Share the Wealth: How to End Rentier Capitalism

Description

How can we reduce inequalities? How can we make work get better recognition and better pay? Philippe Askenazy in this new book shows that the current share of wealth is far from natural; it results from rising rents and their capture by the actors best endowed in the economic game. In this race for rents, the world of work is the big loser: while many workers feed capital rents by increased productivity and worsened working conditions, they are stigmatized as unproductive and their earnings stagnate. By proposing a new description of the capital-work relationship, calling for a remobilization of the world of work, and particularly poorly paid employees, Askenazy shows that there is a more radical alternative to neoliberalism beyond simply redistribution.

Philippe Askenazy is a specialist of labour and employment relations. He is a senior economist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, and fellow of NIESR (London) and IZA (Bonn). He is also columnist for Le Monde. He is the co-initiator of the collective called the 'Appalled Economists', a group aiming to stimulate collective thinking and public expression of economists who do not resign themselves to the predominant neoliberal orthodox doctrine. His Manifesto of the Appalled Economists with three co-authors was translated into dozens of languages.

The latest book by Philippe Askenazy is extraordinarily refreshing and innovative and deserves a wide international readership. Askenazy shows convincingly that is above all the relationship of forces and the legal and institutional system in which these relations are expressed that determine the share of wealth. The descriptions of the possible emergence of a new, participatory trade unionism are particularly successful: by describing the innovative mobilisations of subway drivers in New York, London or Paris, of American nurses, not to speak of cleaning workers in the luxury hotels in Paris's 'golden triangle' or bus drivers in Silicon Valley, Askenazy gives one hope again and shows that several futures are possible in the framework of the existing globalisation that is underway. -- Thomas Piketty