Meritocracy, markets, social mobility: Inequality is not a crucial issue

Chapter 7 examines the subset of the corpus of newspaper articles which reacted negatively with respect to key features of Piketty’s analysis and findings. The chapter focuses on those articles which advanced defensive discourses on inequality, seeking to either downplay, deny, or conflate the key findings related to the secular trend of growing inequality. The approach and treatment in this chapter proposes that such discourses can be found in a number of categories: firstly, where the challenges focus on the method used in Piketty’s research and/or the data; secondly, where inequality is defined and treated not as a problem but rather a necessity (i.e., for innovation); and finally, discourses that oppose regulation or other intervention (such as redistribution policies) with the argument or assumption that any regulation would make matters worse.