How Disney's The Aristocats explains our bleak plutocratic future

The French economist Thomas Piketty has a new book coming out soon, Capital in the 21st Century. It is a great work, a fearsome beast of analysis stuffed with an awesome amount of empirical data, and will surely be a landmark study in economics. It also references The Aristocats, a 1970 animated Disney film about some upper-class cats who stand to inherit a fortune.

I'm not joking, and neither is Piketty, who uses the 1970 movie as a way into his general thesis about the character of inequality of wealth. Before WWI, French wealth was spectacularly concentrated:

What's responsible for this persistent wealth disparity? Piketty argues that it is a historical fact that for most of human history, the rate of return on capital has been much higher than the rate of economic growth — or, put in simple math terms, r > g. Absent either extremely fast economic growth (historically rare) or confiscatory taxes on wealth and high incomes (politically challenging), inequality of wealth will grow to spectacular levels. And if the difference is large enough, there's almost no end to the divergence:

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

That is how inequality of income can become inequality of wealth.

Wait, wouldn't this have to stop eventually? Yes, says Piketty. However...

This is doubly true, Piketty notes in a different context, when cross-border movement of capital is possible, as it was before WWI and is today. When returns on domestic capital fall, the rich purchase foreign assets that still provide a return. In theory, that process can continue to an odious destination: "In principle, this process always comes to an end — when those who own foreign assets take possession of the entire planet."

What does this bode for the future? Piketty's prognosis for the 21st century is not great; he suggests that it is highly possible for this century to be even more unequal than the 19th, which produced vast fortunes like the one of Madame de Bonnefamille.

However, as Piketty also notes, there is nothing natural or inevitable about the process he has described. Conservatives (and the ultrawealthy themselves) tend to regard the vast inequalities created by our economic system as a natural and just consequence of capitalism and the inherent worthiness of the rich. This, of course, is nonsense. On the contrary, vast inequality is a result of our institutional arrangements — some of which, like taxes on capital gains, high incomes, and inheritances, act to reduce inequality. Through such policies, France has avoided a full return to the inequalities of the pre-WWI era.

But the U.S. has not. Our inequality, both of wealth and income, is about as bad as it ever was before WWI, and getting worse fast. Given the increasing radicalization of the ultrawealthy, and the fact that one of our two political parties has all but sworn a blood oath to further reduce taxes on the rich, our future prospects for broadly shared prosperity don't look good.

On the other hand, people forget sometimes that during the post-WWII era, the U.S. had staggeringly high top marginal tax rates — over 90 percent for decades, which mystifyingly failed to prevent our greatest-ever economic boom. We should always remember that a better world is possible, no matter how steep the political slope is to get there.