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thomas piketty
Leading Economists Endorse UN Expert's 'Economy of Genocide' Report After Trump Attack
A group of economists, including Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis, expressed solidarity with Francesca Albanese as the Trump administration pushes for her removal as U.N. special rapporteur on occupied Palestine.
Jul 08, 2025
A group of world-renowned economists has penned an open letter expressing support for United Nations expert Francesca Albanese's recent report scrutinizing the integral role that powerful corporations have played in sustaining Israel's genocidal assault on Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories.
The letter, first obtained and published in English by Zeteo on Monday, characterizes Albanese's report as "a major contribution to understanding the political economy of Israel's apartheid state, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and, now, their genocide," and argues her findings "must be studied and debated widely and freely."
The letter's signatories include former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, French economist Thomas Piketty, and University of Massachusetts Amherst economics professor Jayati Ghosh.
The economists' endorsement of Albanese's report comes days after the Trump administration issued a statement calling on United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to remove her as special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories. The statement was released a day after the publication of Albanese's report, which the Trump administration characterizes as part of "an unacceptable campaign of political and economic warfare against the American and worldwide economy."
The top economists cited the Trump administration's statement as a key impetus behind their decision to publicly back Albanese's work.
"In view of the virulently hostile and indeed intimidating letter from the U.S. government to the U.N. secretary-general demanding the dismissal of Ms. Albanese and the quashing of her excellent report, we felt the need to express our strong support for Ms. Albanese and to encourage the U.N. to dismiss the shrill demands of the U.S. and Israeli governments," the economists wrote.
"Following a well-trodden path of genocide denial and of bullying anyone who challenges the right of the colonial power to dispossess Indigenous peoples," they continued, "the U.S. and Israeli governments, with most European governments too timid to take a stance, demand that the international community turn a blind eye to the ongoing genocide and, in particular, to the key role that multinational and national corporations are playing in maintaining the apartheid regime and enabling the subsequent genocide."
This is not business as usual.
My new UN report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, is out today.
It shows how corporations have fueled and legitimised the destruction of Palestine.
Genocide, it would seem, is profitable. This cannot continue, accountability must… pic.twitter.com/Ei3atw0TQ1
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) July 1, 2025
Albanese's report thoroughly documents corporate complicity and direct participation in Israel's assault on Palestinians, specifically naming dozens of corporations in a range of sectors—from Lockheed Martin to Microsoft to Chevron to Palantir.
"The complex web of corporate structures—and the often obscured links between parents and subsidiaries, franchises, joint ventures, licensees, etc.—implicates many more," Albanese wrote. "Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of the oPt creates an untenable situation for corporate entities to simply continue business as usual."
"The private sector must, in its own interests, urgently reconsider all engagement connected to Israel's economy of occupation and now genocide," she added.
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The World Bank Needs Better Metrics to Understand Inequality
The bank is pushing a statistical notion of “shared prosperity” that, as one expert puts it, “leaves the rich out of the equation!”
Aug 03, 2023
Been eating a bit too much ice cream this sweltering summer? Thinking about going on a bit of a diet? Well, imagine yourself counting calories but exempting anything with sugar from all your counting.
Would that approach help you make an appreciable dent on your excess bodily baggage? Of course not. We can’t eliminate what we ignore. And that goes for inequality as well, over 300 distinguished economists worldwide are charging in a new open letter to the United Nations and the World Bank.
Back in 2015, these eminent economists remind us, the world’s nations came together and adopted a series of “Sustainable Development Goals”—SDGs for short—designed to systematically attack both poverty and climate change. The tenth of these goals specifically aims to “reduce inequality within and among countries.”
Significantly narrowing our world’s deeply unequal distribution of income and wealth will, of course, always remain a tall order, given the political power that grand fortunes create. The World Bank, unfortunately, has made that order taller.
The progress so far on this inequality SDG? Practically nonexistent. By many measures, the open-letter economists note, our “inequalities have worsened,” and that worsening really matters. Without reducing the “deep divide” that separates our global rich from the rest of us, the economists suggest, we’ll forever be going nowhere on “ending poverty and preventing climate breakdown.”
Significantly narrowing our world’s deeply unequal distribution of income and wealth will, of course, always remain a tall order, given the political power that grand fortunes create. The World Bank, unfortunately, has made that order taller.
The U.N.’s member nations have essentially made the bank the world’s official inequality scorekeeper. But the metrics the World Bank uses to track inequality have turned out to be “very inadequate,” charges Jayati Ghosh, a coauthor of the economists’ new open letter.
We already have, Ghosh points out, a variety of established yardsticks for measuring inequality. The Gini coefficient plots actually existing income distributions between 0 for total equality and 1 for infinite inequality. The more easily understandable Palma ratio divides the income share of a society’s top 10% by the income share of its bottom 40%.
The World Bank isn’t relying on either of these standard measures. The bank is instead pushing a statistical notion of “shared prosperity” that, as Ghosh puts it, “leaves the rich out of the equation!” This World Bank measure defines success in the battle against inequality as what we have when the incomes of the bottom 40% are growing faster than the national average income.
On the World Bank’s scorecard, in other words, any nation where the incomes of the top 1% are rising ten times faster than the national average income would be making “progress” against inequality so long as the incomes of the bottom 40% were rising slightly faster than that national average.
This “bizarre notion of ‘shared prosperity,’” says Jayati Ghosh, “provides very misleading estimates of the extent of inequality or progress in reducing it.”
By this bizarre World Bank yardstick, over half the world—53% of the nations the bank sampled—were making progress against inequality just before the pandemic hit and another 11% were showing no change.
Researchers with the World Inequality Database, an ambitious statistical effort that takes inspiration from the ground-breaking research of scholars like Thomas Piketty, paint a starkly different picture. Only 26% of the world’s nations, as measured by the Gini coefficient, are actually showing progress against income inequality, and only 12% are showing progress in Palma-ratio terms.
For three top global inequality watchdogs—Oxfam, the Development Finance International, and the New York University Center for International Cooperation’s Pathfinders initiative—the World Bank’s “shared prosperity” scorekeeping makes plain the need for a real “data revolution” that spotlights the wealth of the world’s wealthiest.
The World Bank’s current approach, these three groups charged in a new report released last month, essentially “ignores what is happening to the rich.” We cannot afford that ignoring, the groups stress, not at a time when “the world’s wealthiest citizens continue to be largely responsible for extreme carbon emissions” while the world’s “poorest citizens pay the price through climate disasters.”
Will critiques like this get the World Bank to change its statistical ways? We’ll see. The bank’s first reaction to the economists’ open letter has been somewhat encouraging. The World Bank, says a spokesperson, agrees “we need to do more to address inequality” and “do better in measuring progress.”
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New Data Show Income of Top 0.1% Soared 345% While That of Bottom 90% Stagnated Over Past 40 Years
"It's all a matter of political choices," progressive economist Thomas Piketty said in a recent interview. "You can have economic justice together with economic prosperity."
Dec 01, 2020
U.S. wage data released this week reveal the continuation of a trend that began at the end of the 1970s, and which has given the United States the dubious distinction of having the worst income inequality among most-developed countries.
The Economic Policy Institute reports that between 1979 and 2019, the top 1% of people in the U.S.--whose mean income was nearly $738,000 in 2018-- have enjoyed 160% income growth, while wages for the bottom 90% have stagnated, rising just 26% over the same 40-year period.
The figures showed massive inequality even among the top 1%, as the highest 0.1%--those making an average of $2.82 million--skyrocketed 345% since 1979.
\u201cThread (1/8): New analysis (@EconomicPolicy) with @joriskywalker of top 1% wage growth:\nhttps://t.co/z43OVMhDDu\u201d— Larry Mishel (@Larry Mishel) 1606924316
While U.S. income inequality is the worst among most-developed nations, its wealth inequality is even more egregious. According to a 2017 report (pdf) from the Institute for Policy Studies, the three wealthiest Americans at the time, Jeff Bezos--who has since become the world's first multicentibillionaire--Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett, collectively held more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population, or some 160 million people.
Experts say it is no accident that the period in which the yawning, ever-growing chasm between rich and poor began coincides with the rise of corporatist and neoliberal economic policies--colloquially dubbed "trickle-down economics"--implemented by conservative leaders including British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan in the U.S.
Thomas Piketty, a French economist whose work focuses on economic inequality and who authored the seminal book Capital in the Twenty-First Century and the recently published Capital and Ideology, says the coronavirus pandemic presents an opportunity for U.S. leaders to finally make a serious attempt to address income disparities.
"We have to revisit some of our ideologies, some of what we believe is the conventional wisdom at a given point in time," Piketty told Hill.TV last week. "I think we should use this opportunity to develop more social state, social policies in general, by which I mean a better income support mechanism, safety net, and better access to education."
"There's nothing natural in the way the economy is organized," Piketty continued. "It's all a matter of political choices, of ideology. I think it's important to send a message to working America and to low-wage America that you can have economic justice together with economic prosperity."
Piketty implored the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden to embrace egalitarian economic policies espoused by progressives such as ex-presidential primary rivals Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), including a tax on billionaires, which he said is "actually pretty popular if you look at the polls."
"I think you need to have a more ambitious policy platform of giving a better chance to more disadvantaged socioeconomic groups," Piketty said. "We're talking about a higher minimum wage, more investment in public universities, more progressive taxation at the top."
"I think it will be a big mistake for the Democratic Party leadership to abandon this kind of idea," he added.
Standing in stark contrast to what economists like Piketty say must be done to combat inequality, the administration of President Donald Trump--who has boasted of giving billionaires a $1.5 trillion tax break--said this week that it supports Senate Republicans' proposal to freeze the wages of the more than two million people who work for the federal government.
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