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Thomas Piketty puts inequality in advanced market economies at the heart of the political debate.French Economist Bestsellers 2013 21st century capital Use long-term historical data on income and wealth to demonstrate how wide the gap between the rich and the rest has grown. With a wealth of data and the famous “r>g” formula, its publication comes after median incomes had been stagnant for a decade or more, confirming righteous outrage over the rifts in early 21st century society.
It’s a rather pessimistic book, actually arguing that the “r” – the return on capital – is usually greater than the “g” – the economic growth rate as well as labor income, so it would take a cataclysm to reduce inequality. War is usually required to destroy the value of the assets held by the rentier class.
This underlying pessimism also appears in this new book, A Brief History of Equality. “[T]The most fundamental shifts he saw in the history of unequal regimes involved social conflict and massive political crises,” Piketty wrote, referring to the French Revolution and the two world wars: the assets of wealth destroyed , and with this decline comes a more egalitarian mood from the crisis, at least for a while.
However, there is also an unexpected optimism – reflected in the choice of the word “equality” in the title, which runs counter to Piketty’s brand of pessimism. This is not because we are currently experiencing plague and war (the book was written before Russia attacked Ukraine). Rather, this is because Piketty focuses on the promise of socialism to reduce inequality. The book advocates for positive political change—though it does not paint any practical picture of how such positive change might be achieved.
Instead, the social struggles, labor movements, and taxation of the mid-20th century were emphasized. “We must deepen and promote the institutions that enable the movement towards equality, human progress and prosperity . . . starting with the welfare state and progressive taxation,” Piketty wrote. These institutions include unions for higher incomes, redistribution through progressive taxes and generous benefits, and general public services.
The authors envision “democracy and federal socialism, decentralization and participation, ecology and multiculturalism”. Thanks to redistribution and a revival of just political debate, we will share power in business, reparations for colonialism and slavery, and drive the influence of money away from politics and the media, according to this extraordinarily rose-colored agenda.
Tension between pessimistic and optimistic Piketty runs through a brief history. It condenses 3000 pages of his previous writings (Highest income in 20th century France, 21st century capital and capital and ideology) of 250 pages, the last one focuses more on global political perspectives than the previous two on long-term economic trends.
The evils of the empire stand out, from the horrors of the slave trade to the protection of the empire’s central market and the exploitation of colonial resources. It’s a one-dimensional history: exploitation is the only reason for the rise of the West, without even mentioning the existence of other dimensions. In fact, the end of empires is considered a key explanatory factor for the “Great Redistribution” that took place between 1914 and 1980. While world wars and the Great Depression paved the way for the ensuing internal social struggles in the West, the liquidation of assets in foreign and colonial countries “helped reduce inequality and destroy the notion of the sanctity of private property.”
A Brief History of Equality is a way into the arguments in Piketty’s earlier writings, which contain a wealth of extensive data and historical detail. Anyone who can’t face those tomes (the third is so bulky, with its own sturdy canvas tote) should read this. But its impact may be less.Although economists pick holes in theory and data 21st century capitalwhile historians challenge ideological interpretations of global history capital and ideology, the abundance of detail in these early volumes is the source of their rhetorical influence in the inequality debate. Most people don’t have to read them from cover to cover — they don’t; it’s enough to know that their arguments are based on so many pages of evidence.
Strip away the details, and what remains is the underlying abstraction that is so evident from the actual politics of change that Steven Randall’s direct translation from intellectual French underscores this abstraction. If ‘r’ is really greater than ‘g’, then perhaps inequality does have its own internal dynamics, but the move to “democratic, decentralized socialism” certainly requires attention to how it arises?
The problem is that Piketty’s theory of change is driven by ideology, so articulating a cogent alternative ideology is sufficient. Surely a vision of a fair, green, and participatory future is convincing enough? Sadly, the factors that persuade readers in the salon are not the same as those that drive action in the streets or even the corridors of power, where the pessimist Piketty is likely to be more persuasive than this new optimistic Piketty.
A Brief History of Equality Thomas Piketty, translated by Steven Rendall, Belknap (Harvard) £22.95, 288 pages
Diane Coyle is a professor of public policy at the University of Cambridge
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