"Although Piketty favors much higher income tax rates ('virtually confiscatory tax rates have been an immense historical success'), policies that redistribute property rather than income are the heart of his program."

"These would include reparations for descendants of enslaved and colonized people, encouraging countries in the global south to tax the fortunes of nonresidents who do business there, cancellation of debts and a program he calls 'inheritance for all,' in which wealth taxes would reduce large fortunes and provide everyone with a financial cushion. He would also take a large measure of control over corporations away from their managers and shareholders and give it to employees, and create 'a system of egalitarian funding for political campaigns, the media and think tanks.'... He is well aware that changes on the scale he is proposing never happen incrementally.... Piketty doesn’t make predictions, but he treats the current system of 'hypercapitalism' as being obviously doomed. Other than socialism, the only real alternatives are authoritarianism, Chinese-style Communism or 'reactionary projects' like ISIS. ... Absent disaster, it seems possible, or even likely, that [incremental adjustments] will move economic policy in the direction Piketty would want... though to an extent that he would consider pathetically inadequate."

From Nicholas Lemann's NYT review of Thomas Piketty's new book "A Brief History of Equality."

"Most fungi take the form of tiny cylindrical threads, from which hyphal tips branch in all directions, creating a meandering, gossamer-like network..."

"... known as mycelium. Fungus has been breaking down organic matter for millions of years, transforming it into soil. A handful of healthy soil might contain miles of mycelia, invisible to the human eye. It’s estimated that there are a million and a half species of fungus, though nearly ninety per cent of them remain undocumented.... [T]he hyphal tips of mycelium seem to communicate with one another, making decisions without a real center.... ...Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist who was taken with Thomas Piketty’s 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' and its insights on inequality. She wondered how mycorrhizal networks, the symbiotic intertwining of plant systems and mycelium, deal with their own, natural encounters with inequity. Kiers exposed a single fungus to an unequally distributed supply of phosphorus. Somehow the fungus 'coordinated its trading behavior across the network'... essentially shuttling phosphorus to parts of the mycelial network for trade with the plant system according to a 'buy low, sell high' logic.... Scientists still don’t understand how fungi coördinate, control, and learn from such behaviors, just that they do. 'How best to think about shared mycorrhizal networks?... Are we dealing with a superorganism? A metropolis? A living Internet? Nursery school for trees? Socialism in the soil? Deregulated markets of late capitalism, with fungi jostling on the trading floor of a forest stock exchange? Or maybe it’s fungal feudalism, with mycorrhizal overlords presiding over the lives of their plant laborers for their own ultimate benefit.'"

From "The Secret Lives of Fungi/They shape the world—and offer lessons for how to live in it" (in The New Yorker)(with the note: "Published in the print edition of the May 18, 2020, issue, with the headline 'Fungus Among Us.'" I can see why they regretted that title, but maybe just own it. You did it. Live with it.)

"Thomas Piketty, the Lena Dunham of economics in 2014, is finally getting to his backlash phase."

"According to the Financial Times, Piketty’s world-rattling best seller on growing inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is based on data that may 'contain a series of errors that skew his findings,' including 'mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets,' which the business paper compares to the humiliating screw-ups found last year in an austerity study by Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Except Piketty is much more famous."