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Journalism of Courage
India should have more public investment in education, health and infrastructure if it wants to bring down inequality, said Thomas Piketty, French economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, where he looks at wealth concentration and distribution since the 1700s.
“One particular thing that was never really done in India was growth-based investment in basic schemes, basic education, health,” said Piketty. He was taking part in a discussion on ‘Capitalism and Democracy’ with Michael Sandel, political philosopher and professor at Harvard University at the Times LitFest here on Friday.
“Every strong capitalist society in the world and every successful historical experience of capitalist development did include a very strong collective effort to invest in public education, public infrastructure, access to health,” said Piketty.
He said that the Indian elite have not adjusted to the idea of such collective, public investment.
“There seems to be hypocrisies and lots of misunderstanding in the way some of India’s elites is interpreting what capitalist development is all about and has been in the West and successful capitalist countries,” said Piketty. “Capitalist forces are sometimes viewed as sort of liberating forces as compared to bureaucratic inefficiencies.”
However, “capitalism doesn’t work even from a pure efficiency perspective,” he said citing the examples of the US, EU and Japan.
Piketty went on to add that in many of these countries, it was only after a big shock — like the World Wars and the Bolshevik revolution (in Russia) — that the elites finally accepted the kind of social and fiscal reforms which allowed for the rise of more inclusive modern or capitalist development.
In India there has been some progress in public investment but it is insufficient and “I very much hope that Indian elites can benefit from historical experience from other countries and do a bit of (work) and not wait for big shocks to go for more inclusive development model, “ Piketty added.
He also implied that meritocracy shouldn’t be used as an excuse to justify inequality.
“The elites always have a lot of imagination to justify inequality,” said Piketty.
A “big part of what modern ideology about inequality is trying to do is to justify extreme level of inequality on the basis of meritocratic principles and the idea of equal opportunity.”
He said this is true not only for India but also for other nations such as France or the US. He added that in all these countries “there is a lot of hypocrisy about the idea of meritocracy and good opportunity” and that there was an “extreme level of concentration of opportunities” when it comes to actual access to high quality jobs and education.
“The question is whether market values and market thinking can do an adequate job of defining a just society and enabling us to deliberate about the common good. I think that is the real problem and it is worth asking why we should care about inequality,” said Professor Sandel.
“ I think there are two reasons. One reason is to do with fairness and distributive justice. (The second) has to do with the corrosive effect that this kind of inequality has on democracy and shared civic life,” he added.
Sandel also talked about the rising nationalism and rising intolerance “which is being debated here in India and also a feature of extreme anti-immigrant politics…throughout Europe and the United States.”
“ I see this current surge of nationalism and intolerance has another source. I think it is a reflection of anxiety about how we can hold societies together under conditions of pluralism and under conditions of differences among ethnic and religions and linguistic groups and traditions,” said Sandel.
This happens when “we don’t have a kind of public discourse that cultivates habits of mutual respect, the ability to listen to one another and to engage in hard debates in public. When we are less and less good at that the way is left open, I think, for those who will assert collective identities with a vengeance because we can’t live only as economic beings,” Sandel added.
