Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021

Thomas Piketty

It’s Not Just the Economy, Stupid – French economist Thomas Piketty is one of the world’s leading authorities on inequality and globalism. Hyper-capitalism and staggering inequality have led him, over the past 30 years, to think beyond capitalism to “a new form of socialism, participative and decentralized, federal and democratic, ecological, multiracial, and feminist.” In this collection of newspaper columns, published mostly in Le Monde between 2016-2021, Piketty examines debt and debt cancellation, taxation, growth, productivity, inflation, wealth, and property. But he examines them through the lens of history and politics, which means he’s examining economic systems shaped largely by colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and climate denial – to use a single word, reality. All of these forces are inextricably linked. They must be acknowledged – and addressed – to do anything about economic inequality.