Piketty Snubs Government Award, Urges Growth Focus

French economist Thomas Piketty rejected an honor from the French government, dismissing the award and urging French policymakers to focus on growth.

Saying that it is not government’s role to decide who is honorable, Piketty rejected the Legion d’Honneur, an award founded by Napoleon Bonaparte at the beginning of the 19th century. The French government announced the winners of the prestigious award, which recognizes achievements in economics, research, culture, and public works.

French economist Thomas Piketty rejected an honor from the French government, dismissing the award and urging French policymakers to focus on growth.

Saying that it is not government’s role to decide who is honorable, Piketty rejected the Legion d’Honneur, an award founded by Napoleon Bonaparte at the beginning of the 19th century. The French government announced the winners of the prestigious award, which recognizes achievements in economics, research, culture, and public works.

Piketty quickly became famous thanks to his bestseller on income inequality trends.  “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has received substantial criticism and accolades from politicians, economists, academics, historians, sociologists, and researchers across disciplines. Piketty’s book argued that a fundamental feature of capitalism is to encourage growth in income inequality over long periods, as the return on capital eclipses the return on labor, causing holders of capital to increase their wealth relative to laborers.

Piketty’s argument received intense scrutiny, thanks in part to its controversial theme and due to Piketty’s unprecedented decision to make all of his data available online. In May 2014, Chris Giles of the Financial Times argued that Piketty made simple empirical errors in his research. Piketty quickly refuted the criticisms as “simply wrong” in a lengthy response on his website, which many economists have favored over Giles. However, Piketty encourages further criticism of his book and improvements to the data he collected, which encompasses income and tax data from North America and Europe spanning four centuries.

In many respects, 2014 can be considered a banner year for income inequality, in which the topic and concept saw explosive focus and scrutiny worldwide. Several politicians and world leaders acknowledged the destabilizing risks of income inequality, including Barack Obama, who addressed the issue in several speeches.

Meanwhile, critics insist that envy and jealousy motivates income inequality, and does little more than encourage resentment and class warfare. Some have gone so far as to accuse Piketty of being a neo-Marxist who believes that government control of markets is desirable.

At the same time, Piketty continues to publish on the topic, including “The Top 1 Percent in International and Historical Perspective”, which was published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2013.

More recently, in an article for Science with Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, Piketty argues that the trend of inequality is not inevitable in a market-driven economic system, but can be adjusted and improved through political, non-economic policy decisions. “In a sense, both Marx and Kuznets were wrong. There are powerful forces pushing alternately in the direction of rising or shrinking inequality. Which one dominates depends on the institutions and policies that societies choose to adopt,” they wrote.

Whatever the adopted policy, Piketty believes governments should focus on growth-promoting policies, as he says in his recent statement upon rejecting the Legion d’Honneur prize. “[Governments] would do better to concentrate on reviving growth in France and Europe,” he said in a statement.