The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack .

Earlier this week, the eminent economist Thomas Piketty published a short intervention on the ongoing youth-led protests across France, which he dubs “the twilight of Macronism.”

“Young people,” Piketty writes, “are asking for one simple thing: resources to get an education and access to quality studies.” With admirable clarity, he then dismantles a series of misleading claims made by the French government about how generously it’s been funding education. I won’t go through all his numbers here, but the crux is that chronic underspending on education has seen hundreds of thousands of students — particularly those engaged in direct professional and skills training — thrust into overcrowded university programs ill suited to their needs.

The real value of Piketty’s piece, though, is the riposte he offers to the fiscal conservatives who are predictably insisting France can’t afford to better fund its education system:

To justify the inadequacy of education funding, and in particular the decrease in spending per student, the government and its supporters argue that France cannot afford to invest more. They are making two reasoning errors. Public debt has indeed risen from 20% of GDP in 1970 to 120% today. But at the same time, private wealth has grown much more dramatically: It has gone from 300% to 600% of GDP, with extreme concentration among the wealthiest financial fortunes. In other words, France’s national wealth – the sum of private and public assets minus private and public debts – has never been so high, not only in absolute terms but also as a percentage of GDP (which itself has never been higher).

In one way or another, some version of the above is applicable to most affluent European and North American economies. Canada’s gross domestic product, for example, has seen a nominal increase of 309% over the course of my own lifetime and the same figure is roughly 470% for the United States. This same period, however, has coincided with a generalized drop in funding for social and public services. Inequality — in France, in Canada, in Britain, in the United States and elsewhere — has predictably spiked, as have a vast range of corollary social problems like food insecurity .

From the far right to the center left, the political mainstreams of North America and Europe have offered various mystical explanations as to how we’ve ended up here. Public debt is too high to spend more. We’ve let in too many immigrants. Economic growth has been too slow, etc. But all these elide the glaringly obvious problem at the root of it all, which is that the neoliberal model has enabled a very small few to become impossibly wealthy at the expense of everyone else. What the public purse can or cannot “afford” is mostly downstream from this reality. As Piketty notes of the French case:

The [debt] situation was far more difficult in 1945, when public debt was even higher than today and private fortunes were depleted. Yet that did not prevent the introduction of a national solidarity tax with rates of several dozen percent on the largest fortunes, which could yield much more today. Those who endlessly repeat that nothing substantial can be expected from this side are clearly at odds with mathematics, as well as with history.

Concentrated wealth, of course, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Inevitably, it confers disproportionate political power on those at the top to influence public policy and shape public discourse. The ultra rich, both as individuals and as a class, have always had more political clout than the rest of us. But the American example in particular demonstrates what this ultimately looks like in unbounded form: a legislative process captured by well-financed industry groups; a leadership class bought and paid for through campaign donations; major media organizations owned by oligarchs; the equation of private vice with public good; the privileging of capital’s narrow interests over and above every other priority.

Liberalism refuses to take these questions of wealth and power seriously.

One reason I’m a socialist rather than a liberal is that liberalism refuses to take these questions of wealth and power seriously. Instead, it stubbornly insists there is some reasonable middle path to broadly shared prosperity that does not entail more fundamental changes in our political and economic model, some fresh new cocktail of regulatory adjustments and tax cuts that will magically restore a balance that never existed in the first place.

But whether in France or anywhere else, no amount of economic growth will ever be sufficient to rectify the climate of private affluence and public austerity that decades of neoliberalism has wrought. What’s needed is no more or less than a direct democratic confrontation with organized wealth, the removal of its privileges and a program of comprehensive economic redistribution.

It’s no wonder protests are swelling across France and, increasingly, spreading to other European countries as well. There’s more than enough wealth to fund the healthcare, education and quality public services necessary to ensure a good and just life for all. It just happens to be in the wrong hands.

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