In the interview, Piketty refuses the split between poverty and inequality. History, he argues, shows the two falling together. Two centuries ago Estonia lived under serfdom, with land and people concentrated in the hands of Baltic German nobility, and the rise in both equality and prosperity since then came through political struggle rather than automatic market progress. Equality, for him, is broader than material wealth. It is also political and legal, extending to who actually holds decision-making power inside companies and through the media.

An economy where a handful of billionaires hold near-total control, Piketty says, begins to resemble a monarchy, and their newest promise to save the world with data centers he dismisses as absurd given the climate cost.

On Estonia specifically, Piketty places the country's attachment to a flat income tax inside a wider post-communist trauma shared across Eastern Europe, Russia and China. The catastrophe of Soviet communism, he argues, left a reflexive suspicion of any policy that reduces inequality, including progressive taxation, which in fact has little to do with communism.

A new oligarch class exploits that suspicion. He would prefer a Nordic-style social-democratic route, and says Estonians would be better off today had the Soviet experiment never happened, while noting that long-term investment in health, education and culture still moved the country toward greater equality.

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