conversation to fundamental issues about wealth redistribution.

“I think the right response to identity politics,” he says, “is to put even more emphasis on economic justice.” No one could accuse Piketty of stinting on that emphasis, but a shadow of doubt has been cast over if not his work, then his character. That may yet prove a bigger problem for an economist than it tends to be for rock stars.