As large housing estates are being demolished and the age of great social democracies recedes, taking with it any notion of an architecture for the public, OMA partner Reinier de Graaf asks if there is any alternative to building capital

It is almost a year since Thomas Piketty published his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.1 If Piketty is right, we can once and for all bury the illusion that the present economic system ultimately works in the interest of all and that its benefits will eventually trickle down to the poorest in society. Contrary to what every economist after Keynes has been telling us, the inequality produced by capitalism may not be a temporary phase that will ultimately be overcome; it is rather a structural and inescapable long-term effect of the system itself. Piketty’s analysis is exceedingly simple. He identifies two basic economic categories: income and wealth. He then proceeds to define social (in)equality as a function of the relation between the two over time, concluding that as soon as the return on wealth exceeds the return on labour, social inequality inevitably increases. Those who acquire wealth through work fall ever further behind those who accumulate wealth simply by owning it. Only during the 20th century - under the pressure of two world wars, social unrest, revolutions, labour unions and the daunting presence of a global alternative to the capitalist system in the form of a (former) communist world - only during this unique capsule of time, was capital briefly surpassed by labour as the prime means to accumulate wealth.

Whether or not the 20th century was a brief exception in the inescapable mechanism of a deeply fraught economic system remains to be seen. Much will depend on what happens next: the 21st century will determine the legacy of the 20th. So far, the signs are not encouraging: since the late 1970s, after the great conservative revolution set in motion by Reagan and Thatcher, the promise of accumulating wealth through work has steadily lost ground. The fall of the Berlin Wall (generally claimed as a victory of that same conservative revolution) and in its wake, the wholesale collapse of the Communist Bloc, have exacerbated this trend. If current indicators are right, we could well be faced with a situation in the near future where, for the first time since the end of the 19th century, returns on wealth through ownership will again exceed those of labour.

Indeed, if Piketty’s argument holds true, the 20th century will have been no more than an anomaly: a brief interruption in the systemic logic of capitalism, where the inherent accretion of capital through capital remains an unbreakable cycle. This simple economic conclusion may have social and cultural implications beyond our wildest imagination. When a lifetime of labour can no longer match the returns on an acquired fortune, inherited wealth once again becomes the defining factor of class distinction, reducing any notion of social mobility to a remote possibility at best.

  • 1. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, initially published in French (as Le capital au XXIe siècle) in August 2013; trans Arthur Goldhammer, April 2014.