However, while this focus on inequality is welcome, we should be careful not to let it blind us to the severe limits of Piketty’s own stance in political economy. One such limitation has already been fairly widely commented on: Piketty’s almost complete failure, after a promising start in chapter 1 of his book, to analyse his subject in relation to Marxian questions of class or exploitation. [4] I will focus here, however, on the other fatal absence from Piketty’s political economy: his failure to take seriously the ecological limits to growth. Piketty argues that if growth in a capitalist economy is higher, then, other things being equal, wealth will be more evenly distributed. I am extremely doubtful as to whether he has proved this; causation is of course not proven by mere correlation. The data are, in fact, equally compatible with the claim that there has been a lucky and partial correlation between high economic growth and periods of democratic regulation, reform and governance of the economy, and that it is the latter that have been more responsible for the relative evenness of wealth distribution at times of higher economic growth. Piketty has perhaps offered some data and thinking to support the argument that, in a capitalist ‘growthist’ economy, higher growth might be expected to make slightly more possible a more even distribution of wealth – certain conditions obtaining. (Politically, the objective of redistributing some wealth is, in one way, easier to achieve when incomes are rising as there are fewer apparent losers.) However, this claim only applies to present-day people, not to future people (let alone non-human animals), who are thereby entirely absent from Piketty’s account or calculations. If economic growth will lead to future generations suffering, then it is not egalitarian – provided that we take seriously the idea that future generations matter, that future people are our equals. Of course, economists will counter that all people from now to the end of time are in their equations, as if they live in a discounted present: but that is the point. Rashly assuming that growth will continue forever, standard economists such as Piketty standardly discount the future: the further into the future one looks, the less the people living there matter.