‘We’re Eating People...’: Piketty Warns of Democratic Collapse

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Economist Thomas Piketty says free-capital regimes have created a world where the rich never pay, the middle class is “stuck”, and politics is turning the poor and migrants into scapegoats — a trajectory he calls “unsustainable”.

By S JHA

New Delhi, December 11, 2025 — Economist Thomas Piketty, one of the world’s most influential voices on inequality, has delivered a stark warning: democracies are sleepwalking into a social breakdown because governments refuse to confront extreme wealth concentration. Speaking to Channel 4 News, Piketty tore into what he calls the “eternal protection” of the super-rich under modern economic systems.

At the heart of his alarm is a brutal arithmetic: the bottom 50% in countries like the UK and France own less than 5% of national wealth, while the top 1% controls around 30%. This, Piketty argues, is not just unfair — it is politically explosive.

The middle class, he says, has been trapped in a system where the richest evade taxes through free capital flows that policymakers themselves enshrined. “The very rich won’t pay tax… and the middle class will have to pay for them. Too bad for you.” It’s a chilling description of an economic order that has hollowed out democratic consent.

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And when people can’t look up, Piketty warns, they start looking down. “Because we cannot get resources from people above us, we are going to eat the people below us,” he says. The “people below us” — migrants, foreigners, the poor — become the political targets. The anger that should be directed at the top is redirected toward the vulnerable.

This cycle, he insists, is not sustainable. Why don’t governments fix it? The answer, according to Piketty, is fear. Wealth taxes would force nations to break with old treaties and confront global capital.

Leaders worry that undoing these frameworks will unleash international chaos. “I understand they’re afraid. But there are limits to fear,” he says. Those limits are beginning to show. The economic model built on free trade and free capital, Piketty argues, is already collapsing. Democracies must choose: tax extreme wealth, or let the system fall apart under the weight of inequality and resentment.

Piketty’s warning is not ideological. It is a diagnosis of a political world where the super-rich float above accountability while societies fracture below them. Inherent risk per the economist is that if governments refuse to listen, the pitfall is paralysis at the cost of reform.