Thomas Piketty visited the Faculty of Economics and Business to deliver the Maddison Lecture in Economic Growth and Development 2018 on May 23. An economics professor at the Paris School of Economics, Piketty became a global household name in 2014 when his “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” became a bestseller. The book caught the mood of the moment, providing rigorous data illustrating the concentration of wealth over time, just as inequality was emerging as a hot-button political issue.

His Groningen lecture focused on the role of political trends in inequality, and in particular a shift from class-based politics to identity-driven politics in France, the United States and the United Kingdom. He demonstrated this by illustrating changes in demographic support for political movements over time. Once, wealth was the deciding factor in political support, with richer people leaning right and poorer citizens backing the left. Now however this picture has become more complex, with the highly educated voting left and some of the lower educated leaning towards the right.

“Why didn’t democracy reduce inequality? Well, in my view probably because you have multi-dimensional inequality structures, in particular globalisation and migration on one hand, and educational expansion on the other hand. They have created new multi-dimensional conflicts about inequality,” Piketty said. “Racism, nativism, and also higher education for completely different reasons, are powerful forces that can divide the poor electorate,” he said.

In order for left-wing parties to unite the lower-income electorate, they needed to offer an egalitarian proposition that made poorer voters of different educational backgrounds and with diverse racial identities feel they had more in common than divides them.

”Politics has never been a simple poor-versus-rich conflict. I think it has always been multidimensional. But I think we believed that what we had as a class-based conflict in the 1950s and 1960s was a normal equilibrium, but I think it’s time to realise that in fact this corresponded to very special circumstances,” Piketty concluded.

Piketty’s lecture also highlighted the strong role that Groningen has played in inequality research. He mentioned that when writing his book his “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” he made frequent use of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre’s Maddison Project Database, which traces comparative economic growth and income levels between countries over long periods of time. The project was begun by a group of scholars who wanted to continue the work of Angus Maddison, the former Groningen professor and pioneer in measuring and analysis economic growth and development over historical periods of time.

“I didn’t have the chance to meet him while he was alive but I feel a lot of sympathy, proximity and admiration for his work so I am particularly glad to be here today,” Piketty said as he opened his speech in the Aletta Jacobshal.

Inequality is one of FEB’s seven “signature areas”, research communities of scholars with different specialities brought together to tackle major societal challenges. Commenting on the influence of Piketty, associate professor Gaaitzen de Vries called Piketty’s work “a great source of inspiration”.

“One of the areas he’s focusing is the returns to different factors of production, this relates to one of my areas of research which is documenting and investigating the causes of labour market polarisation,” de Vries said.

Associate professor Jutta Bolt said Piketty had also inspired her work in examining the historical roots of long-term inequality trends in Africa. “That’s a region that Piketty does not study at all, and it’s crucially important for the world today because the region hosts some of the world’s most unequal countries,” Bolt said. Equally, Dean and professor of economic history Herman de Jong, noted a recent paper he had written with María Gómez León which tried to estimate new distribution levels for large industrial nations.

“This way we also added to the growing literature on inequality, thanks to Thomas Piketty,” de Jong said.