The Triumph of Europe’s Social Democracy

Economist Thomas Piketty, writing for Le Monde (archive) on the success of Europe’s social democratic model and countering “the narrative of a ‘declining’ continent”:

If someone had told the European elites and liberal economists of 1914 that wealth redistribution would one day account for half of national income, they would have unanimously condemned the idea as collectivist madness and predicted the continent’s ruin. In reality, European countries have achieved unprecedented levels of prosperity and social well-being, largely due to collective investments in health, education and public infrastructure.

To win the cultural and intellectual battle, Europe must now assert its values and defend its model of development, fundamentally opposed to the nationalist-extractivist model championed by Donald Trump’s supporters in the United States and by Vladimir Putin’s allies in Russia. A crucial issue in this fight is the choice of indicators used to measure human progress.

For these indicators, Piketty mentions some of the same factors that economist Gabriel Zucman detailed in his Le Monde piece I posted in December:

More leisure time, better health outcomes, greater equality and lower carbon emissions, all with broadly comparable productivity: Europeans can be proud of their model, argues Gabriel Zucman, director of the EU Tax Observatory.

• economics
• Europe
• Gabriel Zucman
• politics
• Thomas Piketty