The Guardian reports this morning that queues developed in London yesterday outside the lecture theatre where French economist Professor Thomas Piketty was booked to speak. Most of them, according to vox pops the paper conducted, hadn't read Piketty's book Capital, and you can hardly blame them for preferring to get its message in an hour or so rather than wading through many hundreds of pages.
The success of Capital in capturing the imagination of the Left-leaning public probably tells us as much about the phenomenology of the media (and of collective hysteria) as it does about economics. A friend recently asked me what I thought of the book. "I haven't read it", I said. "Neither have I", he replied. "But I read a review of it".
So have I now. Several reviews. That doesn't make me an expert, but lack of expertise has never stopped a blogger from having an opinion.
Piketty's thesis is, essentially, that assets grow in value at a faster rate than economies do, so people who have assets get richer faster than people who don't. Hence ever rising inequality.
But in purporting to address the bigger picture (which is certainly what Piketty's supporters claim for him), he excludes what for the purposes of analogy you might call the picture frame. Which is to say that although we live in a world of inequality, it is actually a world in which most people are getting richer.
I like to imagine what George Orwell would have made of the affluence of our society. I think he would have been horrified at the vacuousness of consumer culture, but amazed and impressed at capitalism's capacity to create wealth. For capitalism does indeed make people richer. It just doesn't make them richer at the same rate.
What would Orwell have made of mobile phones? Here is a gadget that would have been utterly beyond his imaginings. Even Ian Fleming, writing in the technologically obsessed 1960s, never dared to get Q to present James Bond with anything so outrageous. "Now look James, you can get the cricket score on it, and the weather forecast for Kuala Lumpur, and the chemical formula of cordite, and the latin name of the Ring Tailed Lemur. Clever eh?" "You're pulling my leg, Q". And yet fifty years later most people reading this will have one, all at the expense of a tenner or so a week.
The point of the mobile phone for Piketty's thesis lies in the whereabouts of its manufacture. These things are not made in Walsall or Frankfurt or Detroit. They're made in Thailand, or Taiwan or China.
Why are people willing to work in factories assembling chipsets instead of labouring in the paddy fields or herding the family's cows? It's because working in factories gives them a higher standard of living. The conditions may be rubbish and the pay exploitative by our standards, but it's still better than the alternative.
Of course the downside is that as jobs have leaked from the affluent West to the impoverished East, wages in Europe and America stagnated and even fell. That's capitalism in action too. But we are still living in societies in which the overwhelming majority of people have enough eat, get a free education and have a roof over their heads; whereas they are not.
Professor Piketty's fans are so concerned that they aren't getting rich as fast as the Duke of Westminster that they haven't noticed that in other parts of the world capitalism is slowly making genuinely poor people better off.
