Piketty
Article
Piketty is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 12, 2021 and March 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Piketty thinks the same process might be happening”; “Piketty tells us that 51% of bachelors-but-not-postgraduate degree holders vote Democrat”; “This is from this commentary on Piketty”. It most often appears alongside Trump, 2017 presidential election, 2026 Billionaire Tax Act.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: August 12, 2021
- Last seen: March 06, 2026
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
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- 2017 presidential election (1 shared issues)
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- 2026 Billionaire Tax Act (1 shared issues)
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- ACX legal and economic analysis team (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- American Nursing Association (1 shared issues)
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- Apple (1 shared issues)
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- Bay Area Cities (1 shared issues)
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- Biden (1 shared issues)
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- California (1 shared issues)
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- California Medical Association (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I don't want to argue with his data showing that conservatives care less. But even if it’s true, I don't think it's the root issue. The reason everything is liberal is because of the stuff Thomas Piketty keeps trying to tell us about our shifting coalition system.
You can find this in Piketty’s new book Capital And Ideology, or if you don't have the attention span to get through a 1104 page book, his more recent paper Brahmin Left Vs. Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies 1948-2020. Or, if even a 32 page paper is pushing it, here are three graphs:
Inline links: Capital And Ideology, Brahmin Left Vs. Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies 1948-2020
Here are some other graphs about the American situation in particular, from an earlier Piketty paper:
Inline links: an earlier Piketty paper
Some people propose that it could decrease state revenues overall even if it passed, if it drove out enough billionaires, though others disagree. Pro-tech-industry newsletter Pirate Wires finds that 20 out of 21 California tech billionaires interviewed were “developing an exit plan” and quotes an insider saying that “if this tax actually passes, I think the technology industry kind of has to leave the state”. Even Gavin Newsom, hardly known for being an anti-tax conservative, has argued that it “makes no sense” and “would be really damaging”. The ACX legal and economic analysis team (Claude, GPT, and Gemini) doubt the direst warnings, but agree that the tax is of dubious value and its provisions poorly suited to Silicon Valley. On one level, it’s no surprise that California, a state full of bad socialists, is considering bad socialist policy. But I think this is the wrong perspective. This proposition isn’t being sponsored by some generic group of Piketty-reading leftists. It’s the project of SEIU (Service Employees International Union) a union of mostly healthcare workers. This immediately clarifies the debate about whether it’s net negative for revenue. 90% of the revenue from the tax is earmarked for health care. So even if it’s net negative for the state, it isn’t net negative for the health care budget in particular, ie for the people who are sponsoring the measure. But we can get even more conspiratorial. The SEIU is known in California political circles for pioneering and perfecting the art of extortion via ballot initiative. Their usual strategy goes: Propose a ballot initiative that will sound nice to voters, but which is actually deliberately designed to ruin some industry.