How Disney's The Aristocats explains our bleak plutocratic future

If the rest of humanity doesn't stop them, the ultra-rich could theoretically end up owning the entire planet

The Aristocats
(Image credit: (Screen shot))

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:

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.