Thomas Piketty: Clamping down with law and order will not be enough

Here's an English translation:

http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2015/11/24/clamping-down-with...

It just so happens that Piketty is French. Maybe you can find a translation somewhere, though.

"I don't understand why we shouldn't believe what's coming straight out of ISIS' mouth."

Because they're proven masters at propaganda and messaging. To take prop at face value is the definition of naive.

"ISIS has said they're killing us because of their interpretation of a book written in the first millennia."

That's their justification for their actions, not the reason. Come on.

Recruiting for ISIS pays $5000 - $10000 per successful recruit.

If their true motivation is purely religious, if religion is the INCENTIVE, then why incentivize people with lump sumps larger than yearly income from honest work?

ISIS represents a way out of poverty, at least, that's how they sell it in recruiting.

"When someone shoots up a Planned Parenthood, however, he doesn't even have to make a public statement and the same people are quick to blame Christian beliefs or rhetoric and immediately accept the ideological reason for the violence."

We call that quid pro quo, and yes, it's intentional. If Islam itself is responsible for the actions of a minority of a minority, then it stands to reason that Christianity itself is responsible for the actions of a minority of a minority. So long as conservatives blame Islam in general for ISIS, we will blame Christianity in general for Westboro Baptist, for Clinic Terrorists, for Jehovah Witness child negligence murder, etc.

"Why don't we say that gunmen attack Planned Parenthoods because of income inequality in the United States?"

We do, often, we bemoan the war against education (ignorance as pride) and growing wealth inequality for social tension and violence both here in America and worldwide.

> Why don't we say that gunmen attack Planned Parenthoods because of income inequality in the United States?

I do. I think the Planned Parenthood shooting is due to a combination of mental illness and lack of education. I don't think it really matters which crazy ideology you pick, you can use it to justify your actions. And if the crazy, uneducated, people weren't shooting up a Planned Parenthood, they would be shooting up a theater, or a school, or any number of other places. The solution is to educate kids and to treat the mentally ill.

Why does this tiny group of Muslims commit hate crimes, while the vast majority do not? Piketty thinks it's income inequality, what's your explanation?

It's not a case of believing what's coming out of ISIS' mouth - most people, even on the Left you decry, do. The question is why, when they utter this stuff, do so many people listen?

To address your analogy, proponents of Planned Parenthood aren't killing pro-lifers en mass using robots and tacitly supporting the most extreme pro-lifers to address a third enemy. The analogy doesn't work at all.

Why would I believe their reasons?

If there is one thing I've learned in life, it's that people don't know why they do many (or even any) of the things they do. They do them for reasons unknown to themselves, and then afterward, supposing there is demand, they fabricate reasons. Not lies necessarily, more like their "best guess" as to why they did it.

When the judge asks the teenager why he microwaved a live hamster and the teenager says "I don't know" he's not only being honest but actually insightful. And because society demands reasons for every action, most children soon learn that "I don't know" is an unacceptable answer.

So no, I don't believe what comes out of ISIS's mouth(s) regarding why they do these things.

I'm not sure why you do either, and it's a fact that neither do you.

Things don't have a single cause. "ISIS grew out of staggeringly unequal distribution of Mideast oil wealth" and "ISIS is motivated by extreme interpretations of Islam" are able to coexist perfectly well.

Do you have any examples of "the same people" being inconsistent here? Because usually when people complain about inconsistency like this, it's actually different people being mentally categorized together, not actually the same people.

You're thinking of ISIS' intent, whereas Piketty's argument is about the circumstances that allow one entity to acquire so much power.

They aren't allowed to say that they're selling oil to Turkey to pay their "holy fighters" while being kickstarted by USA and Saudi Arabia.

Because the left in the West, more than being attacked by terrorists, is afraid of being seen as politically incorrect.

There's a difference between the stated motive of ISIS and what enables them to exist and grow. I have a hard time believing that they can be so effective in their recruitment efforts with a message based entirely on an interpretation of an old book. It is more plausible to me that they prey on desperate, mentally unwell, and disaffected people to join their cause.

I won't pretend to know why everything is so fucked right now but I will make 2 points:

1) In general, the people actually doing the killings are far removed from the organization's leadership.

Here's an interesting piece on individual Isis fighters: http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte...

2) Usually when someone is upset, they're very bad at articulating the actual thing that is upsetting them. Often when someone is upset, they'll say (and think) it's about something that is actually unrelated but happened to come right before the outburst of pent up frustration. To me, Islamism is a suspiciously rational explanation for completely irrational violence. Islam's pretty old, the book hasn't changed, but we're seeing a big spike in coordinated terror against civilians in the last couple years.

There is no reason why both Piketty's and ISIS' rationale can't both be true. ISIS's eschatological religious propaganda wouldn't have nearly the resonance and recruiting power it does if it weren't for the current state of political and economic inequality in the middle east.

Also, while the Planned Parenthood shootings are tragic, they are not widespread and frequent enough to be attributed to an aggregate measure such as income inequality.

Edit: removed my comment about how we'd have to have Christian armies rising in the US to have a situation comparable to ISIS. Apparently that rubbed some the wrong way.

Maybe because the Planned Parenthood shooter specifically mentioned "no more baby parts"? And Planned Parenthood has been HEAVILY featured in the media this last year, falsely painted by the christian right as a baby-killing organization?

ISIS is a fundamentalist millenarian dead cult making up some thousands of people, the question and the issue is why they haven't been run out of the areas where they operate by the ordinary people that live there, and their existing power groups. It is completely uncontroversial that ISIS are substantially tapping into existing and real sectarian grievances in the area. In Syria, that is down to a lack of development in rural Sunnis areas, and human rights abuses by the Shia-led regime. In Iraq, it is down to the loss of power of Sunni groups after the fall of Saddam, and the transition in power and patronage towards the Shia majority. Just saying over and over again that ISIS is evil is just repeating an obvious truth, the question is how do explain their success, and how do you undercut their power base, and a substantial part of that is to do with the allocation of money and power for the Sunni areas in Syria and Iraq.

Here's Le Monde's English translation:

http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2015/11/24/clamping-down-with...

Since you kind of elided it, their stated reason for killing is more or less "because you're not Muslim". We could take it at face value, but there's nothing useful you can do with that information.

What would be useful is to know how so many people get to that place. What are the conditions that radicalized thousands to the point where they are willing to kill others just for being less Muslim than they see themselves?

I think the Post's use of the word 'blame' is meant to be provocative. Western powers obviously aren't scheming to create ISIS with wealth inequality, and improved wealth distribution obviously won't inspire ISIS to lay down their weapons. But if that inequality really is a cause, it's worth trying to fix it if you want to head off the next manifestation of ISIS.

> I don't understand why we shouldn't believe what's coming straight out of ISIS' mouth.

Accepting it doesn't really answer much.

> ISIS has said they're killing us because of their interpretation of a book written in the first millennia.

Yes, and if we accept this, we are faced with the question of what makes particular people in particular times and places likely to accept and act on messages like this, and what circumstances enable them to be successful when they do. Daesh isn't the only group to promote an ideology like this based on interpretation of some ancient religious text (nor is the phenomenon of groups trying, or even succeeding, in doing that limited to the Middle East, or the Islamic world, nor are the Quran the only text which has been used in this role.)

Nor, for that matter, was Daesh (though it had a different name!) new to this when they first started achieving real success -- they had similar goals and interpretation of Islam before they became known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, when they were known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, and when they rejected their affiliation with al-Qaeda to style themselves first as "the Islamic State in Iraq", then "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant", and finally "the Islamic State".

> When someone shoots up a Planned Parenthood, however, he doesn't even have to make a public statement and the same people are quick to blame Christian beliefs or rhetoric and immediately accept the ideological reason for the violence.

Women's health clinic attacks by violent religious extremists with an overt religious motivation are a recurring pattern in the US; assuming that another such attack is part of that pattern rather than breaking with it is not exactly a giant leap. In any case, the ideology behind the attack and the conditions which made the attacker susceptible to adopting that ideology are distinct issues.

> Why don't we say that gunmen attack Planned Parenthoods because of income inequality in the United States?

Actually, lots of people on the left -- the only people who generally acknowledge the overt ideological motivation of violence of Christian religious extremists -- point to social factors like income inequality and persistent poverty as among the factors that make people susceptible to that extremism (as well as pointing to deliberate acts by certain political elites to fan that extremism and channel it for political ends as contributing to the uptake of the extremism.) These positions are complementary, rather than incompatible.

Rudimentary talk-radio analysis aside...

I find Daesh far scarier than other Islamic fundamentalist movements because their techniques are more sophisticated and their aim is much higher. The "they're killing us!" argument is so silly... terror attacks are to stir western nations into violent action, not to actually significantly injure us. And it works - far too many Americans and Europeans live and act politically in abject terror of very low-impact, unlikely events.

What scares me about Daesh, though, is that I think they're trying to goad outside powers into massive wars with each other! This is why they've attacked everyone - the US, France, Russia, and all the major Arab nations. Everyone is off fighting in Syria, and not as a unified front, but a bunch of independent powers making independent alliances and jockeying for position.

During a recent presidential debate, Rand Paul wisely asked the question, "Are you ready to shoot down Russian planes?" (note: I'm not a Rand Paul supporter. I just thought he was spot-on with this.) If the US creates a no-fly zone while Russia wants to do bombing runs in it, we could have a situation where American and Russian planes are in direct combat. There's a non-zero chance that this could lead to nuclear war and the destruction of the West as we know it. And we've already had the first taste of it, with NATO member Turkey shooting down a Russian plane.

If I wanted to destroy the West, that's exactly what I'd do - provoke a war between the US and Russia with those giant Cold War nuclear arsenals.

And that makes me think Daesh is by far the most sophisticated and dangerous enemy we've seen since the Nazis.

The left claims ISIS happened because of geopolitical bullying that the West did in that area for about a century now. The right claims ISIS happened because they are religious nutjobs fundamentally opposed to western values.

I think it's not either / or. I think it's a messy situation with a complicated causal web. It's more like all of the above.

You get Picot / Sykes after WWI to stir up trouble in the region. And the creation of an artificial state after WWII in the region, which the West keeps sponsoring so that they dominate the area militarily. And things like the CIA coup to remove Mosaddegh from office in Iran, who ended up being replaced with a theocracy. And the relentless pressure and meddling from the West, for the purpose of maintaining an oil supply.

And then you get a bunch of religious nutjobs ruling various places in the area. And a religion which seems to have a particularly "robust" attitude towards "holy wars". And then throw in the mix some climate shifts that knock out harvests and upset the price of food staples. And maybe the economists are right, too, and vast inequalities of all sorts in the area just made everything else worse.

If any one of the factors mentioned above was acting in isolation, nothing would have happened. But the stack, as you see, is pretty thick, and I guess something broke somewhere. It's all of the above. It's not one single, isolated reason.

The mistake you're making in your analogy is comparing a group of people to a single person. ISIS is not one united front, and most of the people who actually fight -- not the leaders making videos, but the people doing the killing -- do so for much less grandiose reasons.

Casting the rise of ISIS as a black-and-white, good-vs.-evil struggle allows some very clever politicians to have their way: torture some folks, spy on citizens. But if we look deeper at the situation, we'll see that motivations are more complex. In doing so, however, we (the West) must confront our role in the situation.

"For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.” [0]

[0]http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte...

You are miss understanding what he meant. I don't think he meant to explain the reasoning used by the attackers, he is however trying to understand what caused all these people to start killing in the first place. ISIS surely feeds on religion, but the root cause of the problem is not only religion, just as the root cause of the Crusades wasn't.

> Finally, is there anywhere to find the original article by Piketty in English?

Pretty much everything Piketty writes, is originally written in French. He's French, after all...

There can be multiple real counterfactuals based on multiple contributing causal factors.

What is the origin of the Islamic extremism? Why does this group of Muslims kill people while the vast majority do not?

People who hold to your preferred cause are the only sane ones, and everyone else is "merely playing politics." Cool.

Or maybe, just maybe, the real world is a little more complex than that. Maybe it is Islamic extremism and climate change and income inequality and a thousand other things all interacting with each other.

I don't doubt that Piketty is using ISIS to advance his agenda, because that's what people do. Everybody everywhere is using ISIS to advance their agenda. Piketty uses it to support his ideas about income inequality, and Sam Harris uses it to support his ideas about Islam.

Ultimately, pointing fingers does nothing. The question is, what do you do now to fix things? I don't see anything actionable on that front coming out of the "Islamic extremism" cause.

Okay, and why is Islamic extremism taking root and spreading?

It's like a body, you've got loads of bacteria all over your body, including some nasty MRSA stuff on your skin. This isn't normally a problem. But sometimes something can trigger a situation where the bad bacteria can spread and literally eat your body.

ISIS would be a footnote in an odd corner of the world if it weren't for favorable conditions for them to flourish.

This very much includes Islamic extremism as their call to legitimacy as a caliphate resonates with far too many.

It is absolutely not a red herring to point to the root conditions for ISIS success. It's incorrect if one thinks it's ONLY income inequality, compared to an interplay of conditions (Iraq destabilization, income inequality, Islamic extremism, and geopolitical machinations providing a destabilized Syria amongst them).

I am not disagreeing with you here, but what you are saying doesn't discount that income inequality could still lead desperate people into Islamic (or more generally religious, or even more generally, ideological) extremism. Blind faith thrives among the poor and uneducated.

> To say the problem with ISIS is anything other than Islamic extremism is a red herring.

This assertion seems obviously false. ISIS isn't suddenly "better" because they are killing in the name of something other than "Islamic extremism." There are also plenty of extreme right-wing muslims who don't kill people, which also suggests that a generic diagnosis of "islamic extremism" is not enough to explain ISIS.

If you /really/ believe ISIS is powered by a fervent belief in fundamentalist Islam and nothing else, then there are no remedies other than killing every member of the group as their rhetoric inescapably leads to the conclusion they should kill everyone who disagrees with them. Of course, to believe that, you also have to believe previous groups that espoused philosophies with similar conclusions (Al' Qaeda, etc) were lying - as we haven't kill all of their members and their terrorist & militant activities have fallen off. If all muslim extremists are driven solely by personal belief in islamic extremism, we would never expect them to change their behavior.

But people do change! All the time. So, even if you believe that all extremely right-wing muslims want to kill everyone all the time (a preposition I find hard to believe myself), you should also see that some (most I would say) muslim extremists choose not to kill most of the people most of the time. If we want to save as many lives as possible we should, while we push back against the intellectual garbage of extreme Islam, should also work to understand the factors that cause some extremists to kill and others to live in relative harmony.

It's amazing to watch phrases that get used in politics take on a life of their own.

If you say, "Revolutions happen when the masses can't afford to eat," probably nobody will bat an eye.

If you say "Revolutions happen when income inequality grows to the point where the masses can't afford to eat," people freak out.

Yes, please stop publishing these ridiculous headlines that seem to be used just to incite political arguments for clicks and ad revenue.

Agree, it really distracts from his point when Piketty deliberately ignores the other obvious factors (religoius extremism, tribalism, power vacuums, etc) and fails to integrate it into the quagmire everyone is aware of.

You statement assumes that everyone who joins/supports ISIS is evil or brainwashed like the people in that article.

Imagine you are a resident of a town just captured by ISIS in Syria. Assuming that they don't kill you immediately for being a Shia, Kurd, Christian or Yazidi, how hard would it be for you to say no to supporting them, when the alternative is death, or to flee to another place only to be forced into destitution due to lack of economic opportunity.

No doubt ISIS seems to have a special capability to recruit people with sociopathic desires, but any army marches on its stomach, and that requires regular, non-evil people, to participate in the effort.

Modern liberalism leaves no room for evil. The contemporary social conservative-liberal axis reflects personal responsibility. Conservatives believe individuals are entirely responsible for individual happiness and liberals believe society is entirely responsible for individual happiness. If westerners are joining ISIS they are not evil, they have been failed by the collective and are seeking happiness elsewhere. They want variation, excitement, or certain moral standards that western society cannot or will not provide. Is that evil? If we lived in ISIS-controlled territory we'd likely want to escape and would also be branded as evil by those in power.

I'd argue income inequality is very much the culprit in this problem: individuals need not be in economic strife to feel unsatisfied with life. Wealth helps enable empowerment but individuals still need the mental tools to maintain it, and our society vastly undervalues mental health (except among the most fortunate).

> "Members of Hezbollah's militant wing who were killed in action in the 1980s and early 1990s were at least as likely to come from economically advantaged families and have a relatively high level of education as they were to come from impoverished families without educational opportunities."

> "Instead of viewing terrorism as a direct response to low market opportunities or ignorance, we suggest it is more accurately viewed as a response to political conditions and long-standing feelings (either perceived or real) of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economics."

quoted in http://www.nber.org/digest/sep02/w9074.html

He is not positing a general theory of income inequality and extremism merely offering a hypothesis for recent extremism in the middle east. Saying "I think X is the cause of Y in country Z" is not the same thing as saying X is always the cause of Y in all countries all the time.

I think it can be traced well before the Arab Spring, to the (insane) policies of the US government during the invasion of Iraq.

I don't think 'we' have trouble acknowledging your elephant.

Rather, simply pointing at the elephant smashing everything in the room of the Middle East seems unproductive in light of the fact that we have such an elephant in our very own room. Ours just happens to not be smashing things currently.

It did do so quite recently though (and rather more violently that ISIS), and not just throughout our entire history, but the history of all of humanity. The elephant is part of human nature.

Isn't it much more productive to look at the many underlying factors that might cause elephants to go berserk, both external and internal to the human individual, and then try to find solutions based on that?

Increased income equality might be such a factor, or it might not. But at least it acknowledges all the elephants in all the rooms, and offers a possible way out. Pointing at the one elephant somewhere else does no such thing, and is likely to enrage ours (in fact, it already seems rather agitated).

Finally, I actually do think that the increasing inequality and centralization of power in the US does significantly increase the chances of a regression to a more 'medieval barbarism state'. It's just not happened yet.

Can you expand on this a little bit? What exactly are you trying to say?

There is absolutely no credible, facts-driven research to suggest that lack of wealth, access to health care, access to mental health care, or access to education have a direct correlation to individuals joining terrorist groups or the rise of such groups. It's just a common trope repeated because it fits with people's existing ideologies. Terrorism is much more complicated than that.

You know, I often ask myself when presented with your argument: How come we don't hear about suicide bombings or mass (targeted) killings against Paris/Europe, US or other western nations by the multitude of poor, highly uneducated peoples of various (christian) countries in Central or South America (or christian majority countries in Africa even). Sure they have killings and other bad things happen, but usually contained within the country.

I see Islam (I don't see a difference between the so called "extreme islam" and "moderate islam" as their holy text is pretty clear that it is extreme"

Damn. You took the words right out of my mouth.

Wow. Talk about gratuitous negativity. Lots of people have a favorite theory about where Daesh came from. Blame Bush. Blame Obama. Blame Islam. Blame oil companies. At least this hammer isn't one we're already sick of hearing. What do you actually think is wrong with Piketty's analysis, other than the fact that he has actually published on this topic before?

Why address the substance when a glib dismissal will do?

You didn't address his argument at all. Just an ad hominem.

Is that because you can't address it? Because his thesis seems quite reasonable to me. And historically, we certainly know that societies with extreme income inequality are less stable than those with more equality.

"That is not an argument."

What if instead I said that the rise of the Islamic State can be traced back to dictators allowing a small elite to get rich off of oil, while oppressing and impoverishing the masses, who finally revolted? I'm guessing you might find that less objectionable even though it's just a specific rendering of "income inequality."

While I agree, there is one point that must be considered: the Arab Spring directly sprang, if you will pardon the pun, from an extreme rise in the prices of basic staples, and the population of the Middle East didn't have the income buffer to compensate. Not being able to afford bread tends to lead to a lot of revolutions, or at least the breakdown of society. Just ask France.

It's most definitely not about religion, these are mostly childish criminals which are using religion as an excuse to commit even bigger crime.

No reasonable person would expect there to be a single factor. But some straw did break the camel's back.