Thomas Piketty: Ireland’s economic model is damaging to other countries

Дата публикации: 15-08-2026 05:00:00

French economist is co-director of World Inequality Lab, which is proposing an average monthly income of €5,000 per person by 2100

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Thomas Piketty dials into the video call from his office, the spines of books he has authored arranged on a shelf behind him.

I start by apologising for missing a prior appointment to speak to him, and explain this is an interview for our Weekend section and the intention is to write at length about his life and work.

“No problem,” he says.

There’s little sign that four minutes later he will try to cut the interview off.

Piketty is one of the world’s most famous economists. The 55-year-old professor at the Paris School of Economics won global renown in 2014 with the unexpected bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which drew on tax and income data from 20 countries going back to the 18th century.

The book warned that when the financial returns on capital surpass the growth rate of the economy – when merely owning wealth is more lucrative than working – riches become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few in a way that threatens democracy.

This was prescient. This month the Financial Times published a long read on the threat “America’s new oligarchy” poses to democratic integrity, writing that the power of billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos under the Trump administration may now be even greater than the monopolistic “robber barons” of the Gilded Age.

The first question for Piketty is what has changed since 2014?

“Things have gotten worse in terms of environmental crises. There are heatwaves and wildfires all over Europe right now,” he replies with a sense of urgency.

“I think people are starting to realise that this is really going to be a defining threat for the future, and this makes the issue of inequality and redistribution even more important.”

Piketty’s publications are formidable and relentless: studies, media articles, and books, the latest co-written with his wife, fellow economist Julia Cagé.

He has also overseen the building of a free online database of each country’s long-term wealth and income at the World Inequality Lab, which he co-directs.

Was there a particular experience that inspired him to start working on inequality? He starts to answer, and then breaks off.

“The Global Justice Report – I’m really sorry, but this is really what I want to talk about. So if you’re not interested in the Global Justice Report, maybe we should stop,” he says.

The report he mentions is the World Inequality Lab’s latest publication, which contains eye-catching proposals around average monthly incomes per person converging to €5,000 in every country by the year 2100, working hours being halved, and large areas of the earth being reforested.

It argues that a wealth tax on the richest 1 per cent would pay for a transformation of the global economy to bring carbon emissions to zero and avoid disastrous levels of climate change.

I reassure the professor that I do have questions about it.

“I think we should stop,” he repeats. “It’s clear, I can see you are not really interested.”

He is kept on the line – just – by a stammered question.

The Global Justice Report imagines a world of much greater wealth equality, with lower carbon emissions. To help an ordinary person imagine what such a world might look like, is there a country he can think of that is closer to that ideal now?

[ Europe needs to start treating the climate emergency as a threat to our national securityOpens in new window ]

His reply is frustrated: of course no current country is a model, he says. “By definition.”

“Right now, with the kind of climate investment that we are making, our baseline projection for global warming is above four degrees in 2100,” he says.

A four-degree rise in average global temperatures would be catastrophic: large parts of the world would be uninhabitable; the sea rise due to melted polar ice would submerge much of Dublin.

“I’m just saying: it’s going to be really warm. So we need to do something,” he continues.

“The question is really how to reconcile prosperity with planetary habitability. This is, I think, a very optimistic report – it is saying it is possible to combine the two.”

The report’s proposals rely on taxing billionaires to pay for the climate transition and to rebalance the distribution of wealth between countries. But are today’s billionaires “taxable”? Haven’t they become so wealthy and powerful as to be beyond the reach of ordinary tax systems?

“At every time period in history, there has been a feeling that you cannot change the tax system. At the time of the French Revolution, there was the idea that aristocrats, you cannot make them pay tax, that’s impossible,” Piketty replies.

“If you had asked mainstream economists or politicians in 1910 in Ireland or Britain or France: is it okay if we compress inequality three-fold? And is it okay if the total tax revenue goes from 10 per cent of GDP to 30, 40, 50 per cent of GDP?

“They would have said: ‘this is communism, this is going to be the collapse of the economy, the sky is going to fall’. But in the end, it was very successful and it came with unprecedented prosperity and growth.”

He has no time for those who describe the report as utopian.

“I think it’s entirely a matter of political choice and political decision. Of course it’s easier if more governments get together and take the decision together. But I think even individual countries can do it,” he says.

“This is a very moderate proposal as compared to what already happened.”

Piketty is a long-term critic of Ireland’s economic model, and some of his proposals sound almost like a caricature of the kind of continental thinking abhorred in Merrion Street.

A group of senior academics recently called for Ireland to recuse itself from negotiations on corporation tax and digital rules during its current presidency of the Council of the European Union due to a “questionable record”. Does he agree with that view?

“I think what would be even better, rather than recusing itself, would be for Ireland to change its attitude on the subject,” Piketty says.

“The extra income that Ireland is generating by trying to be business-friendly, in practice means a lot of fake accounting of international corporations booking their profits in Ireland with economic activity which, in fact, is not happening in Ireland.

“The entire system of economic accounting of Ireland which has become completely opaque, and nobody knows the true GDP of Ireland, the numbers are impossible to follow.”

Ireland’s model imposes costs on others, Piketty believes, because multinationals continue to damage the climate while other countries are forced to impose taxes on their low and middle-income earners to make up for the escaping corporation tax.

“For one euro of extra wellbeing that you bring to Ireland by playing that kind of game, you are imposing 10 or 20 or 30 euros of damages to other countries, to the rest of the world, and to the planet,” he says.

It is ultimately unsustainable because Ireland relies on trade and the prosperity of others to thrive, he says. “Ireland cannot be prosperous in autarky.”

Piketty adds: “I don’t want to blame Ireland. I understand why every country is looking for its own little niche in this difficult world.

“I would like Ireland to say: look, we’ve been doing that because we had no other plan, to find a bit more resources for ourselves.

“This is the problem: this little niche that Ireland is creating for itself looks attractive, but in fact it’s a mediocre development strategy. I think in the end, Ireland could get more for itself through global co-operation than what they are doing now.”

We are soon out of time, but I later email Piketty a recent interview with the Italian writer Roberto Saviano to give him an idea of the kind of article I am hoping to write about him.

He apologises for “the misunderstanding”, saying he thought the plan was to write a story about the Global Justice Report – and answers some follow-up questions.

His interest in studying inequality came from observing “very different levels of wealth and social status in my family”, he writes. “Some very poor, some quite rich.”

Previous profiles have described his parents as left-wing idealists who, in the years after France’s 1968 student revolt, rejected well-to-do Parisian backgrounds to raise goats in the countryside, his mother later becoming a primary school teacher and his father a research technician.

[ David McWilliams: Could France go bust?Opens in new window ]

Piketty himself “came of age listening to news of the collapse of the communist dictatorships and never felt the slightest affection or nostalgia for those regimes or for the Soviet Union,” he wrote in Capital.

He became “vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anti-capitalism”.

The year he turned 18, the Berlin Wall fell and he started university at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris. By age 22, he had a PhD and was teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

He would later write that he found too many economists to be obsessed with “petty mathematical problems” in the hopes of lending their discipline the appearance of a science.

Piketty returned to Paris aged 25, determined to focus on the broader societal applications of economics and to “collect the missing data” on inequality.

He intended his 2014 bestseller to be a contribution to democratic debates “about the best way to organise society and the most appropriate institutions and policies to achieve a just social order” under the rule of law.

Its success led to a financial windfall that, he has told interviewers, the French state taxed at a rate of 60-70 per cent.

“A 90 per cent tax rate would not bother me,” he told the Financial Times the following year. “There would still be a lot left, since we’re talking about several millions.”

Piketty was once affiliated with the Socialist Party, serving as an adviser to a presidential candidate in 2007, but subsequently became a critic.

He refused a Socialist-led government’s attempt to award him the Légion d’Honneur in 2015, saying it was not the role of the government “to decide who is honourable” and that it should instead be trying to increase economic growth.

With a presidential election due in April and Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally leading in polls, France’s current political trajectory concerns Piketty.

[ Marine Le Pen’s decision to run for French presidency is a big gambleOpens in new window ]

“Of course I am concerned that right-wing techno-nationalists might win the election, but I think it possible to defeat them,” he said in his emailed replies.

“What makes me optimistic in the medium run is that techno-nationalists won’t solve the development and climate challenges we need to solve, so we will need to move to something else.

“The [problem] is that they could cause huge damages in the meantime, like Trumpists in the US.”

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