ABSTRACT
The chapter briefly discusses Piketty’s views on patrimonial capitalism and compares his theory on the evolution of modern inequality with a perspective on long-term dynamics, as that encapsulated in the concept of long waves of development. In that framework, the chapter analyzes the recent decades of stagnation and the dominance of an accumulation regime based on the expansion of fictitious capital and on the corresponding rentist forms of economic power. Finally, the strategy and effects of the imposition of inequality-enhancing policies in Portugal are described, as they provide a case for identifying inequality not as a perverse consequence of wrong policies, but instead as the very purpose of the social adjustments put into action as a response to the structural shortage of accumulation in the period of the dominance of fictitious capital.
