Chronicles: On Our Troubled Times by Thomas Piketty – review
Thomas Piketty depresses as much as inspires. Read him and you become convinced that western democracies have set themselves problems they no longer have the will to solve.
Democracy's superiority to dictatorship is not that democratic leaders are necessarily more virtuous than dictators are. Nor can anyone but a cockeyed optimist believe that democratic publics are by definition always clever and benevolent. Democracies' great advantage is meant to be that they have a rubbish chute. When leaders and policies fail, we shove them through it and replace them with something better.
Related: Why the 1% should pay tax at 80% | Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty
Piketty's solution, that the eurozone countries share their debts and become a single state, strikes me as naive
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