CAPITAL & IDEOLOGY

A graphic treatment, with attendant simplifications, of French economist Piketty’s difficult study of capitalism and its failings.

Piketty’s opus would seem an unlikely candidate for translation into what used to be called a comic book. Complete with a fictional family to humanize the dismal-science edge (whence the “novel” part of “graphic novel”), it opens with Piketty’s account of France’s ancien régime and its three estates (the clergy, the nobility, and all the rest), an economy based on deep inequalities. That gulf is reinforced by a proportional or flat tax, which, as one panel puts it, “since the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor,…thus favors the wealthiest group.” Contrast this with progressive taxation, where the “highest incomes are more heavily taxed, for the good of all society,” and you begin to build a bridge. Anathema to free-marketers and libertarians, that system worked in France, the U.S., and other advanced countries until the 1980s and ’90s, when, once those taxes were rolled back, “multiple elites” began to contend on left and right, each in turn building a base that reflects “the return of the educational cleavage,” the left representing educated globalists and the right building on the less educated nationalists. At present the latter seems to be ascendant, and, as a character representing Piketty at the lectern asserts, 1% of the population owns 27% of global wealth, more than twice as much as the poorest half. What’s to be done? Piketty has never been short of policy recommendations, and the graphic treatment captures some of the key ones, including cracking down on taxes evaded (which, if paid, “would pay the annual salary of 34 million nurses”), taxing carbon emissions, instituting “genuine social ownership of capital” by giving employees meaningful shares in their employers’ businesses, and more. It doesn’t quite add up to a novel—it’s really more like Piketty for Dummies.

A relatively accessible approach to a subject that may still—beg pardon—tax readers without training in economics.