The Guardian view on Europe’s growing wealth divide: back to the world of Balzac | Editorial

A new study highlights the dangers of a modern rentier capitalism that perpetuates inequality through the generationsIn a recent study picked up in the French press, the academic Mélanie Plouviez cites one of her country’s best-loved novelists to make a damning point. The power of inherited and unearned wealth in the France of 2025, she argues, replicates the social injustices found in Honoré de Balzac’s 19th-century chronicles of ambition and despair. As in the 1820s, she writes, “Who now could buy a place in Paris relying only on their wage and without family help? With the resurgence of inherited wealth, a gulf between what work allows and inheritance allows has also returned.”The problem is a sadly familiar one across Europe, and the same observation could be made of Britain, Germany or Italy. The economist Thomas Piketty has laid bare the extent to which booming stock markets and property prices have turbocharged asset wealth in western liberal democracies, at the expense of those reliant solely on a wage. Since the 1980s, regressive tax changes have empowered the wealthy to keep more of their money and pass more of it on to their sons and daughters. In advanced economies, the amount of inherited wealth has more or less doubled as a proportion of GDP, compared with the middle of the last century. Continue reading...

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