Piketty rejects Légion d’Honneur award French economist Thomas Piketty, during a presentation at Kings College, central London, on April 30, 2014, said that he hoped to create a more informed fight about the issue of income inequality as he launched his bestselling and highly controversial book in Britain. France’s sputtering economy was a source of endless frustration for President François Hollande in 2014. It found a new way to torment the French president on the first day of the new year when Thomas Piketty, one of the country’s most celebrated economists, rejected a Légion d’Honneur award, saying the government had no standing to grant such recognition. Mr Piketty, whose 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has already sold more than 1m copies, told the AFP on Thursday: “I refuse this nomination because I do not think it is the government’s role to decide who is honourable.” In a clear indictment of Mr Hollande’s economic record, Mr Piketty added that the government instead “would do better to concentrate on reviving growth in France and Europe”. Mr Piketty’s comments come on top of a series of disappointing performances and false dawns on the economic front ever since Mr Hollande and his socialist government took office. Unemployment has remained persistently high in spite of promises to change the upward trend by the end of last year. Meanwhile, sluggish growth — the economy was stagnant for the first six months of 2014 — has helped drag down Mr Hollande’s popularity to the lowest levels of any French president in modern history. But the rejection of the award by the French economist — who argues for the redistribution of concentrated wealth in his best-selling book, which was the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year — is particularly galling coming on the same day that the French president dumped his supertax scheme for the rich. The measure to increase tax rates to 75 per cent on earnings over €1m, which earned Mr Hollande support from the left when he announced the plan to great fanfare in 2012, was on Thursday abandoned after bringing in just a small portion of the expected revenue. In rejecting the Legion of Honour, Mr Piketty joins a list of personalities that includes Claude Monet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Hector Berlioz and Brigitte Bardot — all of whom declined the award for varying reasons. The Legion of Honour was first established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and is considered the country’s highest award. In 2012, Mr Hollande became Grandmaster of the order, continuing the long tradition of placing the incumbent French leader at the head. I refuse this nomination because I do not think it is the government’s role to decide who is honourable Among others nominated in the New Year’s list on Thursday were Jean Tirole, the French economist who last year was awarded the Nobel Prize, and Patrick Modiano, the French novelist who won the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature. Mr Hollande has come under fire in recent months from Brussels for not making more of an effort to reduce the country’s budget deficit to within eurozone guidelines. But he has also taken flak from within his own Socialist party following his decision a year ago to give businesses €40bn in tax breaks in the coming years as well as plans to make €50bn in savings between now and 2017. Mr Piketty, 43, was once close to the Socialist party but has conspicuously distanced himself from Mr Hollande’s government in recent years.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 09:30:34 +0000
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