Progressives win the educated electorate, but conservatives keep the affluent

Let's turn the spotlight on a study coordinated by Thomas Piketty on politics and demography and reported by the "Economist" on May 29, 2021 with the mysterious title "Brahmins vs. merchants”.

For those involved in books, Piketty is also a successful publishing case for this industry.

Marx and Piketty, two heroes of their time

In addition to a certain ideal orientation and the title of the main work, Piketty has in common with Marx the ability to spend entire days on economic-social data, statistics and documents and to be able to derive from them very illuminating trends and stories of what is happening around to us.

Interpreting economic or demographic data is not like looking Gone with the Wind: their extraction and their study requires a certain abnegation and an effort that recalls that of miners more than that of intellectuals. Piketty isn't one of those talk show fixtures with a nice Côte d'Azur tan.

The heroic Marx

Marx had a colorful and explicit expression to define the tiring work of excavation that the economic and demographic materials demanded of him. He defined it: "Die ganze ökonomische Scheiße” (“All that crap,” TA). Just open a random page of the floorplans to understand what material really ******* handled Marx and why, in the end, his analysis of the mechanisms of capitalism remains unsurpassed to this day.

Marx suffered from anal fissures and one can imagine what suffering it was for him to sit all day on the benches in the gloomy halls of the British Library. It is said that as the inflammation flared up his theories became more radical.

During the drafting of the Capital, Marx wrote to Engels with a certain irony: “To finish the book I should at least be able to sit down. I hope the bourgeoisie remembers that." Marx had a rather corrosive humour, even quite pleasant, despite the fact that he has abused various personalities, from Proudhon to Bakunin, bearers of important demands for the workers' movement. The factionalism of the left was initiated by Marx himself.

The heroic Piketty

Piketty operates in a more comfortable context than Marx's. He has an excellent salary, works at home or in his studio at EHESS in Paris, comfortably seated in a padded armchair in front of a Mac equipped with remote access to the databases it needs. Nonetheless, the processing of the material he studies maintains something thankless.

Like Marx's work, Piketty's work has something relevant also for its historical and geographical extent. Capital in the XNUMXst century it became a worldwide bestseller translated into all languages. Who would have said that about a book on economic statistics?

In fact it is an academic book of a thousand pages, 96 graphs and 18 tables (published in Italy by Bompiani). According to Kindle reading statistics, people, on average, didn't read more than 20% of the content. With this he has certainly done better than the Mathematics Principle by Russell and Whitehead which, Russell himself reports, only Kurt Gödel read in full.

A new interpretative canon

The fact is that Capital in the XNUMXst century it really changed the interpretative canon of the post-industrial society that we thought informed by political democracy and social justice.

Piketty has demonstrated that the canon is another: it is inequality. A shocking discovery for public opinion which consolidated and consolidated the sensation perceived after the terrible crisis of 2007-2008, and confirmed by the pandemic.

Sure Capital in the XNUMXst century it's not a perfect job, and neither was the Capital of Marx. A group of scholars, in a book entitled All of Piketty's mistakes (IBL libri, 2018), highlighted the theoretical shortcomings of that work.

The fact is that the central thesis of the book, i.e. inequality is, together with the pandemic, the main topic of global public discourse and is also discussed in the G7.

Populism is not a black swan

Recently Piketty, together with Amory Gethin and Clara Martínez-Toledano — two colleagues from the World Inequality Lab — published a 150-page working paper entitled "Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020”. Basically, the paper applies the approach of Piketty's main work to the study of the relationship between demography and ideology.

The team compiled time series data for socioeconomic characteristics of more than 300 elections held in 21 Western democracies from 1948 to 2020.

The analysis of these series shows that the election of Trump or Brexit were not unforeseeable and unexpected events, but rather the natural outcome of an international trend that developed starting from the 60s.

The migration of the Brahmins and the permanence of the merchants

In the 1950s–1960s, voting for Democratic, Labour, Social Democrat, Socialist, Progressive and similar parties was associated with voters with low levels of education and income. The educated and affluent electorate voted for Conservative parties.

From 1960 onwards, higher education voters ('the Brahmins') previously firmly aligned with the Conservatives gradually converged on the vote for progressive parties.

In the years 2000–2010 this trend started to take on such a dimension that it gave rise to “multi-elite party systems”. The Brahmin elites voted for the progressives. Instead the high-income elites ('the merchants') continued to vote conservative as they always had.

Those who did not socially belong to these elites began to be orphaned of political representation or saw it very diluted in the historical reference parties.

The demographic reason for this trend

The authors did not identify the cause of this trend, but one can reasonably infer that it is demographic in nature.

In 1950, a bottom 10% of the electorate in America and Europe had a higher education. It was an irrelevant incidence at the electoral level, incapable of reorienting a political alignment.

As of 2000, more than a third of the electorate had a university degree, enough to attract them to political coalitions identifiable as progressive.

At this point the opposing coalition began to fracture in calling on other layers of the electorate to compensate for the Brahmin exit from the conservative pole. This is where the formations of the alternative right and populists were born.

A new socio-cultural structure of the political alignment

This repositioning has been accelerated by the rise of both the green and anti-immigration movements. Key features of these alignments have been able to close the ranks of the better educated and the less educated electorate, respectively.

By combining the database of electoral movements elaborated by Piketty's team with the programs of political parties, it emerged that the educational discriminant is strongly linked to the emergence of a new "socio-cultural" axis of political conflict, with respect to the historically typical one of democracies westerners.

The perception that something very similar happened or was happening is the result of intuitions, but now Piketty gives full scientific legitimacy to this hitherto uncertain intuition.