Row erupts over French academic’s radical idea to redistribute entire world’s wealth and pay everyone £4,325 a month
A leading French academic has sparked a row after claiming every single person could be paid £4,325 a month if countries increase taxes on their wealthiest citizens.
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The World Inequality Lab, a Paris-based research centre, has called for the unprecedented redistribution of wealth its newly-published Global Justice Report.
Proposals in the 136-page document include hiking global income tax rates to as high as 90%.
The tax would begin to kick in for those with assets worth 10 times the global average per adult – at least £950,000 – and surge steadily to reach 20% for those with at least £550 million.
It would see billionaires’ share of global personal wealth plunge from 6% to 0.05%.
Meanwhile, the poorest 50% of people would see their share of global wealth surge from 2% to 30%.
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The world today is characterized by large-scale inequalities. And a climate crisis is looming over us.
— Thomas Piketty (@PikettyWIL) June 4, 2026
We urgently need a new vision for global progress in the 21st Century. One that grounds human development and equality in planetary habitability.
What would it take to… pic.twitter.com/vmWIKR1fWw
The report argues this would be able to provide citizens with a per capita monthly national income of €5,000 (£4,325) across all countries, closing today’s 16-fold global income gap.
Thomas Piketty, co-director of the research centre, wrote on X: “The world today is characterized by large-scale inequalities. And a climate crisis is looming over us.
“We urgently need a new vision for global progress in the 21st Century. One that grounds human development and equality in planetary habitability.”
The French academic rose to fame with his 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which sold millions of copies.But his fresh proposals have faced backlash from a string of experts.
Dan Neidle, founder of Tax Policy Associates, slammed the report as “potty”.
He added: “I’m just amazed that people, smart people, can spend so long putting something like this together. It all seems like a fanciful sixth form essay and not a very good one.”
Austrian Economics professor Daniel J Smith said: ‘Advocates for wealth redistribution not only have questionable empirics, they have questionable economic theory.
‘Wealth taxes don’t just redistribute. They distort who manages capital and under what incentives. Comparative advantage applies to the management of capital. Worker-owned and collective structures routinely suffer incentive misalignments that reduce productivity.”
But others have backed his radical ideas.
Rachel Millward, Green Party’s deputy leader, said: “The Global Justice Report presents a vision of hope – a future where people and planet thrive together.”
She added: “Such a transformation will require major systemic change, and policies such as wealth taxes, increased expenditure on health and education and a rapid energy transition.”